Video Pioneer

BY: PROVOKR Staff

As a pioneer in avant-garde cinema, Jonas Mekas became known in the 1960s for using a handheld camera as his own personal journal—chronicling the people and events around him.  In this excerpt of Mekas’s To Barbara, With Love, which he dedicated to fellow filmmaker Barbara Rubin, Mekas films Andy Warhol in the midst of shooting one of his infamous “screen tests,” he captures Allen Ginsberg at a peace rally and Lou Reed giving one of his earliest performances. “With his films, Jonas has given us a direct personal response to the world,” Martin Scorsese has said of Mekas’s work. “Keeping the direct contact between his camera and the moment preserved.”