For over 70 years, Lithuanian filmmaker Jonas Mekas documented his life in what was later labeled as his diary films.
From his arrival in New York as a displaced person in 1949 to his death in 2019, he chronicled the trauma and loss of exile while pioneering institutions to support the growth of independent film in the United States.
Internationally known as the “godfather” of avant-garde cinema, he inspired countless independent artists, from Scorsese, Bogdanovich, Andy Warhol and John Waters, to Yoko Ono, John Lennon and Jim Jarmusch.
All of them (and others) were drawn to his indefatigable spirit and belief in the transformative power of cinema. But internally, he struggled.
The traumas of his early life and exile stayed with him. Fragments of Paradise is an intimate look at his life and work constructed from thousands of hours of his own video and film diaries—including never-before-seen tapes and unpublished audio recordings.
It is a story about finding beauty amidst profound loss, and a man who tried to make sense of it all with a camera.
Director’s Statement:
Jonas Mekas’ life and work defies any convenient summation, or categorization. Like his filmography, it is at once fragmented and vast. His film and video diaries alone total around 500hours. I spent the pandemic year in hermitage with this sprawling archive. Thousands of hours of raw footage, audio recordings, photos, volumes of written works, diaries, poems, letters, and critical reviews.
I let loose the ideas carried into the project and instead, immersed myself in his life and in turn, he emerged in mine. Something happens when you experience his work this way, in a marathon viewing over the course of eight months.
There were times he would speak through the flickering light, turn to camera, as if to me, and declare, “this is a fragment of paradise.”
Others who have spent time in his archive had similar experiences. It’s the intimacy, the vulnerability shared with his camera… which is to say, with us. We, the audience, experience his diaries as the intimate reflections of a life-long friend.
I have often thought this is how he would prefer his work to be seen, immersive and in its totality, which presents a paradox for narrative, biographical storytelling. Jonas’ diary films are reflections on his own life story. At some point it became clear to me that the most honest way forward was about putting together pieces of the story he had already told.
Some ardent fans and admirers may desire more traditional, biographical facts. Without question, Jonas’ historical role in the American avant-garde merits a film all its own.
However, the themes at the heart of his work, revisited again and again—themes of loss, exile, existential crisis and, yes, the relentless pursuit of beauty—speak to deeper truths. Like meditation, Jonas’ own work seems to be a kind of path… cinema and poetry as tools to examine and reflect lived experience, the present moment. This is what I wanted to explore. Art as path and the themes that drove him.
In our present moment, increasingly defined by crisis, loneliness and anxiety, Jonas’ experience of displacement, and his lifelong contemplation of loss, continue to take universal quality.
There is something to be gleaned from his almost religious insistence on the importance of momentary, small, fragile things; his focus on mundane experience as the essence of a happy life.
Fragments of Paradise is itself a fragment, a window onto “some of the beauty” Jonas seems to have found everywhere. I hope it inspires a new generation to dig deeper into his life and work and perhaps undertake similar investigations, with at least some measure of his obvious delight.
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