Jonas Mekas - José Luis Guerin : Cinéastes en correspondance

A key figure in avant-garde cinema, Jonas Mekas’s video correspondence with revolutionary Spanish filmmaker José Luis Guérin is an intimate and revealing portrait of two artists, their friendship, and attitudes to cinema and philosophy. The Pompidou is screening the nine ‘letters’, exchanged between November 2009 and April 2011, accompanied by Mekas’s ‘365 Day Project’, his video diary of 2007 on 12 screens, and Guerin’s ‘La Dame de Corinthe’, an audiovisual installation exploring the relation between cinema and painting.

There is also a programme of documentaries on Jonas Mekas:

5-10 December: Three portraits of Jonas Mekas – ‘Le Cinématon No. 1590’ (Dir. Gérard Courant, 1992); ‘Jonas Tourne Toujours’ (Dir. Pip Chodorov, 2002); ‘Meanwhile a Butterfly Flies’ (Dir. Julius Ziz, 2002)

12-17 December: ‘Hanging Out With Jonas Mekas’ (Dirs. Hopi Lebel and Thomas Boujut, 2012)

19-24 December: Three pieces on Mekas in the 1960s – ‘Shooting “The Brig”’ (Dir. Storm De Hirsch, 1964), ‘Shooting “Guns”’ (Dir. Charles I. Levine, 1966) and ‘Jonas’ (Dir. Gideon Bachmann, 1967)

26-31 December: ‘Jonas in the Desert’ (Dir. Peter Sempel, 1994)

2-7 January: ‘My Country is Cinema, Scenes from the Life of Jonas Mekas’ (Dir. Brigitte Cornand, 1999)