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This spring the Jewish Museum presents “Jonas Mekas: The Camera Was Always Running”, a major exhibition celebrating the centenary of filmmaker, poet, artist, and Anthology Film Archives co-founder Jonas Mekas. This new exhibition, however, does not represent the first intersection between Jonas, the Jewish Museum, and the realm of cinema that Anthology was founded to preserve and present. From 1963-70, Mekas and his collaborators organized dozens and dozens of experimental film programs, under the auspices of an organization that was known briefly as the Film-Maker’s Showcase before adopting its permanent name, the Film-Makers’ Cinematheque. A roving screening series, which was in some ways a kind of precursor to Anthology, the Film-Makers’ Cinematheque hopped from venue to venue frequently during the course of its existence, with residencies at the New Yorker Theater, the Astor Place Playhouse, 125 West 41st Street, and 80 Wooster Street, to name only a few. In its very last phase, leading up to (and in fact briefly overlapping with) the creation of Anthology, the Film-Makers’ Cinematheque held weekly (Tuesday) screenings at the Jewish Museum, from November 1968 to December 1970.
The Jewish Museum screenings came about thanks to the good graces of the Jewish Museum’s Director at the time, Karl Katz, on whose watch the Museum had been presenting adventurous programming which caught Jonas’s eye, and inspired him to propose a collaboration. The Cinematheque programming that took place over the course of those years is, from today’s perspective, an intriguing mixture of filmmakers and films that would soon be effectively canonized as part of the nascent Anthology Film Archives’ “Essential Cinema” collection, as well as numerous other filmmakers who are little-known and rarely-screened today.
Renewing our collaboration with the Jewish Museum more than fifty years after the final Film-Makers’ Cinematheque program, Anthology will present a series of screenings throughout May that will (as much as possible) recreate a selection of the Cinematheque programs that took place there in 1968-70. These programs focus on filmmakers who were notably omitted from the Essential Cinema cycle, demonstrating the breadth of programming presented by the Film-Makers’ Cinematheque, as well as the extraordinary vitality of the experimental film scene of the time.