Editor's Note:
Located in Manhattan's historic Anthology Film Archives, nearly half a century later, it is now embarking on a new expansion project. On March 1, 2017, Jonas Mekas (JM) and Jim Jarmusch (JJ in conversation) were invited by AnOther magazine to sit together, and British actor Benn Northover (BN in the conversation) also participated in the conversation.
The conversation shifts from the place of poetry in Jarmusch's life and the influence of different languages on the understanding of poetry to the understanding and feeling of film, thus bringing out the filmmakers' works collected in the film archive, the expansion of the museum's past history and present, and finally returning to the poem with a powerful saying. The whole conversation was pleasing and exciting, and the three talkers captured a sense of music between the poem and the film.
——Yuruky
New York's cultural landscape is changing rapidly, and the Film Archive has been a bastion of independent cinema for the past 47 years. It is the largest and most important collection of independent and avant-garde films in the world, and a cultural landmark in New York.
The Archive is undertaking a major new expansion project, led by its founder and filmmaker Jonas Meccas. Just as the Archive has been able to achieve so much over the years, this project will be done as a team. The international art community has identified its support for the project. Chuck Close (American hyperrealist painter), Ai Weiwei (Chinese contemporary artist, son of poet Ai Qing), Julian Schnabel (American contemporary artist), Matthew Barney (American avant-garde artist, director of the Cremaster series), Michael Stipe (American singer/visual artist), Artists such as Jim Jarmusch and Patti Smith (American singer-songwriter/poet) have pledged to support the planned fundraising campaign. The archive needs to raise seven million dollars to ensure that the films will continue to be preserved for future generations.
Meccas and Jarmusch met in the late '70s, and both are very active members of downtown film circles, which are still pervasive by the influence of the Cultural Revolution that swept Through New York a decade ago. It was a full decade before a strong, independent voice sounded that put the film in the hands of its creators and changed the film forever.
The next conversation took place on a rainy day in December. I met Jonas and Jim in the lobby of the Film Archive, and we decided to go across the street, in a small bar on the corner of Second Avenue. As we walked through the rain, the two of them opened the conversation box...
Poetry and life – find your own voice
JM: Where is poetry in your life?
JJ: Poetry is important to me. I read a lot of poems. I studied at the New York School with Kenneth Koch and David Shapiro, poets who led my life. As a teenager, when I was still in Akron, I discovered translations by 19th-century French poets —Baudelaire (a pioneer of French Symbolist poetry), Rimbaud (the representative poet of early French Symbolism/the founder of Surrealist poetry) and Verlaine (a master of French Symbolist poetry). At certain stages of my life, William Blake (the English Romantic poet) guided me in the right direction. When I die one day, I hope people will see me as a descendant of the poets of the New York School, they are my guides, their sense of humor, their enthusiasm, you know, and Frank O'Hara (The New York School poet)...
JM: Yes, Frank O'Hara and Kenneth Kirk. They'll quip and there's something particularly down-to-earth. Kirk, still deserves proper recognition.
JJ: Joe Brainard (American writer/artist) I love to death, and Ron Padgett (American poet/novelist). The latter wrote poetry for our new film. The character in the film is a poet.
BN: The character's name is Patterson, isn't it?
JJ: I named the character Patterson in the film because William Carlos Williams (the originator of American postmodernist poetry) had a poem called "Patterson." He makes a metaphor in the poem that isomorphizes the landscape on the waterfall with a person. So I kept the metaphor, "I'm going to make a movie about a poet who lives in Patterson and is called 'Patterson.'" "You get the idea.
JM: The first time I read Patterson, I thought I should meet William Carlos Williams, and maybe start with his poetry to make a film. I knew LeRoi Jones (formerly amiri Baraka, African-American poet), and we set off to visit Carlos. He had no patients that day (his main business was doctors), so we discussed the project of filmmaking. We decided, I'll memorize some ideas, he'll write some things, and then we'll meet again. But I can't really remember what happened. It was the first few years of Film Culture magazine, and I was so busy that I didn't follow up on the project. But I'm really curious if some of Carlos's notes will remain in his file. To me, he was extremely important.
JJ: I heard an interesting story about Allen Ginsberg, the leading poet of the Beat Generation in the United States, who also lived in Patterson when he was very young and showed some of his poems to Carlos. Carlos replied to him, but said: "These poems are terrible. You have to find your own voice. They rhyme, but they just don't. If you really aspire to be a poet, go ahead and write about it. Find your own voice. ”
BN: Thankfully, he had to keep writing. I've always liked Emily Dickinson (a pioneer of American modernist poetry).
Poetry of Feelings
JM: I don't know if you've read it, but she has a new book that just came out. They selected some of her envelopes and small notes for publication, on which she scribbled down small verses and thoughts. Those words are now on The New Yorker. Of the English poets, she is my favorite.
JJ: Ah, and one of my favorites, of course among American poets.
JM: Her handling of language is great.
JJ: So modern, beautiful, unbelievable. You also read German, French, English and, of course, Lithuanian poetry.
JM: I can also read Italian, if I have a dictionary, in Spanish or Russian.
JJ: Kenneth Kirk once gave me a poem by Rilke, in German, and he said, "Jim, translate it to me in two days." I told him, "But, Kenneth, I don't know any German." He said, "That's just right." "He wanted me to read what I needed. Like the line number processing of poetry, anything like this can be borrowed to create a new one.
JM: What Louis Zukofsky (the pioneer of American Object poetry) did from Latin poetry was that he translated it through phonology. That's right, Robert Kelly (the poet of the American Deep Image group) and Schuldt (who the translator checked the man's work and didn't know who it was) did it. They transliterated Hölderlin's poem into English, read it, and translated it back into German with English transliteration, which was already a secondary source from Hölderlin.
JJ: Wow, that's great.
JM: They published the project.
JJ: It's really great, it's fun.
JM: We all have memories of when you don't understand a language, you listen, you seem to understand, but you learn something else entirely. Interestingly, like Zukovsky's translation, like Robert Kelly and Schulte's translation of Hölderlin, you more or less capture the same spirit, or something is preserved.
JJ: I remember E.E. Cummings saying, "You can understand a poem without having to know what it means." ”
JM: The same goes for music and movies that you can't understand in the language. In a way, you know the character's general feelings and meanings.
JJ: I went to Japan in the 1980s and became obsessed with Ozu, Naruse, and Mizoguchi. I can't buy their movies in the U.S., so I buy a lot of plates in Japan to watch at home, and of course they don't have a translation. I would keep watching, really not at all understanding what the dialogue was about, but I could still feel so many beautiful things, and I learned a lot about the performance, the eyes of the characters, the camera positions, these small aspects of filmmaking.
A fortress of poetry and cinema
JM: People say we shouldn't watch movies on videotapes. Still, for people who live in remote areas of the planet, sometimes that's the only way to see the film. The same goes for art. I attended elementary school in a remote village in Lithuania, where there was a shelf full of books, one of which was about the Renaissance. It's not colored, the paper is bad, it's old. I was so impressed with the bad black-and-white replicas that I always wanted to see the originals. Fortunately, in these bad replicas, the essence is conveyed. So I'm not against making movies in digital form that provides information, as long as there are places like the Film Archive, people can still see films that are shown as films, or videos that are videotapes.
JJ: I'm browsing a small number of different artists that you've saved or famous here, film artists. These are just a few of the people who have touched me deeply: Peter Hutton, Hollis Frampton, Nam June Paik, Bruce Conner, Hans Richter, Taylor Mead, Danny Lyon, Rudy Burkehart Burckhardt), Shirley Clarke...
JM: And we have not only their finished work, but also unfinished material. Cuts include Hans Richter, Maya Deren, Hollis Frampton, and even Tarkovsky.
JJ：...... There's also Man Ray, Joseph Cornell, Robert Frank, Harry Smith, Jack Smith, George and Mike Kuchar, Kenneth Anger, and Lizzie Borden), Stan Brakhage, Bruce Baillie, Ron Rice, Michael Snow, Andy Warhol, Ken Jacobs, Maya Delen, and many more.
JM: The archive is a bastion of poetry and cinema, and we will continue to do it. This is where the poetry of the film lives. This place is a metaphor.
JJ: In that sense, I like it. It's a powerful metaphor: We're not leaving, you see, we're here. I always felt that visually it was a very domineering building. I've always liked the name "Anthology Film Archives" about the film archive, because "Anthology" can be said to be anti-class.
JM: Myself, Stan Brahag, and Adams Sitney all came out of poetry. Initially we wanted to build a basic list of films that all contributed to what we knew as the "art of cinema"; we wanted to build an anthology of films, films that we loved, films that we were willing to protect with our whole body and mind and all our passions. Researchers often come from Europe because they can't find the material they need elsewhere. Not only the film material, but also the large collection of text materials in our library. It includes publications, periodicals, manuscripts, news, correspondence and working materials for filmmakers. For example, we have a manuscript of the original Citizen Kane (1941) with Orson Wells's notes and deletions. Something like this. We have material for Joseph Cornell's work: the magazines and books he cut out, the angels he cut out, and what he used in collages. But because there are not enough places, we still have hundreds of boxes of information that cannot be provided to researchers. That's why we're trying to raise money now, in order to expand the archive. We have so many good things that people can't see, so it's important to build a vault for them.
JJ: Will it be built on top of the building?
JM: Yes, add a new layer to the existing building.
JJ: Great.
JM: We're also going to improve the archival facilities for film and video, and we're going to have a gallery to properly preserve, store, and display all this great material. The two existing theaters will be similarly improved.
JJ: It's unbelievable!
BN: No, it's a must.
JJ: A must.
JM: This whole project, now costs seven million dollars. I will participate in organizing an art auction, just for it, to raise these seven million... I really hope that through this auction and people's donations, I can scrape together enough money to complete this project. So, in the last few months, bringing together artists and collectors has become my top priority. I work hard and sometimes I stay up all night.
Never resist gravity
JJ: Well, that's going to work. I remember a few years ago when you were struggling to get ready for a renovation, we made the first part of Coffee and Cigarettes (1986). After I immersed myself more in the archives, I realized that the gangster murders of 1923 had taken place just outside the front door of the museum building. A man named Kid Dropper, a young, was assassinated by the notorious gang member Louis Cohen and killed him outside the gate.
BN: Indeed, it was a court at the time (Essex Market Court).
JM: This building was built in 1914 and was originally intended to be built with 12 floors. But the First World War began, and as a result it remained on two and a half floors. Now the structure it bears is strong enough to last another ten stories.
JJ: Wow, that's awesome.
JM: So next to the library, there's a café. It was my dream, and it should pay homage to Café Voltaire (voltaire's last residence and place of death, later named after him) and Café de Flore (founded in 1887 as the birthplace of existential enlightenment and surrealism).
JJ: Oh my God.
JM: I just want to do something particularly special and unusual.
JJ: I want a new place to relax, I need a new place to relax.
JJ: Right, right. You know, poets and filmmakers don't have muchwhere to go in New York right now, unlike in the '60s. There's nowhere to go now. Can you tell one?
BN: Just not.
JJ: Williamsburg?
JM: But we need one in Manhattan. We need one in downtown Manhattan. There will be wine, simple cuisine - not a restaurant. It is a café like some French taverns.
BN: Also fragrant coffee!
JJ: Well, that's a real treat.
JM: The "Cathedral of Cinema" (the new collection of the Film Archive) is about to be completed. Film seems to give birth to many trees with different branches, and although the original mission of the archive is to serve the independent/avant-garde, poetic films are actually dedicated to all branches of the film tree. This is true of different styles, diverse forms, different periods, types, and countries.
JJ: We mentioned the people whose works were collected by the archives, but we also had to talk about what an amazing and vivid place it was, with amazing programs of events and great people coming and going, talking, showing up, giving speeches. That's why the preservation of these films is so important, but there's something vivid about it— and that's why I like the idea of a café. It has its existential value for all of these things. It's like so many things are made up of molecules connected here. The same is true of history. I can ask you, how do you feel about its current situation? Given the so many people you know and work with, do you still have an optimistic attitude towards the status quo and these artists?
JM: I've always been optimistic because the future is always full of possibilities. Bad is good. But you see, I've been involved a lot in the last sixty years, and I've been there no matter what's going on. I rarely meddle in what's happening now. But I have to say that I don't have as much enthusiasm and obsession with contemporary art today. My feeling is that we are still at a stage, described in the words of Joseph Conrad, that is, past the shadow line (The Shadow Line, a short story published in 1917). Before this line, you don't have to care about what to do, just do it. Don't care what people say, just do yours. "Fuck your mother, that's all I have to do." But after that, it becomes an echo, just as after the black square, the abstract representationism, Warhol, so many forms are being created, and that is the echo. I feel like we're still in a transition period, have a deep respect for all of this, and are still putting the same stuff back together. A new outbreak has not yet arrived. We need new pushes. But I think things like computers, in this computer age, I think there's already a taste of the beginning.
JJ: We're all looking forward to an outbreak.
JM: Exactly, I mean the outbreak hasn't come yet.
JJ: Are you worried, because history is constantly reincarnating, are you worried about the oppression of words and ideas?
JM: I don't think it's going to be that way, people are going to protest. I don't think Trump can do what he wants to do, he can't do it. We'll have to see what he's going to do, and then people will rebel. If he had acted against immigration or against women, people would have really done it against him. A passionate uprising is possible.
BN: That's right.
JM: Show you what I'm reading. I don't know if you know the poems of Paul Celan, one of the great German poets. Regarding what poetry is, I found one of the best recent descriptions in this book. You can read the whole paragraph quietly by yourself. But he ends like this: "The search for ground lights is not enough. Follow an axis, 'point, point, point,' and then forget. Your first priority is to find lightness, floating, and never resist gravity. ”
JJ: Fantastic. Never resist gravity.
Translation: Yuruky
Proofreader: Stalker