One hundred and sixty portraits or rather appearances, sketches and glimpses of avant-garde, independent filmmakers and film activists between 1955 and 1996.
Why BIRTH OF A NATION? Because the film independents IS a nation in itself. We are surrounded by commercial cinema Nation same way as the indigenous people of the United States or of any other country are surrounded by Ruling Powers.
We are the invisible, but essential nation of cinema. We are Cinema.

Not a documentary in the strictest sense of the word. Rather, it is a journey through the world of the artist Jonas Mekas - one of the exponents of independent U.S. movies; founder and director of the New York Anthology Film Archive.

A man fondles objects, looks at himself in the mirror, poses in different clothes, smiles and makes faces at the camera while his voice on the soundtrack speaks of his despair, makes impressionistic statements and little songs, quotes Greta Garbo and Maria Montez, tells the story of a lonely little boy and tells the story of a woman named Madame Nescience who dreams of herself as the Mother Superior of a convent of sexual perversion.

After a holiday visit with his parents, Mikey is headed to the airport to return to his wife and newborn baby. Except he doesn’t board the plane. Instead he returns to his parents’ loft in lower Manhattan, back to his childhood room that has since been converted to storage. Unsure of his own motivations, he makes up excuses about why he’s staying – his flight is delayed, his flight is cancelled. A day passes, and then another, and he calls home and work to say he can’t return just yet – his parents are getting old, his parents are ill, time is too short. His doting mother is more than happy to enable his procrastination, while his artist father is suspicious. From afar, his confused wife grows increasingly unsettled. Meanwhile Mikey moves back into his room, digging out notebooks and mementos, calling on old friends. As the days go on he becomes more and more entrenched in his adolescent sanctuary, and comes to a point where he must choose between life as it is and life as it was. --© Official Site

有些人拍片无数，有些人也许只为那仅有的一部或几部电影而活着，孰轻孰重，孰对孰错，自然有人会明了。

这是来自美国实验电影大师肯.雅克布斯的6小时42分钟先锋纪录片巨作，《星光照亮死亡》据说是花了他近50年竭力创作的一部集大成之作，美国政治，种族，地下电影等等半个世纪的历史和发展均收录其中，1957年当雅克布斯还是一位青年独立电影人的时候就开始构思和收集影片素材，几十年间他为这部影片可以说倾尽全部，影片所有的资金设备创作全部由他自己独立承担，直到2004年才得以完成，2006年正式发行。

Starring: Jack Smith, Jerry Sims, Gib Taylor, Bill Carpenter, Cecilia Swan, Laurie Taylor, Bob Fleischner, Reese Haire, Jim Enterline, and Ken Jacobs.

"It's a stimulating, labyrinthine experience provided by a master of the American avant-garde and an historical artifact that is nevertheless piercingly contemporary." -- Doug Cummings, FILM JOURNEY

"With a running time of 6 hours and 42 minutes, ''Star Spangled to Death'' is the magnum opus of the independent filmmaker Ken Jacobs. Begun in 1957 as a backyard bohemian romp starring the avant-garde legend Jack Smith -- an amazing proto-drag performer who later directed his own underground classic, ''Flaming Creatures'' -- the project grew over the years to incorporate huge chunks of appropriated material, including, for example, the entirety of Richard M. Nixon's 1952 Checkers speech and what seems like most of an early 30's documentary on what was then known as ''darkest Africa." -- Dave Kehr, NEW YORK TIMES

"Finished—or perhaps abandoned—after nearly half a century of work, Ken Jacobs's monumental, monstrous Star Spangled to Death receives its first ever theatrical run this week at Anthology Film Archives. The movie is a six-hour assemblage of found audio-visual material ranging from political campaign films to animated cartoons to children's phonograph records, interwoven with gloriously eccentric original footage shot mainly on the streets (and in the dumps) of late-'50s New York." -- Jim Hoberman, VILLAGE VOICE

Featuring interviews with the likes of Hitchcock, Kurosawa, Robert Bresson and David Lynch, What is Cinema? is documentarian Chuck Workman’s engrossing visual essay about mastery of cinematic form. Our world premiere will be followed by a live conversation with Workman.

一战以前，影院的的艺术家和诗人往往都是激进分子，他们热衷于拍电影并把这种艺术形式向新的方向发展，他们被排除在艺术领域和电影工厂之外，像是被困在一座孤岛上，他们大胆的创造出自己的电影世界并拥有一个自己的工作网络，并作出了不可估量且有力的贡献
This feature-length documentary provides a vivid, eye-opening, and appropriately personal introduction to one of the most important, yet perpetually marginalized, realms of filmmaking: avant-garde cinema.
Achieving the near-impossible task of doing justice in a mere 82 minutes to this incredibly rich, varied, and expansive domain, FREE RADICALS is as expertly constructed an introduction to the topic as one could hope for, thanks in large part to the films privileging of rare interviews with some of the most important filmmakers in the avant-garde tradition (including Jonas Mekas, Peter Kubelka, Stan Brakhage, and Hans Richter), and its inclusion of several films in their entirety. The film's sincere admiration for its subject is best reflected by Chodorov's own description: "I wanted to share a few of the films I love and introduce you to some of the free, radical artists who made them."

Drawn from footage shot between 1949 and 1963, Jonas Mekas’s autobiographical diary film chronicles his early years in exile, capturing the struggle to build a new life in New York and his gradual discovery of a vibrant artistic community.

A 1971–72 documentary film by Jonas Mekas. It revolves around Mekas' trip back to Semeniškiai, the village of his birth.

A compilation of over 30 years of private home movie footage shot by Lithuanian-American avant-garde director Jonas Mekas, assembled by Mekas "purely by chance", without concern for chronological order.

“A motion picture composed of brief diaristic scenes not used in completed films from the years 1960-2000; and self-referential video footage taped during the editing. Brief glimpses of family, friends, girl-friends, the City, seasons of the year, travels. Occasionally I talk, reminisce, or play music I taped during those earlier years, plus more recent piano improvisations by Auguste Varkalis. It’s a kind of autobiographical, diaristic poem, celebration of happiness and life. I consider myself a happy man.” –J.M.
“In a film of amazing delicacy and poetic insight, Mekas celebrates the beauty of imperfect images…” –Amy Taubin
“OUT-TAKES starts with Mekas alone at night while the city sleeps, editing his old films. As he looks back over his life he starts to talk, insisting that his life’s work amounts to ‘just images, some fragments of this world’ that he will bring together for himself and a few friends. But as images of the people who brought joy into his life pass by, we realize that most of them are no longer alive. Mekas sees them again, but he is seeing them alone. As much as it is about his happy life, the film is also about emptiness, loss, and a longing for some sort of spiritual consolation. At one moment the cover of St John of the Cross’s MEDITATIONS appears on screen. This is Mekas’s long dark night of the soul.” – Richard Dorment, THE TELEGRAPH
Out-Takes from the Life of a Happy Man, Jonas Mekas
USA/UK, 2012, 68 min, 16mm&video, color, mono