This week in Film Notes, we share a selection of passages from Jonas Mekas’s writings, published between 1959 and 1972. As a critic, programmer, and organizer within New York’s emerging underground cinema and avant-garde art, Mekas challenged systems of publication, exhibition, and distribution ill-suited to filmmakers’ working conditions and the new forms their work was taking. His attacks on censorship, festival bureaucracy, and the press are inseparable from proposals for filmmakers and other artists to build their own institutions and networks and determine the terms on which their work is shown and circulated. As the research demonstrates, for Mekas, artistic independence becomes a matter of practical arrangements, from ownership of a print to payment for a screening, and of public support for forms of cinema unable to sustain themselves commercially.
From “On Censorship, the Mayor’s Office, and the Underground” (1963, Village Voice)
“They say we are corrupting your morals. We would be glad if we could. It would do good to some. Those must be very sick souls which can be angered by beauty; shaky and suspicious are the morals which can be upset and “corrupted” by beauty.
Let’s not be ridiculous.
Censors of City and State:
leave us alone.”
From “Open Letter to Film-Makers of the World” (1966, Cinim, no. 1)
“Dear colleagues, film-makers and film critics: the conception of film festivals must be changed. Bureaucracy has got to go. Film-makers should decide what should be shown; they know what’s happening. Money should be used not for importing stars or for publicity but for paying for the prints of the films shown, for the shipping of films, or for importing film-makers, their technicians, their equipment (for inter-media shows).
For instance, even if [the] Pesaro representative would have seen and liked Songs or Galaxie, the film-makers wouldn’t [sic] have afforded to make prints of these films for sending to the festival. Cinema is changing, but the film festivals have remained the same—that’s what’s wrong.
...We developed a more human working system. We stuck together, we grew and expanded. Through the Cooperative, we increased our outlets ten-fold. We created a distribution circuit embracing colleges, universities, film societies, art theaters, art galleries and museums.
...At this point, we would like to urge you—and I direct this Open Letter to the independent film-makers of the world, to anybody whose life is cinema, who is making and must make films—to create Film-Makers’ Cooperatives of your own, in your own countries. There is no other visible solution. There is no other way of escaping the grip of the commercial set-ups. This net of international Coops could then exchange among themselves and help each other beyond the boundaries of their own countries.”
Read the full selection on e-flux Film Notes.
The selection published with permission of the Jonas Mekas Estate is presented alongside Letter to John from Jonas (1999), e-flux’s October 2026 Staff Pick, now streaming on e-flux Film.
