Adolfas Mekas, '60s filmmaker
POUGHKEEPSIE, N.Y. - Adolfas Mekas, a member of the avant-garde New American Cinema movement of the 1960s and longtime professor of film at New York's Bard College, died Tuesday at age 85.
POUGHKEEPSIE, N.Y. - Adolfas Mekas, a member of the avant-garde New American Cinema movement of the 1960s and longtime professor of film at New York's Bard College, died Tuesday at age 85.
The Lithuanian-born artist came to the U.S. in 1949 after time spent in a Nazi concentration camp and later in displaced-persons camps in Germany, where he was able to study theater arts and literature.
He served as a still photographer in the U.S. Army Signal Corps from 1951 to 1953. Mekas and his brother Jonas founded the journal Film Culture in 1954 and the Filmmakers' Cooperative, a cinema-distribution house.
Mekas was associated with the neo-Dadaist Fluxus movement and participated in the first Fluxus performance in 1961. He made several short films and then the comedy feature "Hallelujah the Hills," which played at the Cannes Film festival in 1963.