The Brooklyn Rail celebrates its 19th Anniversary with Jonas Mekas’ diaries in Venice. 

Curatorial duo Francesco Urbano Ragazzi will introduce two of the Jonas Mekas’s seminal works, selections from the 365 Day Project (2007) and his feature-length Walden: Diaries, Notes, and Sketches (1969).

Friday, October 11, 17:30–19:30 — 365 Day Project (2007) is a monument of Mekas’s democratic spirit. He released a short film everyday of 2007, making use of both recent and archival footage, creating a quilt of memories from different eras and epitomizing Mekas’s concept of “diaristic cinema.”

Sunday, October 13, 15:00–18:00 — A rare screening of Jonas Mekas’s first feature-length diaristic film, Walden: Diaries, Notes, and Sketches (1969), chronicling four years of the artist’s life in and around New York City. Walden is a tender map of social and spatial relations, exemplifying the openness and joie de vivre that is Mekas’s legacy. The film stands as a thorn in the side of New York’s accelerating consumerism, and remains a crucial record of the Downtown avant garde.