Images Are Real is the book that in Italy celebrates the centennial of Jonas Mekas’s birth. It was published on the occasion of the homonymous exhibition presented at Mattatoio di Roma from November 9, 2022, to February 26, 2023.

Edited by Francesco Urbano Ragazzi for Cura.Books, the volume highlights the philosophical, avant-garde, and political aspects of Mekas’s practice. A wide selection of works from the 1960s to the late 2010s traverses the intense life and sixty-year career of the filmmaker, a Lithuanian-born poet who lived in New York as a displaced person from 1949, becoming one of the most prominent figures in the history of independent cinema after World War II.

The diary-film genre, codified by Mekas in movies such as Walden (1968) and now popular on social media, is considered as a connective medium that accompanies the author in the founding of institutions that have united at least three generations of filmmakers, theorists, and viewers around a new understanding of moving images: Film Culture magazine (1954), the New American Cinema Group (1960), the Film-Makers’ Cooperative (1962), and the Anthology Film Archives (1970). In the catologue, great attention is also given to the latter phase of Mekas’ production, during which the artist made artworks for museum spaces and transferred his cinematic diary to the Internet.

In addition to an essay by the editors, the book includes precious contributions by Hollis Melton and P. Adams Sitney, who followed Jonas Mekas throughout his life in the United States, and pointed essays by Ieva Jasinskaite and Philipp Scheid, representatives of a new breed of researchers capable of interpreting Mekas’s vast legacy in the contemporary.

The project is promoted by Roma Culture and Azienda Speciale Palaexpo with the partnership of the Lithuanian Culture Institute and the Embassy of the Republic of Lithuania in Rome.

Language: IT+EN
Pages: 224
Dimension: 190 x 275 mm
Soft Cover
ISBN 978-88-99776 -38-1

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