Adolfas Mekas, People’s Film Dept.
by Frances Sandiford

I am a film buff, and I'm interested in the history of film in America. For the many years that I had known Adolfas Mekas I was not really aware of how influential he had been in the annals of cinematography. He was my neighbor who taught at Bard College, grew tomatoes and made a tasty home brew called limoncello. But then, I "discovered" him through some chance reading and conversations. Adolfas was indeed a "find," and he was right here under my nose.

On an afternoon not too long ago, I went to find Adolfas—filmmaker, teacher, and a conversationalist whose quips can keep any audience laughing—at his log house on River Road. On the door of the carport next to the house is a sign, Carriage House Film Center.

Adolfas shared with me stories of his life and his accomplishments, though he cautioned me not to believe everything that he said. Most of Adolfas’s accomplishments are documented, but for reasons of his own, or perhaps just for the fun of it, he said, he alters the truth from time to time.

There is, for example, the question of St. Tula, the patron saint of films. While teaching at Bard College, Adolfas issued each of his students a text of her sayings (supposedly from the fourteenth century) and assured the students that she would watch over them. That must have helped, for in his tenure, no film student failed to graduate.

Then, there is the question of Adolfas’s real age. His records say that he was born in 1925, which would make him 84. He claims he is 95. The records, says the sprightly man with a halo of white hair, take the date (1925) from his family Bible—which also gives his birthday as September 31! Why believe anything from such a source? Besides, he says, a dentist once told him that his teeth were at least 90 years old. It is anybody’s guess.

Adolfas was born on a farm in Lithuania. During the German occupation of his country, he and his older brother Jonas wrote propaganda leaflets, using a typewriter hidden in the home of his uncle, a priest. It was a dangerous business, but the Germans never caught them. Instead they were rounded up and sent to a work camp whose inmates were released every day to work in the war factories. The confinement lasted about a year until the camp was liberated by the British. From there, with the assistance of the United Nations, Adolfas went from a camp for displaced persons to attend Gutenberg University in Mainz and drama school in Kassel, Germany. In 1949, he and Jonas came to America.

The brothers landed in New York City where they supported themselves with menial jobs like washing dishes. It was a hard life, but not much harder than for the people around them. Always interested in making films, the brothers purchased a Bolex and began recording the lives of the people they met. There was a distinct artistic quality to their effort. Using speeded up movements, real location shooting, novice actors, iris shots, and music that recalled the silent films, the Mekas films were avant-garde—an aesthetic style in vogue in Europe, but far from the Hollywood norms that shaped American cinema.

Over the next several decades, Jonas and Adolfas made films together and separately. Adolfas’s best known movie was Hallelujah the Hills, made in 1963. A review in Time Magazine called it “the weirdest, wooziest, wackiest screen comedy of 1963.” It is about Jack and Leo, both in love with Vera, who has just married Gideon. To console themselves, the two young men set out on a madcap camping trip across Vermont. The film uses many cinematographic tricks, like juxtaposing slow and fast motion, pictures that appear, then disappear, a dialogue in English that changes to Japanese, and so on.

Beginning in 1954, the Mekas brothers decided to supplement their filmmaking with the production of a magazine called Film Culture. For the next 30 years the magazine helped introduce avant-garde films to America, carrying articles by prominent filmmakers from both America and abroad. The publication was financed by jobs Adolfas and Jonas held; copies of he complete collection are available in the Bard College archives.

In 1971, with an impressive list of accomplishments behind him, Adolfas came to Bard as a lecturer in the newly-formed, probationary film department. At the time, the department was located in a converted carriage house (thus the sign on Adolfas’s carport), and its inventory consisted of a two Bolex H-16 movie cameras, a couple of projectors, a seating room for 15 people, glue and other implements of the filmmaker’s trade. Enrolled were a dozen students. Within four years, Adolfas had turned the film department, which he dubbed the People’s Film Department, into one of the most popular divisions of the College. The number of enrollees increased each year, as did their equipment. Yet Adolfas’s time at Bard was fraught with problems. He had his opponents as well as his supporters.

According to Peter Hutton, a professor at Bard’s Film and Electronic Arts Program, the People’s Film Department and Adolfas were “irascible, anarchistic and Dadaistic.” Adolfas’s passion for the filmmaking art and his active interest in his students made the early years of the film department a dynamic and exciting place to study. But filmmaking just didn’t fit into some faculty’s notions of a small liberal arts college like Bard—it used a technique, not a liberal arts skill. In the 1970s, the Faculty Senate evaluated the department and found it too expensive to continue. This was no more than a convenient excuse, according to Adolfas. The full faculty voted to kill the film program, and if then-President Reamer Kline had not overridden the faculty vote in the 11th hour and issued a reprieve, the department and Adolfas’s job would have disappeared.

Several years later, the Evaluation Committee consisting of senior members of the Bard faculty voted to deny Adolfas tenure. Immediately he received offers to head the film departments at Manhattanville College and New York’s School of Visual Arts. Most unusually, the new Bard administration requested a second evaluation, which this time had the support of some younger faculty members and the People’s Film Front, an entrenched group of students who fought to retain their leader. Adolfas did receive tenure. For 33 years he served as chair of the People’s Film Department.

Today, Adolfas is struggling to complete a monumental fictional autobiography of his alter ego George Binkey, titled George the Man. He is also assisting the Anthology Film Archives in New York in preparing a retrospective of his films that is to take place this fall. In between working on his book and these other activities, he is preparing for a six-day master class presentation “What is Cinema?” at the Escuela International de Cine y TV in Havana, Cuba.

And still he finds time to plant tomatoes in his garden and to make gallons of limoncello for his friends.