Jonas Mekas: Cinema Is Young!

The exhibition that in Italy concludes Jonas Mekas 100!, the international programme of initiatives promoted by the Lithuanian Culture Institute to celebrate the centenary of the birth of the director founder of the New American Cinema Group.

More than an exhibition, Cinema is young! is the culmination of an itinerant journey that has crossed the peninsula from Rome to Naples, passing through Bologna, Pesaro and Venice. It is also, in the words of the curators, the final chapter of a trilogy dedicated to the artist: “If the exhibition that has just ended at the Mattatoio in Rome had a retrospective character and the one at the Padiglione dell’Esprit Nouveau in Bologna focused on the symbol of the tree, the project that we have conceived for the Cineteca di Milano aims to highlight Mekas’ position in the history of western cinema”.

Set up in the halls of the MIC – Museo Interattivo del Cinema, the exhibition emphasises the simultaneously cinematic, educational and relational nature of the exhibition space. A selection of films, videos, photographic series and documents exemplifying the director’s seventy years of production are displayed within the Milan institution’s vast collection. Mekas’s work is thus presented as a nodal point in the journey from the origins of cinematography towards the new digital frontiers.