Jonas Mekas

A Dance with Fred Astaire is an extraordinary collection of anecdotes and rare ephemera featuring a dizzying cast of cultural icons both underground and mainstream, both obscure and celebrated. Memories and diary entries, conversations and insights into his work sit alongside collages of beautifully reproduced postcards, newspaper cuttings, film negatives, lists, posters and photographs, envelopes and letters, book covers, telegrams, cartoons and doodles. Mekas has kept and archived the artifacts of his life as a cultural touchstone down to the minutiae, all of which is brought together here in the form of a unique and fascinating scrapbook of a life lived with the highest artistic commitment.

“Jonas is a true hero of the underground and a radical of the first degree-a shape-shifter and time-fucker… he sees things that others can’t… his cinema is a cinema of memory and soul and air and fire. There is no one else like him. His films will live forever.”
-Harmony Korine, The Guardian About the Author

Born in Lithuania in 1922, Jonas Mekas has lived a uniquely influential life as a filmmaker, writer, critic, and poet. He survived a World War II labor camp and postwar displacement before immigrating to New York in 1949 to embark upon an extraordinary career in the arts, playing an instrumental role in the careers of Jack Smith, Andy Warhol and numerous other iconic artists and hanging out with everyone from Maya Deren to John and Yoko, from Tiny Tim to Salvador Dalí, from the Kennedys to-yes-Fred Astaire.