Some of the Best

Axiom of Choice Evoking the physiognomy of a Rembrandt portrait, Axiom of Choice depicts Jonas Mekas and his son Sebastian, their heads rotating in radiant chiaroscuro against a black ground. With Mekas at its center, the references to cinematic machinery abound in this work: from the proto-filmic zoetrope (which used a spinning cylinder to create the illusion of a moving image), to the flickering zoom of Ernie Gehr’s film Serene Velocity, to the enormous gyrating machine at the center of Michael Snow’s La Région Centrale. —Richard Birkett, Karin Schneider & Nicolás Guagnini

3 Friends Singing (...in... A short portrait of Jonas Mekas by filmmaker and veteran Jonas chronicler Peter Sempel.

Morfar och Ida A girl, a grandfather, an encounter and a rope.

Jonas Towards Broadway Short portrait of Jonas Mekas by filmmaker and veteran Jonas chronicler, Peter Sempel.

Elegy for J.M. Created by Anthology’s Archivist John Klacsmann, the visual track of Elegy for J.M. is the result of an encoding malfunction while preparing a clip of Jonas Mekas’s Lost Lost Lost (1976), a happy digital accident in keeping with the spontaneity and openness to chance embodied by Jonas’s diary films themselves.

Red Light An obnoxious social media influencer and a group of friends on their way to a Halloween party find themselves in a grim world of hell when they run into two twisted brothers.

For Myself, Alone A lone man tries to open a door.

SIMETRIA

Just Beyond the Trees A ghost story made up of traces of places, of images and afterimages fractured from the histories otherwise inscribed into them by re-photography and digital manipulation. Always searching for something through the noise, something beneath the image—and perhaps finding it in its absence.

Ken Jacobs / Tom Chiu of... "Abstract Expressionist Cinema"