Cast

Jonas Mekas, Andy Warhol, Kenneth Anger, Peter Kubelka, Norman Mailer, Robert Downey, Su Friedrich, David Lynch, Amy Taubin, Fred Camper

Film description

In 1969, Jonas Mekas, Stan Brakhage, Peter Kubelka, Jerome Hill and P. Adams Sitney established the now legendary Anthology Film Archives to collect and present the most important achievements in auteur, independent and avant-garde cinema.

Visionaries is more than mere homage to the extraordinary persona of Mekas and exceptional archive that Workman’s documentary refers to as the ‘cathedral of film.’ It is, above all, a synthetic story of American’s postwar film avant-garde as developed by Andy Warhol, Stan Brakhage, Peter Kubelka, Chris Marker, Kenneth Anger, Norman Mailer, Robert Downey, Su Friedrich, and Mekas. Workman also shows that their experimental films have roots in the European experimental films of the 1920s and 30s, and provides examples of how postwar American artists such as Ralph Steiner, Joseph Cornell, and Maya Darren continued these traditions.

Workman’s film is saturated with countless snippets of historic experimental films, interviews with the most important artists of the postwar avant-garde (Warhol, Anger, Brakhage, Kubelka, Downey, Mailer), as well as critic commentary (Amy Taubin and Fred Camper). The film attempts to answer the question on the essence of the art that is avant-garde film and why, as Mekas says, making the art of film is an ‘absolute necessity.’

Karolina Kosińska