Jonas Mekas was the truest champion of avant-garde and independent film. He arrived in New York from Lithuania in 1949 and spent the next seventy years of his life making, critiquing, praising and proliferating underground and experimental movies, thus inscribing himself into the city’s artistic lore.

He co-founded the seminal Film Culture journal and Anthology Film Archives, wrote reviews for the Village Voice, and gleefully skewered Hollywood films as gross, banal, and “second-rate art.” As the critic J. Hoberman puts it, “Every avant-garde, independent experimental-film artist in America is in some way in Jonas’s debt.”