Description
Book SynopsisA 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. Guided by Mekas’s distinctive prose and suffused with warmth, A Dance with Fred Astaire is rhapsodic, poetic and funny as all get out. A revealing visual autobiography of a genuine culture hero.
Trade ReviewIf avant-garde American cinema were to christen a hero among its kind, it would be nearly unfathomable to think of anyone more deserving than Lithuanian-American filmmaker, film critic, poet and all-around catalyst Jonas Mekas - Dazed
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 - The Guardian
His is a singular life unlike any other, one filled with passion, determination, and innovation. His stories inspire, enlighten, and entertain with equal parts charm, courage, and originality - Dazed
"Mekas didn't just write about movies. He made them, showed them, and it woul be fair to say he lived them." - Bilge Ebiri, The Village Voice
"The advance party of the present moment: Instagram and selfies and all forms of social media notations are his diaristic descendants" - Gaby Wood, The Daily Telegraph
