Jonas Mekas reflects on the relationship between memory and image in this clip from his feature-length film, Outtakes From the Life of a Happy Man, which premieres this week at London's Serpentine Gallery. The Lithuanian-born filmmaker, poet and avant-garde instigator assembled this visual diary from the over 50 years of footage shot since his emigration to the US in 1949. Upon arriving in Brooklyn Mekas borrowed money to buy his first Bolex camera, and so began to capture every aspect of his life, recording intimate moments with family and extended circles of friends in pastoral landscapes in addition to the urban sprawl of his adopted city. Using previously unseen footage, here the director creates an impressionistic vision of his autobiography, accompanied by his own poetic voiceover. The film jumps forward non-chronologically, formally enacting Mekas’ dictum that life is unknowable, memory transient and the image the only reliable manifestation of the past. Old footage is spliced with recent shots of the auteur at work on the film as we watch it, hunched over reels late into the night, physically cutting and pasting narratives together. Mekas was instrumental in the underground culture of 1950s and 1960s New York, screening at small galleries on the Lower East Side and working with the likes of Yoko Ono, Allen Ginsberg and Andy Warhol. In 1970, he co-founded the Anthology Film Archives, a groundbreaking center for the preservation and exhibition of experimental film. His work has since been exhibited at such major venues as the Venice Biennale, PS1 Contemporary Art Centre and the Centre Georges Pompidou. 

Jonas Mekas’ 90th birthday is marked by three separate shows across London and Paris. In London, an exhibition of work opens today and runs through January 27 at the Serpentine Gallery and BFI Southbank's season of Mekas films begins December 6. A retrospective runs at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris until January 7.