"In February 2004, after 30 years of my life in SoHo, I made a decision to leave SoHo and move to Greenpoint, Brooklyn. This video is about what it feels like to leave a place in which one has spent more time than any other place, and which was also the place of my family life. I am somewhere else now. It's about beginning of growing roots in a new place, new home, with new friends, new thoughts, experiences. But this video is also about video. I will let Dominique Dubosc, my good Paris friend, talk for me, in a recent letter:
'I think you finally mastered this bloody video camera that was for so long (still is for most people) no more than a tape recorder. Now it is the eye-camera the Kinoks had been dreaming of. Of course, it is not only a question of mastering the camera. What is more important is the energy behind. The movement of life embracing death itself. It gave me such a push that I feel on the move again. Thank you.'
What Dominique meant, and what I mean, is this: when in 1949 I began filming with my Bolex, it took me fifteen years to really master it so that my Bolex would do for me what I wanted. When in 1987 I got my first Sony camera I thought it would be different. But no. Only today, after working with the video camera for fifteen years, I feel like it had become an extension of my eye, my body, A Letter from Greenpoint being my first real video work." - Jonas Mekas
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