To renew and to reinvent forms of celebrating poetry, the Centre Pompidou uses to offer to around thirty venues in France and abroad a joint event, which is each time dedicated to a remarkable and emblematic figure: John Giorno in 2020, Charles Baudelaire in 2021, Patti Smith in 2022… For this year they have chosen filmmaker and poet Jonas Mekas to inspire this new Poetry Day.

The main event of this year’s Poetry Day will be the screening of Requiem, Jonas Mekas’ last film, at the National Opera of Lithuania with a live orchestra, at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and many other venues worldwide, including Close-Up.

Requiem
Jonas Mekas, 2019, 84 min

“Requiem is the last film made by Jonas Mekas and can be considered as his farewell to earthly life. (…) Flowers of every shape and colour, trees, meadows, and leaves were captured by the artist over the last thirty years of his existence using various digital mediums, from his first Sony camcorder to an ultracompact Nikon. However, what the viewers see unfolding before their eyes is not a depiction of earthly paradise. At times, the floral imagery alternates with tragic scenes of wars, fires, and floods captured by Mekas’s camera from a distance, on television screens or newspapers. Rather than an Eden, the planet immortalized in the work appears to be the one that survived the great Flood. More than a meditation on death, the artist seems to offer a vision of life after the Anthropocene, at the end of human life.” – e-flux

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Supported by the Centre Pompidou