LIGHTSTRUCK is a Los Angeles based experimental film screening series curated by Zena Grey and Mark Toscano, as well as a growing informational website related to experimental film and archiving.
OUR NEXT LIGHTSTRUCK EVENT:
Sunday, March 15, 2026 @ 1:00pm
2220 Arts & Archives, Los Angeles
**note atypical start time!!**
Jonas Mekas’s BIRTH OF A NATION (1996) on 16mm
Lightstruck is thrilled to invite you to celebrate the origins of the experimental film community in a 16mm matinee program to complement the big Hollywood to-do later in the day – one show a twisted funhouse mirror vision of the other (but which is which??)
A luminous cinema icon unto himself, Jonas Mekas pioneered a distinctive form of hyper-present 16mm diaristic filmmaking, capturing the resolutely anecdotal with engaging, earthly poetry. But he was also inarguably one of the leading lights of the avant-garde, determined to foment and connect a global independent film community that he saw as utterly crucial to the potential, power, and humanity of the medium. His feature Birth of a Nation radically appropriates a title inextricably linked to cinema history (yet tainted by its own corrupt vision), instead repositioning the phrase to describe and celebrate the myriad brilliant constellations of Mekas’s beloved film community. Utilizing his characteristic handheld camera, quick cutting, and an unparalleled eye for the touchingly mundane, Mekas creates a vital moving image album of filmmakers and assorted film friends that reveals these myths and legends of the avant-garde in all their anecdotal mortality.
Vastly more than a guessing game of who’s who in experimental film (there’s Will Hindle!), the film represents an incredibly rich emotional bridge between the vitality of these people at their moments of capture, and the assembly of this footage by Mekas into a collective portrait at a time (1996) when many were already gone, and their original contexts resolutely in the past. Seeing the film another 30 years further on, it packs an unexpected emotional wallop, as we are welcomed with inviting arms into the throng of a living, breathing community that – at least in its unique idiom and fragile temporality – has essentially disappeared. And yet, thanks to film itself, it still lives and breathes, and our local/global experimental film community is in part an ongoing tribute to the hundreds of folks in this film, who made independent movies and watched them together in independent spaces, just like us.
“We are the invisible, but essential nation of cinema. We are Cinema.” (Jonas Mekas)
PROGRAM:
Birth of a Nation (1996) by Jonas Mekas
16mm, bw & color, sound, 80 minutes
Program by Zena Grey and Mark Toscano. Notes by Mark Toscano. 16mm print from Film-makers’ Cooperative (which was co-founded by Jonas Mekas).
LIGHTSTRUCK 