Conversing with film critic J. Hoberman

"MANOHLA DARGIS In one of Jonas Mekas’s first columns for The Voice he wrote that 'every breaking away from the conventional, dead, official cinema is a healthy sign.' There was an activist element to his rhetoric, and soon after he started writing for The Voice he decided that it wasn’t enough to be a critic, he had to become, as he put it, a near-midwife, so he could hold and protect 'all the beautiful things that I saw happening in cinema and that were either butchered or ignored by my colleague writers and by the public.' He was fighting, to borrow the title of a book on him, to free the cinema."

J. Hoberman Talks About Village Voice and Film Culture
by Manohla Dargis and A. O. Scott, The New York Times, January 20, 2012