With his brother Jonas Mekas, he founded the magazine Film Culture, as well as the Film-Makers' Cooperative and was associated with George Maciunas and the Fluxus art movement at its beginning.

[citation needed] In July 1944, Adolfas and his brother Jonas fled the approaching Red Army, going West in an attempt to reach neutral Switzerland, holding fabricated student papers from the University of Vienna.

While in Germany, Adolfas attended classes in literature and theater arts and philosophy in Mainz, where he also wrote and published short stories, novels, and children's books.

At the same time, he wrote more than 50 scripts and attended film screenings at the Museum of Modern Art, Cinema 16, Thalia, Stanley, and other venues.

P. Adams Sitney wrote of the project "The brothers little realized at the time that they were actually elevating American culture to new heights, and marshaling a level of film criticism that has never been equaled since in our country."

[clarification needed] During those years, he made short trips to Canada to visit friends and find material for the novel he was writing, A Canadian Romance.

In 1959 he returned to the States and to the daily struggle to live and create and express the needs of the growing movement of independent and avant-garde filmmakers in New York.

The second meeting took place on September 30 at the Bleecker Street Cinema and the first draft of the statement of aims was read, discussed and approved, and later published in Film Culture.

Subsequently, a third and fourth meeting took place, leading to the establishment in 1962 of the Film-makers' Co-op,[1] a distribution organization for the dissemination of independent, experimental and avant-garde films.

The New York group included, among others, Lionel Rogosin, Shirley Clarke, Robert Frank, Maya Deren, Peter Bogdanovich and Daniel Talbot.

In 1964 Mekas was hired as post-production coordinator and editor of the independent comedy drama Goldstein, which was co-directed by Ben Manaster and Philip Kaufman.

[clarification needed] The same year Mekas edited sound and film footage taken by brother Jonas of a performance of The Brig, directed by Judith Malina.

In spite of the performance of Hurd Hatfield, who played two parts in the film, there were problems with the production from the start, and Mekas never got to do a final cut.

Gene Moskowitz in Variety wrote "The Double Barreled Detective Story is authentic Mark Twain-esque with all the rustic humor of the 1880s....Mekas shows he has a way with parody and he gets disarmingly innocent performances from his cast."

In the same year Mekas directed Pola Chapelle in a short parody of Italian art films of the time, written by Peter Stone for the Broadway show Skyscraper which starred Julie Harris and Charles Nelson Reilly.

NY World Telegram[clarification needed] described it as "... a priceless film sequence satirizing Italian movies, for some of the heartiest laughs of the evening."

He was encouraged by Howard Hausman of the William Morris Agency, who had seen promise in Hallelujah the Hills and had made more than a few attempts at getting Mekas's scripts into the hands of independent producers who would understand their style.

Dominique Noguez in Cahiers du Cinéma wrote "....No frills, no Gipsy violin effects, no second movement of Aranjuez's concerto – and it is thereby, poignant.

"[clarification needed] In 1972, assisted by Pola Chapelle, Mekas completed an autobiographical film that documented his return to Lithuania after a 27-year absence.

[clarification needed] Mekas was not discouraged and, once a year, rented a truck and, together with Pola, visited film friends in New York City.

John Pruitt, and guest faculty – friends including Ken Jacobs, Sidney Peterson, Shirley Clarke and George Kuchar.

P. Adams Sitney writes, "what came to be known as the People's Film Department was [Mekas's] theater of hijinks; he surprised even himself with his enormous didactic gifts, his startling administrative skill and his unceasing fount of comic invention.

Nowhere in the archive of film is there an invented character who could come near the brilliant, lovable, outrageous mischief that consistently turned his classrooms into arenas of magic.

[1] By his bedside was his treatment for the fantasy docudrama he would make on the life and death by fire of the Neapolitan poet, philosopher, and so-called heretic Giordano Bruno.