The exhibition argued that Mekas cannot be read through his films alone. Alongside the filmic practice ran an intellectual, organisational and often bluntly administrative one, and the second made the first possible, for him and for everyone around him.

It followed three decades from his arrival in New York in 1949: the magazine, the cooperative, the archive, the cinematheque. Mekas built the structures through which avant-garde film could be distributed, shown and kept, and he did it while insisting that film was a form of personal expression rather than an industry. Works by the filmmakers he championed and collaborated with were shown with his own, which is the only honest way to show a body of work that was never solitary.

Seen together, the letters, the ledgers and the reels describe a different kind of authorship, one that belongs as much to the institution built as to the film made.