University of Cape Town – FAM4004S
Martin Botha
10 November 2017
‘The Cinema of Gratitude’:
As I Watched It Occasionally I Had Brief Insights Into Jonas Mekas’s As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses Of Beauty (2000)
“My dear viewers, I guess you have come to another realization by now and that is that I am not really a filmmaker. I do not make films. I just film. I’m most obsessed with filming. I’m really a filmer. And it’s me and my Bolex [camera]. *sound of Bolex being wound* I go through life with my Bolex, and I have to film what I see, what is happening, right there. What an ecstasy just to film. Why do I have to make films when I can just film? When I can just film whatever is happening there in front of me there and now, my friends, and whatever I see or what- I may not even be filming the real life, I may just be filming my memories. I don’t care, I just have to film life.”
– From Mekas’s in situ commentary.
“Now I drift through the Poem of the Sea;
This gruel of stars mirrors the milky sky,
Devours green azures; ecstatic flotsam,
Drowned men, pale and thoughtful, sometimes drift by.”
– From Arthur Rimbaud’s poem ‘The Drunken Boat’.
“I stick to facts. Just what I feel, I think.
Words are ideas.
Rustling, the stream passes – and what does not pass,
Which is ours, not the stream’s.
I’d have had verse be like that: mine is alien,
Something that I too read.”
– Fernando Pessoa’s poem ‘I Stick to Facts’.
“The stage cannot hope to achieve what the film achieves without effort: the illusion of being a window opened on the world itself. And not only does the world move; the window also moves in the world.”
– From Parker Tyler’s Underground Film: A Critical History (1971: 8).
Jonas Mekas’s magnum opus As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty is almost entirely self-explanatory. It is a film more self-evidently concerned with its own exegesis than any other. So this essay can only valuably serve as a companion consideration of its understated majesty. In the context of any history of the Cinematic Avant-Garde, it represents a lovely landmark – a visionary five-hour documentary-memoir extracted from a palimpsest of accidents. As the quasi-culmination of Mekas’s career, it provides a definitive statement of his personal philosophy of entertainment. And on its own terms it accomplishes a sweet-hearted congruence between the actualities of film, memory and contemplation. But I’ve made it sound too grandstanding already. At one point in the first of his patented ‘Diary Films’, Walden: Diaries, Notes and Sketches (1969), Mekas shrieks in time with his accordion “I live therefore I make films; I make films therefore I live.” And Brief Glimpsesis just the natural exemplification of this neo-Cartesian conception of the medium. The Absolute it aspires towards is a kind of sublime transparency between its creator’s creativity and private experience. Hence the film necessarily deserves the mantle of being the greatest home-movie ever made.[1]But it transcends all the obvious frailties of the genre by suspending its images in a conscientious state of self-questioning. Mekas shows his life to us because he wants to guess at that which he can never know – what his favourite images might mean to other people. And in this way he manages to vanquish the nostalgia inherent to any record of sentiment. He fails to fetishize the precious aspects of his reality. Instead, we get to live his life again with him, and time thought lost is redeemed as a sequence of colourful, quivering lights.
The effort of this bears an implicit irony that reflects back on the substance of Mekas’s reputation as ‘the godfather of American Avant-garde cinema.’ The tenuous tradition of Underground filmmaking he uncovered, invigorated and presided over in New York from 1954 as the creator and editor (with his brother Adolfas) of Film Culture magazine based its vitality on a continuing capacity for social and aesthetic provocation. It existed to serve one of the film camera’s “most neglected functions”: “that of invading and recording realms which have to some degree remained taboo – too private, too shocking, too immoral for photographic reproduction.” (Tyler, 1971: 1) This self-consciously surfaced first in Europe in the Twenties in parallel with the Modernist movements that functioned like magnetic fields for technical anarchy in all the arts – Surrealism and Dada obviously obliged the heretical discord of Bunuel and Dali’s Un Chien Andalou (1929) and L’Age D’or (1930) while Expressionism contextualized Walter Ruttmann’s abstract colour animations and innovative montage-machinations. With the arrival of the spectre of war and fascist tastelessness, it followed most of its artists into professional exile in California, influencing the psycho-sexual iconography in the early works of Maya Deren and Kenneth Anger, before doubling back to New York in the Fifties to blend in with the best of the Beats and the Abstract Expressionists in the bebop careers of Stan Brakhage, Ken Jacobs and the unrelated Smiths, Harry and Jack. This was the milieu Mekas and his brother gradually snuck into after escaping Lithuania’s war-weariness and the ‘boredom’ of a couple of German labour camps. They initially settled in tolerable squalor in Williamsburg, Brooklyn in 1949 and Jonas, at the age of 27, immediately started “mak[ing] up for all the lost time”[2]by becoming the best devotee of the much-beloved Cinema 16 film society and “buying his first Bolex [16 mm] camera with borrowed money just two weeks after he arrived” in the city.[3]
“[B]ut since I did not know [how to make films], I had scripts written I had several little scripts that were sort of poetic, they were not normal scripts. But I was not sure so I just kept filming; I wanted to master the camera, to see what the camera could do. Since I got involved in Film Culture then later in The Village Voice, I never had much time, no long stretches of time, I just kept filming in little pieces. I thought I was practicing, but when I began looking at what I had, I realized it was like keeping a diary. So I just continued working that way![4]”
Thus the discovery and development of his private style/genre proved as whimsically circumstantial as the contents of the majority of his films. And his other cinephilic ventures required only slightly more enterprise: Film Culture came into being because “[t]here was [no publication] in the United States” to intellectually compare to Paris’s Cahiers du Cinema or London’s Sight & Sound, and the Filmmaker’s Cinematheque co-operative, which he started as nightly screenings in his loft in the early Sixties and later evolved into the world-class Anthology Film Archives, grew from the want of any wider platform for distributing and presenting the experimental productions[5]he and his friends were making and which his magazine sought to promote and cover.[6]
“We simply wanted to do something else that could exist alongside Hollywood, but they did not want to let us in. They had built walls around traditional cinema that could not be broken so we had to operate outside those walls in whatever way we could.[7]”
The movement he predominantly MC’d was then forced Underground – and came to accept its identification as such – because its envisioning of the potential of filmmaking purely as a personal medium of expression proved entirely incompatible with the conservative consumerism of the era’s less-than-silent majority of moviegoers. But the delusive self-sufficiency of the burgeoning New York art scene fostered a kind of localized complementary appetite for transgressive spectacle. In taking on the ‘Underground’ moniker, films like Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures[8](1963), Brakhage’s Dog Star Man (1964) and Andy Warhol’s Chelsea Girls[9](1966) effectively doubled down on their lack of mainstream appeal by making their subjects a series of stabs at disinterring the most affectingly repressed images buried in their audience’s collective subconscious. Each of them signifies a kind of sublime overlap between the high-minded exploratory purposes of modern art and the unrepentantly rancid low-brow attractions of the kaleidoscopic peepshow. In this sense, the filmic Avant-garde of the time was united by a shared impulse towards the evocation of the uncannily uncommon. They simultaneously meant to disturb and hypnotize.
But Mekas’s cinema is the dialectical inversion of this principle, as well as its necessary, optimistic exception. His images are only provocative in as much as they are groundbreakingly ordinary. His montages gather together not a re-imagined reality but the real substance that forms the base of his imagination:
“It is important to know that what I do is not artistic. I am just a film-maker. I live how I live and I do what I do, which is recording moments of my life as I move ahead. And I do it because I am compelled to. Necessity, not artistry, is the true line you can follow in my life and work.[10]”
And at the start of the fifth of Brief Glimpses’twelve chapters, he confesses to us:
“You must by now come to a realization that what you are seeing is a sort of masterpiece of nothing. Nothing. You must have noticed my obsession with what’s considered as nothing, in cinema, in life, and nothing very important. We all look for those very important things, very important things, and here there is nothing important, nothing. It’s all little daily scenes, personal little celebrations and joys. Nothing important, it’s all nothing, nothing. If you have never experienced the ecstasy of a child making the first steps, the incredible importance of that moment, of the child making the first steps, or the importance, the incredible importance, of a tree in the spring suddenly all in blossoms, all in blossoms. The miracle, miracles of every day, the little moments of paradise that are here now. Next moment maybe they are gone. Totally insignificant but great.[11]”
What is then transgressive and almost disquieting in Mekas’s work is his incapacity to view it as constituting a separate realm of identity from his actual life. The immanent gap of fantasy that structures even documentary storytelling is simply non-existent in all of his Diary films, and especially in Brief Glimpses. There are contemporary parallels for this aesthetic over-proximity in other mediums. Many of Robert Lowell’s late poems in The Dolphin (1973) and Day by Day (1977) equally functioned as autobiographical speculations and ‘true’, irrevocable confessions that disturbed his loved ones. Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor comics (1976-2008) exhibited issue after issue filled entirely with incidental stories from his working-class life. And Norman Mailer typically projected himself as the protagonist of his ‘non-fictional novel’ The Armies of the Night (1968)[12]. But Mekas capitalizes on the ontological cachet of the photographic image to develop a body of work that serves simultaneously as the transcription and expression of his individuality.[13]He short-circuits the notion of the cinematic visionary because he doesn’t need to manufacture a demonstration of his way of seeing; he just shows us what he sees. The camera-eye is his actual eye. In Bazin’s terms, “[his] personality … enters into the proceedings only in his selection of the object to be photographed and by way of the purpose he has in mind.”[14]Since his purpose is pure appreciation for the beauty of the object that has inspired him to pick up his Bolex in the first place, the burden of value falls entirely on the assiduity of his curation of subjects. We need to be able to share his judgements. In The Sixties Quartet – the four half-hour films he cut together from his footage of the company of John Lennon, Andy Warhol, Jackie Kennedy and George Maciunas (the fellow Lithuanian founder of the Fluxus art movement) – we immediately appreciate the opportunity to spend time within his subjectivity because the subjects he observes are icons witnessed in private moments of friendship, enchantingly relieved of their celebrity.[15]But in Brief Glimpses, 285 minutes of galactically scattered images are only unified by the currency of the experiential taste of Jonas Mekas while he and his wife Hollis raised their little family in Soho in the Seventies and Eighties. There is no guarantee that we will accept his standards of Beauty.
Though of course we do. Or at least I did. And I was won over in particular by the extent to which Mekas manages to match the overwhelming sincerity of his endeavour with an uncondescending kind of commentating irony. One of the most persistently repeated of the hand-typed inter-titles is “Nothing happens in this film”, but this is offensively untrue. We see Jonas and Hollis get married. We follow them to Vienna on their honeymoon, then later to Paris, Provence and the Grand Canyon on holiday. We explicitly see the births of both of their children, Oona and Sebastian. We see birthday parties, Sunday picnics, ballet classes, school concerts, street parades, snowball fights, Central Park in every season, D.H. Lawrence’s house, a Dizzy Gillespie performance, Richard Serra painting an entire room black, Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky proselytizing in the streets, William Burroughs giving a public reading, a walk on Brooklyn Bridge, a whale-watching trip, countless visits to friends, Hollis trying to make the bed with the cat still under the covers, ice-rinks, merry-go-rounds, Christmas pageants, flapjack breakfasts, spontaneous dance sessions, ‘lazy afternoons’, daily tai-chi and Jonas sitting himself down for a scattershot series of self-portraits.
But these are all presented only for their own sake:
“I have never been able, really, to figure out where my life begins and where it ends. I have never, never been able to figure it all out – what it’s all about, what it all means. So when I began now to put all these rolls of film together, to string them together, the first idea was to keep them chronological. But then I gave up, and I just began splicing them together by chance the way I found them on the shelf, because I really don’t know where any piece of my life really belongs. So let it be. Let it go. Just by pure chance. Disorder. There is some kind of order in it. Order of its own which I do not really understand. Just as I never understood life around me. The real life, as they say. Or the real people. I never understood them. I still do not understand them. And I do not really want to understand them.[16]”
This Zen-like relinquishment of direction produces a few holistic effects. Every image we see is now equalized into a paradise of material inclusion. Shots of sleeping cats, cascading leaves, blurred traffic, bright flowers, circling birds, shining fruit bowls and rolling waves all command the same attention as the aforementioned anthropocentric images. And despite the signposting of exact dates in the inter-titles for most of the special occasions, all of the instances on show seem to coagulate into one fluctuating but self-contained moment. This, of course, is the constancy and ever-presence of Mekas’s self-experience[17]as he quests for the minimal aspect of the cinematic amidst the entirety of his private environment. But the film constantly orbits and repeats the same sights and the same inter-titles (‘Life goes on’, ‘Beauty is Happinness’ [sic], ‘In Soho’ and so on) because Mekas sticks to Keats’s dictum that “[a] thing of beauty is a joy forever”[18]and therefore never tires of re-playing the images that his younger self lived amongst and always felt inspired to capture. The exact same subject filmed in a slightly different way or at a slightly different time becomes something entirely new. He even explicitly demonstrates this at one point in Chapter Six by switching back-and-forth between two lighting effects for the same film reel, showing the Summer wind blowing into the alternately warm and washed-out colours of his and Hollis’s bedroom.
But the film’s technique as a whole succeeds at seeming a specialized mimesis of Mekas’s subjectivity. Foremost, of course, it is predominantly presented in ‘first-person’, like any home-movie, but he makes the form his own by reinventing the texture of his footage:
“I … discovered that the Bolex camera is very suitable for single framing and changing exposure, underexposing, overexposing, speeding up. But it was already part of the cinematic language. I did not invent it.”
“It helped me to condense reality, and to put my feeling of the moment into what I was filming. I compare it with somebody who plays a musical instrument, like saxophone. Your feelings translate into your fingers and how you play it. The same with a movie and my Bolex. My temperament I put into it, guided by the many possibilities — to speed up, to overexpose, the single frame — all connected directly with my feelings. Same with a painter and brush — which way you move the brush, what you do, you do it all with no thinking. Because you cannot think, “Now I will go right, now left.” No, you have to have mastered your instrument well enough that you do it with no thinking.[19]”
In Brief Glimpses this method amounts to a kind of nervous cinematographic accent that matches the shaky deliberation of his commentary. His camera constantly reaches for that which it knows it can never grasp. It flits and flickers from sight to sight, investigating details and discovering gestures of pleasure everywhere. The frames are fashioned as grainy keepsakes, tinted in watery shades of successively sweet colours and sped along in a slight fast-motion that maintains the underlying flow of the feature. This is further ensured by the dominion of jump-cuts in the edit, as our focus is determined by the mechanistic logic of arbitrary montage: we expend the first ‘glimpse’ that signifies the interest of a particular sight then quickly move on to more pressing visions. And on the soundtrack his still-accented English personalizes the production just as much as his handwritten titles and credits. He often repeats his phrases, chuckles and improvises with a kind of scooping roughness to his timbre that allows our attentions to linger on the sincerity of all of his present-tense observations. In between these interjections, besides the clink of a persistent piano melody, what we hear is just as chaotic as what we see:
“I’m not sure what I’m doing really. It’s all chance. I’m going through all the reels of my sounds, picking up this, picking up that, splicing it all together, putting it all together, by chance, same as the images, same as I am putting those images together, same, exactly the same as when I originally filmed them by chance, with no plan, just according, just to the whim of the moment, what I felt that moment I should be filming this or that without knowing why. Same with the sounds that I have collected all those years. I’m putting them on the soundtrack by chance.”
So instead of ever entering the diegesis of his memories, we are positioned at a considerate distance from them by a drawn-out cacophony of ringing telephones, crowd chatter, traffic noises, squawking birds, tearing winds, intellectual discussions, opera recordings and a constant niggling buzzing sound that accompanies every chapter like the very breath of the film itself.
This break preventing our full immersion in the film is essential to Mekas’s project, because instead of being interpellated into his actual experiences we pull back to accompany him in his editing room as he observes his own reactions to their arbitrary reconstruction. He doesn’t presume that we will find his images meaningful because he doesn’t assume they have any objective meaning beyond his affection for them:
“I’m looking at these images now many, many years later. I recognize and remember everything. What, what can I tell to you? What can I tell to you? No, no, these are images that, hehe, have some meaning to me but may have no meaning to you at all. Then suddenly this being midnight I thought there is no image, really, that would relate to anybody else. I mean all images around us that we go through our lives, and I go filming them, they are not that much different from what you have seen or experienced, from what you have seen or experienced. It, all of life’s, are very much alike. Ah, my dear Blake! Just a drop of water. We are all in it and nothing, there is no big difference, essential difference, between you and me. No essential difference.”
&
“My dear viewers, as we continue I do not feel any guilt, ha, making you watch these very personal insignificant moments of my life. We all look for something more important, for something more important, but as life goes at some point we realize that one day follows another and things we felt were so important yesterday we feel we have forgotten them already today, and life is continued, life is continuing. And what’s important to me may be totally unimportant to you, totally unimportant to you.”
By relieving us of the pressure to consistently agree with his appreciation, we are given the freedom to value whatever images happen to strike our fancy in the intersection of his and our taste. And because he so often includes himself as an image for his own consideration, his perspective is in itself put into perspective, so to speak. The arbitrary particularity of his existence reveals the necessary surprise of our own. Thus, Appreciation as such becomes the subject of the film, as the ecstasy of acknowledging the gift of gentle experience is absorbed into a celebration of the gift of its direct recording. Here Cinema does not transparently substitute for any foregone reality but neither does it provide any kind of false witness to life. As a self-consciously separate and material artifact of the past it bears the potential to inspire a resurrection of phenomenological duration. In Deleuze’s terms it ‘re-territorializes’ the sweep of personal history into a real and lasting appearance of experiential wealth:
“But some of the memories, no, they never really go away, nothing really goes away. It’s always here and sometimes it takes over you and it’s stronger than any reality around you, around me now ha. That is, that is reality. That is real, that is really real, though it’s not here anymore, as they say. It’s not here anymore, it’s here for me. It’s here and now.”
And so the film is a kind of pre-accomplished paradise in its own right. It saves itself from the futility of nostalgia by finally acknowledging that Time has already been regained. And cinema’s function is just to make the fact ever-increasingly clear. Brief Glimpses ends with another hand-written title-card and then four extra notes:
‘Yes, La Beaute’
‘And it’s still beautiful in my memory’
‘As real as then’
‘yes, as real as this film.’
In overview then, Mekas’s film presents itself as the seminal masterpiece of a kind of anti-Cinema. It does away with drama and all but the most minimal direction because it seeks to pursue an ideal of self-affirmation that also serves to bolster a conviction in the value of life itself. The cream of experience is rigorously skimmed off the top of Mekas’s history to make “[a] film about people who have never any arguments and no fights and who love each other”. This form does not deny life’s tragedies or disagreements but instead manages to totally overwhelm them in evocations of his instances of complete immersion in joy and gratitude. A filmic skin of sheer prettiness constitutes the film in much the way that the C Major chord delimits the avant-garde composer Terry Riley’s famous one-note symphony In C. There is so much potential nuance even in the singular substance of one such technique of ecstatic feeling that no other material is required to balance out the final work. And Mekas gives up the ghost of control over his affections so that he can begin to attempt to know himself without any unnecessary illusions. The film is as much a gift as life itself in its depiction.
Word Count: 4150
Reference List:
Bazin, Andre. 2004. ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’ in What is Cinema?Volume I (Trans. by Hugh Gray). Berkeley: University of California Press.
Bogdanovich, Peter. 2015. ‘Jonas Mekas’. Available: https://www.interviewmagazine.com/film/jonas-mekas
Deleuze, Gilles. 2005. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. London: Continuum Books.
Ebiri, Bilge. 2017. ‘I’m Like the Last Leaf of a Big Tree’: A Conversation With Jonas Mekas. Available: https://www.villagevoice.com/2017/09/21/im-like-the-last-leaf-of-a-big-tree-a-conversation-with-jonas-mekas/
Frye, Brian L. 2007. ‘“Me, I Just Film My Life”: An Interview with Jonas Mekas’. Available: http://sensesofcinema.com/2007/feature-articles/jonas-mekas-interview/
Mitchell, Elvis. 2001. ‘FILM REVIEW; One Man’s Parenthood, in Minute Detail’ Available: http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/12/movies/film-review-one-man-s-parenthood-in-minute-detail.html
O’Hagan, Sean. 2012. ‘Jonas Mekas: the man who inspired Andy Warhol to make films’. Available: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2012/dec/01/jonas-mekas-avant-garde-film-interview
Taylor, Trey. 2017. ‘Jonas Mekas: Nothing Is Stopping You From Doing What You Love’. Available: https://www.interviewmagazine.com/film/jonas-mekas-dance-with-fred-astaire-interview#slideshow_51506.9
Tyler, Parker. 1971. Underground Film: A Critical History. London: Secker & Warburg.
[1]“The film is a first — the home movie as epic. With its intentionally rough-hewn cuts, it is a journal, with hand-typed titles interspersed throughout that skitter past like lightning flashes and are meant to evoke moments. It’s a fleeting storm of a film, with pockets of rhythms that suggest the ebb and flow of a naturally unfolding event — though for some, its length may call for coffee and blankets.” (Mitchell, 2001)
[5]I should note that I’m only using this term in relation to a broader contextualization of Mekas’s place in cinema history: “[W]hen I use the word “experimental”, Mekas hauls me up immediately. “No one was experimenting. Not Maya, not Stan Brakhage, and certainly not me. We were making different kinds of films because we were driven to, but we did not think we were experimenting. Leave that to the scientists…”” (O’Hagan, 2012)
[8]Which Mekas was nearly imprisoned for publicly screening given its multiple scenes of gay orgies and sadomasochistic mischief.
[9]Mekas actually served as Warhol’s first film tutor, the iconic pop artist having become intrigued by the medium at the early Cinematheque screenings and later enlisting Jonas’s help to set up the filming of Empire(1964), his 8-hour single shot of the Empire State Building.
[11]Naturally even the forthcoming clarity with which he explains his working method and cinematic philosophy, both in interviews and within his actual work, reflects the deathless urgency of his attention to the presence of the self-evident. To paraphrase the poet John Berryman, Awareness is most of what Mekas has, and he uses it kindly to help us learn to appreciate our own lives too.
[12]And successors to this mode of artlessness include the documentary work of Ross McElwee, most prominently the ‘failed history project’ of Sherman’s March(1985), and Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggleseries – the literary equivalent of remembering the beauty of watching paint dry at every stage of your life.
[13]If I were to historicize this loose wave of ‘personal realists’ I’d relate their efforts, along with the intellectual rejection of post-war mass culture, to the general liberal dissent from the showmanship and falsity of politics during and after the Vietnam War. The other side of the coin to any finger-pointing stance against the military-industrial complex would reasonably be an equally intense form of indirectly political introspection, especially for white males.
[15]Warhol’s cinema makes for an interesting counterpoint here, in as much as so many of his celebrity screen-tests and stoic life studies (Sleep, Blowjobetc.) depend on a similar valuing of a kind of metaphysics of celluloid presence, except that his situations experiment with cleaving coldly to the utter minimum of deliberate staging while Mekas’s work usually refuses to enframe or sequester the reality it happens upon.
[16]Mekas’s opening and closing monologue, wailed on accordion the second time round.
[17]Nearly halfway in: “By the time a viewer, that is you, reaches the chapter six one expects, that is you, you expect, you expect to find out more about the protagonist, that is me, the protagonist of this movie. So I do not want to disappoint you. All I want to tell you: it’s all here. I am in every image of this film. I am in every frame of this film. The only thing is you have to know how to read these images.How? Didn’t all those French guys tell you? How to rrread the images. Yes, they told you, so please read these images and you will be able to tell everything about me.”
[18]About two-thirds through: “I… I guess I am a Romantic. You can call me a Romantic. It’s okay with me. I do not understand, I never really understood. Never really lived in the so-called real world. I lived, I live, in my own imaginary world, which is as real as any other world, as real as the real world of all the other people around me. You also live in your own imaginary worlds. What you are seeing is mine, is my imaginary world, which to me is not imaginary at all. It’s real. It is as real as anything else under the sun. So let us continue. Let us continue.”
Categories: Essays/Prose