Jonas Mekas - As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty (2000)

[rate:7.8] 81 votes

Synopsis

Jonas Mekas wrote:

My film diaries 1970-1979: my marriage, children are born, you see them growing up. Footage of daily life, fragments of happiness and beauty, trips to France, Italy, Spain, Austria. Seasons of the year as they pass through New York. Friends, home life, nature, unending search for moments of beauty and celebration of life friendships, feelings, brief moments of happiness. The film is also my love poem to New York. It’s the ultimate Dogme movie, before the birth of Dogme.

Review

nytimes.com wrote:

[...]The magnum opus title of Mr. Mekas's latest film suggests the amount of time you'll have to devote to it. At 288 minutes, this is a blizzard of detail and filmmaking technique, and the movie crystallizes Mr. Mekas's life into a few hours of blissful, and eventually mournful, experience. At almost five hours, the movie is brief only when compared with Mr. Mekas's 78 years of life. 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.

Touchingly, Mr. Mekas provides more of an immersion into his personal life than he has allowed anyone to view before in the welter of films he has built up over his career. ''As I Was Moving Ahead'' at the very least is a meditation on his complicated and shifting feelings about parenthood: it's packed with shots of his daughters, both choppy and leisurely, that make clear the positions they occupy in their daddy's eye (and lens); they're covered from infancy through first Communion, with soaring, ethereal choral music over the latter. Paternal love is the film's most consistent element. [...]

Mr. Mekas confesses that he simply gathered spools of film from the shelves in his home and made a protracted document of feeling. ''As I Was Moving Ahead'' has a lovely, unadorned, though distended sentimentality. Even though he has sliced much of his last 30 years into this movie and broken the film into 12 chapters, Mr. Mekas understands the unreliability of memory. More astoundingly, he manages to tame that phenomenon and get it on film.

One of the title cards that turn up continually reads ''Life goes on.'' It's as eloquent a summary of the aims of ''As I Was Moving Ahead'' as are Mr. Mekas's random observations, like ''enjoy those brief moments'' or ''that moment everything came back to me, in fragments.'' He puts his life on fast forward for this film.

Chapters 1-4




Chapters 5-7




Chapters 8-10




Chapters 11-12




Chapters 1-4
http://www.filesonic.com/file/28462797 953.67MB
http://www.filesonic.com/file/28477567 429.87MB

Chapters 5-7
http://www.filesonic.com/file/28702087 476.84MB
http://www.filesonic.com/file/29071111 476.84MB
http://www.filesonic.com/file/28704847 131.78MB

Chapters 8-10
http://www.filesonic.com/file/29101171 476.84MB
http://www.filesonic.com/file/29117621 476.84MB
http://www.filesonic.com/file/29106821 81.15MB

Chapters 11-12
http://www.filesonic.com/file/29079179

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Chapters 1-4
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Jonas Mekas - Walden - Diaries Notes and Sketches (1969)

Description: Poet and hero of the American counter-culture, Jonas Mekas, born in Lithuania in 1922, invented the diary form of film-making. Walden, his first completed diary film, an epic portrait of the New York avant-garde art scene of the 60s, is also a groundbreaking work of personal cinema.

"Since 1950 I have been keeping a film diary. I have been walking around with my Bolex and reacting to the immediate reality: situations, friends, New York, seasons of the year. On some days I shoot ten frames, on others ten seconds, still on others ten minutes. Or I shoot nothing.... Walden contains material from the years 1964-1968 strung together in chronological order."

"Jonas Mekas's films celebrate life. They rise up against the world's overwhelming commercialism, attempting instead to revive the pleasures of friendship, a first snowfall or the return of Spring. Mekas's genius stems from his generously including the viewer in his vision of the world, allowing us to (re)discover, in a simple image, the incredible force and necessity of poetry."
Yann BeauvaisTwo video cassettes, poster and 150-page book with unpublished texts by 60 authors including the personalities appearing in the film.

Celebrating and singing the scene it records, Walden is four years (1964-68) seen through the corybantic 16mm Bolex of Jonas Mekas. The propulsive images, strung together in roughly the same order they were filmed, inaugurated Mekas's ongoing Diaries Notes and Sketches series, a project of autobiography through home movie—or, as he called them, "Just images for myself." The filmmaker-flaneur records dinners, weddings, hustles, and four full cycles of the seasons seen from the Brakhage compound in Colorado, the malevolent industrial badlands of North Jersey, and the lunch counters of slush-pit New York. The ambience alternates subway clatter and Chopin, and the cast is a game of "spot the counterculture personality"—the Velvet Underground at their inaugural show, an "Uptown Party" at Stephen Shore's place, and numberless other walk-ons and cutaways. In the three-hour torrent of footage, one encounters puzzling asides (the intertitle "Black Power" introduces a black demolition crew at work) and beauty-flecked soporific drones. Mekas's career—filmmaker, Voice film critic, co-founder of the invaluable Anthology Film Archives—may be viewed as a grand project in preservation. Walden is dedicated to the Lumière Brothers, and it follows the model of their quotidian "realities": allowing a departed world to breathe once more.













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