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Yann BeauvaisTwo video cassettes, poster and 150-page book with unpublished texts by 60 authors including the personalities appearing in the film.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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