Issue 1: Summer 2008
Jonas Mekas at the Jameson Dublin Film Festival
Review Posted: 08 Jun 08
Whilst Warhol's work was elegantly entombed in Cork, a comparably major force of ‘60s New York Underground Cinema was not only very much alive but, for a few days in February, very much alive in Dublin. The occasion of Jonas Mekas' visit was a four-programme retrospective of his films and videos at the IFI, organised by the Solus collective as part of the Jameson Dublin Film Festival. The work selected provided a good overview of the long career of the now octogenerian master of the ‘diary film' (to use an often contested term), poet, performer, critic, canon-forming founder of Anthology Film Archives, legendary champion of avant garde film, self-described ‘raving maniac of the cinema': a towering creative figure.
The title of his shatteringly moving, five hour long As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty (2000) says much about his work in general, films created from ‘diary' footage shot sometimes over decades. His jittery, ecstatic handheld camerawork captures friends, family, nature, New York, the art world, in images perhaps best described as ‘glimpses'. Cut together in frequently short bursts of shots, these films both concentrate the intensity of moments rescued from time- fleeting ‘fragments of paradise'- and highlight the fragility of happy instants against the cumulative melancholy of life. ‘Cinema is innocent' Mekas provocatively declares in one of his arrestingly rhapsodic voiceovers- cinema is innocent but people are not.
Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania (1972) is a series of poetic impressions from the exiled Mekas' first visit to his native country since he left during World War Two. Notes on the Circus, a dazzling exercise in in-camera editing, is a prticularly energetic section of Walden (1969), another lengthy ‘diary film'. Less typical is The Brig (1964), a savagely claustrophobic film of a performance of Kenneth Brown's play set in a marine corps gaol and shot like a verité documentary. Letter from Greenpoint (2005) is in the longer take style of Mekas' more recent videos. Today, his moving image work seems, on a formal level, not so much an exploration of his gaze and memory but rather an observational record of his presence in the world. Less, perhaps, the creation of a filmmaker, more documentation of an extraordinary performance artist.
- Maximilian Le Cain
Details of the retrospective:
http://www.dubliniff.com/season_live.php?id=4