Anger, distress, and even ennui are also suppressed. But labour is conspicuously absent, save in idle peoplewatching. Mekas is a true amateur and his filming is hobbyistic: a regular enough part of his life not to disrupt his subjects, but leaving space for him to live around it and actually participate in the scenes he captures. Family is a central and predominant presence, broad enough to include close friends but focusing especially on children (playing, reciting, rehearsing, eating) and babies (usually just looking at the camera). Most notably, I think, there are plenty of moments of actually considerable significance: holidays, reunions, births, baptisms, weddings, anniversaries. He balances the urban (architecture, pedestrians, weather) with the natural, favouring flowers, trees, birds, cats, moving water, and wild landscapes in particular locations. ![]() Mekas’ subjects over the decades here (largely between the 60s and 80s, largely in New York City) show a considerable degree of consistency. ‘This is a political film’ and ‘Nothing happens in this film’, we are told by recurrent intertitles, while Mekas reinforces this defensive stance with commentary on the film’s lack of content, his compulsion to film any and everything, his status as a ‘filmer’ rather than a legitimate filmmaker, his general and total lack of knowledge about life and his place in it.Įxcept it’s either disingenuous or tactical to describe the content of the film as ‘nothing’. Mekas’ explanatory narration actually pops up at the beginning of each chapter, constructing a kind of periodic apologia for the piece. This cookie is used to check if the cookies are enabled on the users' browser.Second time with Jonas Mekas after Lost, Lost, Lost. I have learned, by comparison of the two, that there is a limit to the watchability of only loosely thematised tranche-de-vie home movie footage, and also that it is possible for me to review a film after only 60% of its runtime in good conscience.Īgain organised into chapters, though Mekas confesses at the beginning that he tried and abandoned a project to order the streams of amateur recordings chronologically, opting eventually for a random distribution, ‘as he found them on the shelf’. The cookie is set by the GDPR Cookie Consent plugin and is used to store whether or not user has consented to the use of cookies. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Performance". This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Other. ![]() The cookies is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Necessary". ![]() The cookie is set by GDPR cookie consent to record the user consent for the cookies in the category "Functional". The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Analytics". These cookies ensure basic functionalities and security features of the website, anonymously. Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly.
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