Jonas Mekas at Maya Stendhal Gallery

To watch a Jonas Mekas film is to be plunged into a succession of moments out of the joint of normal or narrative chronology: each instant trembles with intensity, “charged with meaning,” as Pound wrote of great literature, “to the utmost possible degree.” Mekas’s films are fragmentary and the range of their subjects is wide, yet they maintain a thematic cohesiveness, hewing an exilic epic out of the keenest lyric shards. Mekas’s eye is for the lost undersides of the present; by cutting movement up, by following mannerisms, the subtle budgings of an object at rest, he tracks the fleeting fragility embedded within the now. Like a cubist painter, he moves his camera around his subject—whether it is a person or a stony riverbed, looping up its essence while simultaneously pulverizing it, refusing to come at anything without breaking it down. Although his filmmaking is made of “real” time—his lifetime of compulsive filming—and not out of a performance meant to evoke something like reality, the films of Jonas Mekas achieve a kind of transcendental presence: he stitches together thousands of fugitive moments, maintaining an uncanny state of sustained lyric climax. With their rapid jump cuts, their restless flashes of motile light, their lo-fi soundtracks often purposefully out of synch with the imagery, and the little shocks of emptiness that punctuate it all, Mekas’s films induce their own kind of vertiginous trance, an oddly invigorating soporific, operating a dream logic while activating a conscious receptivity on the part of the viewer. Each moment becomes somehow monadic: images shudder into each other and their trembling interstices, making us feel what John Ashbery has called “the painful freshness of each thing being exactly itself”. Mekas is not a documentarian hunting for stories about; he does not film to find himself but rather, founds himself “from scratch”, as he says in “Lost Lost Lost” of compulsive filming. His camera traces what is most delicate and ineffable in people, a world that is living and not just performing life. Flowers and blowing grasses and the sea, donkeys and conveyances, celebrities and family and strangers are all filmed by Mekas with the same admixture of detachment and love: he does not exact a message from his subjects, he does not impose a psychological situation upon them, even as everything we see through his eyes becomes impregnated with the amplitude of its lostness as it flickers by. He is able to capture, somehow, the tenderness and vulnerability in people, the human proportion of their charisma. And there is something terrifying about the flashes of light that disclose, in a Mekas film, circus acrobats, or sunlight upon water, or the oddly fragile way Jacqueline Kennedy has, in “This Side of Paradise”, of handling a Chinatown curio: she herself seems brittle, somehow, as though her grace would break her, as though she is already disappearing.

Where is the protagonist?

“You expect to find out more about the protagonist, who is me. All I want to tell you, it's all here. I am in every image in this film. I am in every frame in this film.”
(Jonas Mekas in “As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty”)

The figure of literary genius in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time is the writer Bergotte, whose relationship to objects in the world is based on his recognition of, as Proust writes, “a priceless element of truth hidden in the heart of each thing, whence it was extracted by that great writer by virtue of his genius.” This “priceless element of truth”, is Bergotte himself, the auteur par excellence: “every fresh beauty in his [Bergotte’s] work was the little drop of Bergotte buried at the heart of a thing and which he had distilled from it.” While this brief text is not the place for an extended meditation on the points of contact between the films of Jonas Mekas and Proust—although potential writers of dissertations would do well to notice that both oeuvres share an occupation with dailiness, loss, childhood, and social life, among so much else—the character Bergotte can help us to understand, here, how a filmmaker-poet can manage to make everything that he sees on camera somehow resemble himself. Mekas has spoken of his films as diary work, yet he is a remarkably self-effacing protagonist, figuring onscreen (and not terribly often) as a gaunt young poet or steadfast and rumpled “filmer” inseparable from his Bolex. His intertitles and voice-overs speak of exile and loneliness, food and poetry, they occasionally make mention of the events unfolding onscreen, but they do not really narrate; they situate, but do not tell. Indeed, events of the weather are as important as human ones in Mekas’s filmmaking, as in classics of diaristic writing. Mekas’s vast cinematic project amounts to nothing less than the distillation of Modernism’s most ambitious exilic projects: to take hold of experience, to make himself “from scratch” toward an ultimate return to the homeland he has lost. (One way to read Modernism is as a litany of genius Displaced Persons.) The work of philosophy, biography, fiction, and portraiture, have all been reduced by various commentators to autobiography, but it is only the great poet who can “quiz each thing”, as Wallace Stevens did, for its reflection of himself. Mekas is one of Lithuania’s greatest poets; his films are poetry incarnate:

“As an exile, as a displaced person, I felt that I had lost so much, my country, my family, even my early written diaries, ten years of it, that I developed a need to try to retain everything I was passing through, by means of my Bolex camera. It became an obsession, a passion, a sickness. So now I have these images to cling to... It's all ridiculous, I think. Because what I have, after all, is already fading, it's all just like a shadow of the real reality which I do not really understand. When you go through what I went through, the wars, occupations, genocides, forced labor camps, displaced person camps, and lying in a blooming potato field - I'll never forget the whiteness of the blossoms - my face down to earth, after jumping out the window, while German soldiers held my father against the wall, gun in his back - then you don't understand human beings anymore. I have never understood them since then, and I just film, record everything, with no judgment, what I see. Not exactly "everything", only the brief moments that I feel like filming. And what are those moments, what makes me choose those moments? I don't know. It's my whole past memory that makes me choose the moments that I film.”
-Jonas Mekas, to Jerome Sans

On Mekas Time

“In reality, all my film work is one long film which is still continuing. I don’t really make films: I only keep filming. I am a filmer not a film-maker. And I am not a film “director” because I direct nothing. I just keep filming.” (Jonas Mekas to Jerome Sans)

“I am not too sure if cinema is really important to me. My obsession with filming has nothing to do with what I think about cinema. I just have to film. I have no choice. If I don’t film I get sick. It’s madness. I am being pulled into it by an irresistible force. That’s about all I can say about it.”
(Jonas Mekas to Jerome Sans)

Jonas Mekas’s ontological position is to film; he makes visible what is always getting away, not just what seems to have be there. The purposeful incompleteness in the fragments he chooses is what figures this absconding. When Mekas says that “it's my whole past memory that makes me choose the moments that I film,” he describes the combination of poetic intuition and technical ability that together constitute artistic mastery. He also articulates the position of the Modern poet within history: all of his choices are determined—pre-determined, as it were—by the memory of which he is made. If Mekas’s films are nostalgic it is because they are haunted by an originary longing for homeland: one might find oneself, watching “Happy Birthday to John”, nostalgic for New York in the seventies, but it is the first loss that orients Mekas within what he films. This condition of exile is what trains Mekas’s eye on what is already getting away, or what is already lost within the present he is in the act of capturing with his camera. In this way it doesn’t matter what Mekas films: it always already has loss inscribed within it. All of Mekas’s present, everything he sees, is bathed in this longing. So his films are always already nostalgic; he made them in the present in order to participate in his present: the only way for him to stitch himself into the now has been to film it. This complicates the question of documentary within his filmmaking, since his subject would seem to be the ghost of the “already fading” present itself, both before and beyond the people and things that populate it.

The contemporary appetite for TV “reality” comes out of a basic longing to seize that same slippery escapee—call it a ghost—of the present. But the reality genre proliferates under the delusion that the mere operation of recording machinery, that mere surveillance—and our post-modernity could be termed the Surveillance Era—could constitute the seizure or preservation of presence. Rather than plunge us anew into the real, the reality genre assassinates it, because it proceeds from the mistaken notion that the use of a recording tool—without the intervention of an artist’s eye—could possibly rescue us from the pain of time passing. It may seem absurd to hold the work of an acknowledged master up to the detritus of contemporary culture, but I do so in order to underscore the urgency of our need for work like that of Jonas Mekas. His films are filled with the fragile and live beauty of existence at the human scale, and not the monolithic and transglobal fantasy of static presence that dominant culture imposes. There was a time when New York artists steeped themselves in underground cinema as a natural part of their education; Maya Stendhal Gallery’s reassertion of Jonas Mekas’s filmwork to the art world reminds us how carefully, and how richly we should look at our own lives.

Ariana Reines

Ariana Reines is a poet and performance artist based in Brooklyn. She studies Comparative Literature at Columbia University.