Some notations on the film work of Jonas Mekas

Jonas Mekas has long promoted independent and experimental film as a vehicle for personal expression, championing the vision of generations of filmmakers, unflaggingly arguing for the relevance of their achievements. Widely regarded as the patriarch and midwife of American avant-garde filmmaking, Mekas also ranks among the great poets of Lithuanian literature, an activity of paramount importance to him in the context of his life’s work. In 1950, shortly after his resettlement in New York from the displaced person’s camps of a Europe ravaged by war, he began to carry a wind-up Bolex movie camera, obsessively shooting the events of the day, as they spoke to him, by impulse. He came to regard the effects of this practice as compensation for what he had lost in the course of the war years. He soon embraced the film diary format, making his “entries” in available light. They appear today as they did then, ongoing, fragmented, sometimes picaresque records of the day, more or less in the tradition of the home movie.

Mekas adopted single-frame filming as a stylistic option of real interest, and, arguably, a response to the expense of film stock. Filmed in real time at 24 frames per second, the capacity of a single roll of film is exhausted in two and a half minutes. Shot frame by frame, the visual information captured in a single roll can be expanded to 4,000 images. What was protracted in the filming to embrace the span of a day produced a barrage of visual information, wildly condensed in the time of its projection. Projected at 18 or 24 frames per second, the effect is a novel visual experience of the passing of time, distinguished by a sometimes fluttering, staccato rhythm that is the effect of changes in light. The method provides a radical increase in the number and kind of available images to attract and stimulate the viewer’s attention. It is also the stylistic obverse of the film practice of his friend and colleague Andy Warhol, who filmed at 24 frames per second and screened at a narcotic 16 frames per second.

As an example, Mekas made the “short” film Cassis (1966, 4 1⁄2 minutes) in the ancient fishing port of the same name in the South of France, during a visit to a friend, the filmmaker and visionary philanthropist Jerome Hill. Mekas was moved by the history of the site, its landscape and the light. From his room he could see the high ridge of rock that juts upward out into the sea, and below in the middle distance, a quai that extends from the town to a lighthouse, marking the entrance to the harbor of Cassis. He was attracted to the progress of the light of day, the movement of the clouds and water, the fixed position of the lighthouse as a kind of marker, the many sailboats passing in and out of the harbor. Improvising a support for his Bolex in lieu of a tripod, he shot from just before sunrise until just after sunset, a frame or two every second or every few minutes, with a soundtrack of the ocean’s roar. Viewed from on high, as the film time speeds by, the sailboats that go in and out of the harbor resemble seagulls, and strollers move out along the quai to the lighthouse, then return. The filmed light is opalescent much of the time, an effect of the clouds scudding by and the reflection of the light. The sea appears to breathe, swelling with the movement of the tide, and as the sun comes nearer to setting, the clouds alter in their composition, illuminated from below. Finally, night falls, and all that remains is the stronger incident of light that is the essence of the lighthouse, and the relatively smaller lamps that border the quai.

That same year, Mekas filmed the colorful, light and action-oriented Notes on the Circus (12 minutes), a carnivalesque riot of plumed dancers, trapeze artists and acrobats, horses, big cats, jugglers, stilt-walkers, flying doves, a flaming hoop, sequined costumes sparkling in the chiaroscuro produced by the impact of available light. He chooses the jug-band music popular at the time as an oddly appropriate, buoyant soundtrack. Closely related in its extreme play of light and darkness is the one-minute Elvis (2001), commissioned by the 2001 Viennale Film Festival and made from footage from the last of a series of four New York concerts given by Elvis Presley in 1972, five years before his death. Mekas’ oddly elegant, near-parodic soundtrack is Johann Strauss’ “Blue Danube,” a nod to the soundtrack of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Electric in the lights of Madison Square Garden, Presley is ghostly, magnetic, at the top of his game, appearing before the adoring multitude to the tune of Richard Strauss’ anthemic “Also Sprach Zarathustra,” Kubrick’s introductory selection for 2001. When Mekas catches the white-suited Presley at a particular angle, as he turns, the singer’s head disappears in darkness.

On the other hand, given the depth of Mekas’ extraordinary access to cultural icons, many of his filmed notations are of special interest for the intimacy of his considerable intimacy with the celebrated. Constructed in segments, the very human Happy Birthday to John (24 minutes, 1996) offers ample evidence of Mekas’ long and mutually supportive association with fellow filmmakers John Lennon and Yoko Ono. There are kaleidoscopic glimpses of the famous, and a soundtrack that knits together disparate elements of a film journal conceived as a birthday tribute to Lennon. The film casually documents Lennon’s birthday in 1972, and includes footage of a Lennon/Ono concert in Madison Square Garden filmed that same year. Throughout, Lennon and Ono cavort, perform and hang out with such celebrities de jour as Viva, Jane Forth, Holly Woodlawn, Andy Warhol, Miles Davis, Alan Ginsberg and others, doing what ordinary people do as the camera points their way.

In the last decade or so, Mekas has further extended this process of recording and condensing by abstracting sequences from film footage and considering these images in a static form. His seems to be a method of subtraction and focus, of seeking the essence in a thing – an almost sculptural process – until only the instance remains. Further culling and considering them as sequences of uninterrupted frames, Mekas focuses on information of special interest to him, selecting, magnifying, printing, mounting and presenting these sequences as aesthetically interesting, even desirable objects. They embody a kind of reverence for the passing of time and the eternally present moment implicit in the film still. These are mnemonic postcards that seek the beating heart in the incidentally defining moments of the lived and recorded past. He calls these sequences of images “Frozen Film Frames,” but regards them as neither films nor photographs. Presented in the gallery context in the manner of photographs, each consists of a few frames in the sequence of their making, often including the moment in which the camera cuts to a second point of view, iterating the intimate conversation of the moving image.

These selected sequences are printed to include a border made up of the regular, unbroken chain of perforations designed to allow sprockets to pull the film through a camera or projector. Other sequences include the continuous optical band of sound track recorded at the same time as the “moving” image, a band visually composed of a string of Rorschach-like utterances, strung together like so many disparate, bilaterally symmetrical beads. Such visual information reifies the strip’s wholeness and authenticity. It is further cognate to the practice of printing a photographic image to include the black frame surrounding the negative, a self-referential testament to the photographer’s ability to compose the printed image at the moment of its capture, not by cropping in the darkroom. Mekas’ “Frozen Film Frames” emphasize the individual, sequentially arranged components of a narrative that is formally compelling in its own right.

Edward Leffingwell

Edward Leffingwell is a corresponding editor to Art in America, and writes often on photography, film and performance. He served as curatorial director of the 1997 P.S. 1 retrospective of the filmmaker and performance artist Jack Smith.