Microcinema DVDs - Walden - Diaries, Notes and Sketches by Jonas Mekas

2009-11-20 Slant Magazine
By Joseph Jon Lanthier

Jonas Mekas, the godfather of American "underground" cinema, shot literally miles of impromptu film on a tiny, touch-and-go Bolex camera before assembling his first "diary film" and screening it before an audience of friends and fellow indie artists in 1969. At that point the home movie ethos was somewhat less than groundbreaking, but a glance at what Mekas's contemporaries were working on or releasing at the time—Kenneth Anger was ensconced in off-and-on production for Lucifer Rising, Stan Brakhage was toiling on the 8mm Songs cycle, and Paul Morrissey had just morphed the Warhol aesthetic into the zeitgeist-preaching Flesh—suggests just how perpendicular his project stood in relation to the remainder of the bi-coastal art-house scene. Mekas, as a distributor and critic in the '60s, had praised and promoted films both archetypically absurd (Anger's Scorpio Rising) and angularly as well as legally shocking (Jack Smith's Flaming Creatures); perhaps this is why the program notes prepared for the first showing of Diaries, Notes and Sketches, also known as Walden contained an uncharacteristically humble and ambivalent letter from the director of the evening's presentation. "You are going to see maybe two, maybe three, maybe four reels, from the total of six," it read. "It will depend on your patience, on your interest."

The founder of Anthology Film Archives may or may not have had good reason to soft-peddle three hours of jerkily hand held, naturally-lit content set to occasional elliptical narration and folk music from an AM radio that just happened to be in the editing booth, but Walden is also notable for its anomalousness as an entry in Mekas's micro-cinematic career. Anyone familiar with his later diary films—in particular the archival catharsis of Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania, which went on to become the artist's most often-seen work after its completion in 1972—might note how flashily cross-woven this film appears in comparison. After the development of VHS camcorders, Mekas completed all of his cuts in-camera, eschewing the visual furbelows that other mainstream DIY filmmakers used to simulate professionalism. Walden, however, purposefully shuffles the chronological order of some events for dramatic effect, features multiple sped-up sequences, and leans rather heavily on primitive double-exposure techniques, which achieve a stunning crescendo in the segment entitled "Notes on the Circus"—an optically frenetic set piece that does for elephants, jugglers, and acrobats what Brakhage's "Mothlight" did for dried, diaphanous wings, and leaf fragments.

So the birth of the Mekas film diary is not only the most pointedly "avant-garde" of the bunch but also the most aesthetically apprehensive, and the most vocal about its objectives (or lack thereof): One can feel churning hesitantly beneath the surface of the film's images a fierce determination to not be misunderstood or misinterpreted, particularly given the political and artistic climate at the time—an intimate rendering of John and Yoko's "bed-in" for peace is one of the final segments. This might be why halfway through the first reel, we hear the languid chords of a creaky accordion while Mekas semi-tonally croaks the lyric, "I am only celebrating what I see. I am searching for nothing—I am happy." The repetition of this mantra throughout the soundtrack, which is ironically followed closely in reel one by a monologue about displacement and exile, makes one wonder who Mekas was attempting to convince. But the utterance comes from a source of creative, if not emotional, sincerity: As Brecht discovered, in socio-politically charged times, it becomes not only necessary but an act of bold artistic maturity to announce one's lack of symbolic motive.

This is not to say, however, that just because Mekas isn't shooting fodder for the Woodstock nation that the cultural strides of the '60s have not influenced him. On the contrary, there seems to have been something strenuously inspiring about the temporal and geographic sphere he was observing throughout the time frame of Walden; it's comprised of footage captured circa 1964-69, whereas Lost, Lost, Lost would reveal that Mekas had been wandering the streets of New York with his 16mm alter ego since the late '40s, when he arrived in Brooklyn as a Lithuanian refugee. But the significance of this era's motifs within Walden is entirely unrelated to the pop music or protests, or the various big names encountered throughout the three hours traffic—Allen Ginsberg, the Velvet Underground, and Carl Dreyer, for example. Far more crucial is the manner in which Mekas's camera watches skaters in Manhattan, or climbs up the scrawny legs of a pre-adolescent girl innocently grasping a dandelion, or manages full-tilt 360-degree pans across a posh wedding party reveling in their Newport reception. Just as the final example not-so-subtly mimics the joyous loss of equilibrium after a glass of champagne, so Mekas seems to be on a contact high from the ingratiatingly protean renaissance blooming around him; with Walden, he adapts the philosophy, if not the décor, of the time to invent a cinema from the pulp of individual consciousness, authoring a film quite literally about perspective without any of what the flower children might have referred to as "hangups" (i.e. ego). If the work of other underground New York filmmakers urged audiences toward visceral or intellectual reactions, Mekas is after a more primal, observational response; looking through his camera lens is an ends rather than a means.

In this sense, Walden more closely resembles the written diaries of poets like Ginsberg and Kerouac than the canonized publication whose title Mekas cribbed. The film's narration often matches Thoreau's unabashed self-congratulatory voice and love/hate relationship with urbanity, but Walden the diary film succeeds as a personal record where the novel-length essay failed due to self-contradictory soap-boxing; where Thoreau argues for seeking transcendence in life rather than art while penning consciously didactic and numinous prose, Mekas is able to make the same assertion by arhetorically celebrating what he sees. There are longueurs in the film, to be sure, but that's also part of the point: In one sense (in the best sense), Walden is a depository of longueurs assembled for future generations. Unlike documentaries from the same period, there are few anachronisms that distract our attention with thoughts of how different attire or appliances or mannerisms were 50 years ago; Mekas skillfully omits these superficial details to instead capture domestic still-life scenarios, ocean-side landscapes darkening at sundown, perfunctory professional interactions, pea-coated masses braving snow and sleet, and, through it all, the immutable playfulness of children in nearby pastoral settings. It's not only a living document of what quotidian existence was like in the '60s for a Lithuanian refugee residing in Manhattan, it's an earnest homage to the elusive state of being—warts and all.

Image/Sound
Celebratorily remastered from the original 16mm reels, Microcinema's digital transfer of Walden consistently surprises with its glabrous clarity; whether upconverting for an HD television or ripping for iPod viewing, the only visible imperfection is film grain. It's proof of the image quality a DVD can achieve even when digitizing materials that were never pristine to begin with, and shouldn't ever be; restoring Walden too fastidiously would annul its spontaneous poetry. If only Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania had undergone the same process for its theatrical run earlier this year; that gem was pulled from scratchy, second generation VHS tapes. The soundtrack to Walden, all of which was added in post-production, has managed to retain a good deal of its analog warmth through the crystalline mono.

Extras
The DVDs themselves are bare bones, aside from a handful of subtitle options—though, irritatingly, there's no English captioning track. But the set's real boon is the booklet—a dual-language (English and French, bien sûr) 150-page tome of critical analyses and scene-by-scene annotations on the film from Mekas himself and a star-studded collection of culture writers. For a work as rich as Walden, this turns out to be a far more effective form of commentary than an audio track; the written word allows for biographical asides on contributors and institutions referenced in the movie while keeping the conversation ever-centered on the visual content. It's a collage of notations, interviews, and appreciations nearly as rewarding as the film itself. The accompanying essays are hit or miss, many of them rife with easy-to-mock pseudo-intellectualism (is it fair to compare Mekas's camerawork to cubism and pointillism when he's just aiming and shooting?), but the interpretations are so voluminous in number and diverse in tone that one can pick and choose as they please while passing through the analytical smorgasbord. The only shame is that due to the comprehensiveness of the booklet, the set's SRP is a bit steep for the workaday film student (or critic). I suggest lobbying your local library.

Overall
Before there was YouTube, there was Jonas Mekas, and Walden not only invented the lo-fi autobiography—it set a precedent of postmodern fecundity in the form that has yet to be matched.

2009-09-24 blogcritics.org
By Dusty Somers

Appropriately, Jonas Mekas’ Diaries, Notes and Sketches (Walden) opens with a dedication to Lumiere. Throughout, Mekas’ film feels like a nod to Auguste and Louis, the most famous of the first filmmakers, who had the opportunity to display the world around them in a way no one had ever seen before — captured on film.

The narrative element of mainstream film has overwhelmingly defined the medium — and rightly so — but it’s worth remembering that not all film must fit into even this most basic of boxes. Mekas, known as the godfather of American avant-garde cinema, isn’t doing something wildly experimental with Walden, although it is decidedly outside the mainstream taste. It certainly has an avant-garde flair, particularly with its juxtaposition of incongruous audio and visual elements, but most often, it’s exactly what its title describes — a diary.

Featuring footage from 1964-1968, Walden is simply a film diary of Mekas’ experiences and surroundings, assembled together chronologically. Some days, he would shoot a few minutes, some a few seconds and on other days, he wouldn’t shoot at all. The result is an inevitably personal look at the life of one man, especially in its moments of simplicity and universality — the planting of a flower garden, a walk through the park, opening Christmas gifts. It also functions as an intimate look into New York City’s underground art movement in the ‘60s. Figures like Allen Ginsberg, Andy Warhol, Nico, John Lennon and Yoko Ono all appear at points.

Divided into six 30-minute reels, Walden isn’t simply raw footage, although it certainly retains that rough quality. Film footage is accompanied by a variety of audio sources, from Chopin to organ music to ambient city noise to Mekas himself singing.

The interest level of each segment certainly varies, and Mekas recognizes this, including in his preface an encouragement to the viewer to only watch what interests him or her. A poster and a book are included with the set to aid viewers in making selections, with extremely detailed information about each section included in each. Mekas’ notes suggest a humble artist, grateful that people are partaking of this highly personal work.

Interestingly, his notes make clear that this is simply a first draft of the work. He released it as is because there is enough worth among the rough parts to be of interest to some, he says, and a fire that threatened to destroy his film cans urged him further to make the work available. Such a release is an intriguing comment on the fluid nature of film —many filmmakers have a difficult time releasing their work, having to settle for stopping somewhere rather than completing the film perfectly as they would’ve wanted it.

Walden is proudly imperfect. It doesn’t strive for singularity or meaning; it’s simply a series of observations, and visual poetry is often the result. Taken in large doses or small, viewers will find something to take away from it as they observe the world of Jonas Mekas right alongside him.

The DVD set from Microcinema International includes the 180-minute film on two discs, along with the explanatory poster and book.

2009-09-10 Film Comment
By Jesse P. Finnegan

This staggering two-disc dvd box set—complete with commemorative program notes and a book-sized, minute-by-minute multi-source annotation—memorializes a work that has existed as a precarious memorial in its own right since its inception. First screened in 1969, the epochal Walden aka Diaries, Notes & Sketches is an 180-minute amalgamation of footage culled from a half-decade of Jonas Mekas’s vast “film diary”—a kinetic 16mm record of sensory glimpses and reveries intended as mere exercise for future, “real” filmmaking projects. The author bestowed the work with the epistolary caveat of “First Draft” as well as an introductory encouragement to audience members to “watch only certain parts” if they preferred. As artist, activist, and spokesman, Mekas has long been fascinated by the tumbling dialectics shadowing the gulfs between Romantic poetry and independent film, personal expression and public discourse, social consciousness and commercial viability, not to mention, as the film’s title makes clear, a theory of art and a practice of life. And so it is in the delicate sprawls of imagery that came to be Mekas’s landmark—the personal
epiphany and artistic declaration of the man at the
center of the crusade that was mid-20th-century New
York independent film culture. Inscribing his own spontaneous subjectivity upon the visible musings of his private world, Mekas came to recognize an osmosis between the examined life he propounded and the automatic, lived art-making he had idealized— an intimate two-way channel between phenomena and experience, see-er and seen, dynamized in a simultaneous process of becoming. These present-tense reckonings were only half of the aesthetic synthesis that would emerge in Walden and inaugurate the diary film paradigm. In his definitive appraisal, “Film Diary/Diary Film,” (included as one of several essays in the DVD’s companion book) David James argues that the transformation of Mekas’s film(ed) diaries into a retroactively constructed diary film is the crux of the filmmaker’s art. By hedging and re-appropriating his accumulated footage, and then adding intertitles, non-synchronous sound, and narration, Mekas challenged the in-camera authorship of his immediate impressions by recasting them as fragments of personal ephemera—filmic artifacts from the blossoming of a since wilted “Now.” Cataloguing the comings and goings of its own consciousness, Walden remains a singular, symbiotic articulation of the time and place that engendered it—mid-Sixties New York. The film’s Vertovian zeitgeist distillations grant no greater prominence to sightings of Leary, Lennon, Ginsberg, and Lou Reed than to lyrical impressions of trees, newborns, book pages, sidewalk surfaces, or smoke-stained lunch counters. This timely DVD resurrection underlines the import that the intervening decades have conferred upon Mekas’s ecstatic celluloid stitches of a New York—boundless and filmed from all angles—that now only exists (or, as Mekas might have it, only ever existed) in the frenzied exposures of downtown Bolexes. But Jonas Mekas still is downtown, still minding the legacies of a generation, and still straddling the breach between past and present tense.

2009-09-02 IFC.com
By Michael Atkinson

The decades-old cliché goes, watching other people's home movies is hell frozen over. Strangely, this is true only if you know the people, and it's their vacation in Tahoe that you're forced to sit through after a few cocktails and a bellyful of spinach lasagna, as they narrate the landscapes and sigh at their own kids' antics and wistfully recall the best restaurant sea bass they've ever eaten. As Daffy Duck said, I demand that you shoot me now.

Removed from that cloying context, though, home movies are raw and beautiful cinema, mysterious, bewitching and filled with the melancholy for the passage of time, as anyone who has seen "Capturing the Friedmans" (I mean that heartbreaking 8mm footage of the roof-dancing girl, whose demise tipped the whole family into doom), or Ken Jacobs' "Urban Peasants" (family home movies, edited together without intervention) knows. In fact, the allure of old home movies has always been mixed up with the legacy and syntax of a lot of American underground film - both schools, if they're mutually exclusive, take their power from the elegiac nature of film, the unprofessional beauty of found light and landscape, and the spontaneous energy of real life. Jonas Mekas' Anthology Film Archives in Manhattan has for years hosted a home movie night, for which ticket buyers bring their own reels for projection, as if family movies shot for private contemplation were avant-garde art and vice-versa, which of course they can be - closer to modern lyrical poetry than movies ordinarily ever get. Mekas' own work as a "new American cinema" granddaddy, his body of work running on for over 50 years, is comprised mostly of "diaries, notes and sketches," as his 1969 opus "Walden" is also titled - he'd take his Bolex everywhere and film everybody and everything, and this three-hour portrait of the late '60s is an indelible time capsule, both of the time and place, and of Mekas' sensibility as a intuitive artist using his camera to interface with the world.

It seems we do not live in a film culture that allows 40-year-old epic avant-garde "diary films" to be forgotten or neglected.

He is interfacing in the crazed, frantic jumble of "Walden" (hardly a single shot stays still or lasts for more than a few seconds), but he's also documenting his landscape (peopled by scores of underground legends like Warhol, Gregory Markopoulos and Stan Brakhage, plus John & Yoko, Judith Malina, Allen Ginsberg, Norman Mailer, Peter Beard, Carl Dreyer, Ram Dass, Barbet Schroeder, Edie Sedgwick, Timothy Leary, ad infinitum). The movie is never just a record of Mekas' travels and daily lingering; it's also a dream portrait of an artist's life, full of hanging out, but hectically reimagining the world as a shake-&-bake cascade of sensations. Whether we're on the Bowery or at the Brakhages' mountain cabin or at a lavish Newport wedding (complete with helicopter), Mekas' take is jumbled, jittery, often double-paced, and strictly observational - the feeling is that this movie intends to keep up with daily events, instead of slowing them down and controlling the flow. It is a home movie, full of kids and dogs and sunsets, but that only means it embodies the life it reveals. The simplicity of Mekas' approach embraces its own contradictions.

The DVD package from Microcinema is something else - the discs come boxed with a thick paperback volume (in French and English) of Mekas' extensive memoir annotations (plus interviews and critical exegesis), indexing the personnel and telling the story of every single shot in the film, plus a fold-out poster which charts the film and its soundtrack's details, "frame by frame." To my astonishment, it seems we do not live in a film culture that allows 40-year-old epic avant-garde "diary films" to be forgotten or neglected.

"Walden: Diaries, Notes & Sketches by Jonas Mekas" (Microcinema DVD) is now available on DVD.

2009-08-25 DVD Talk
By Jeffrey Kauffman

"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

"The amateur is--he will be perhaps--the counter-bourgeois artist." --Roland Barthes

"Let us set up our Camera also, and let the sun paint the people." --Ralph Waldo Emerson

Those three epigraphs culled from this mammoth new release of Jonas Mekas' Diaries, Notes and Sketches, Also Known as Walden may provide at least a starting point in evaluating one of the most unusual, yet epochal, film offerings of the 1960s. This most certainly isn't Hollywood, then just starting its rather precipitous decline as "youth fare" like Easy Rider started taking over at the box office. But similarly it isn't even the nascent Independent movement, at least as characterized by films like Easy Rider itself. This is personal cinema, a man with, as he states, his Bolex, walking around his environment and shooting what are, more or less, home movies. However, the fact that Mekas was part of the underground film movement, and, in a larger sense, the whole avant-garde intelligentsia of mid to late 60s New York means that his home movies are populated with the likes of Allen Ginsburg, Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert, Lou Reed, Andy Warhol, and countless others whose names might not be quite so instantly recognizable, if indeed they contributed no less to the cultural zeitgeist of that halcyon era.

Mekas' own name in fact may be not very recognizable even to those who pride themselves on their own counter-culture knowledge or, indeed, personal heritage. Born in Lithuania in 1922, Mekas sought to attend the University of Vienna, but had the misfortune to be sent to a labor camp toward the waning days of World War II. Along with his brother, he ultimately escaped, studied philosophy after the war, and then made his way to the United States. Within two weeks of his arrival in New York City, he had purchased his first Bolex, and had begun what he ultimately called his "film diary," a sporadically filmed "journal" of sorts of his comings and goings. Mekas was soon part of the New York avant-garde community and gained wider renown with his editorship of Film Culture, and, in the late 1950s, his film column for The Village Voice.

As early as 1962, Mekas realized that the only way anyone was going to get their "underground" films distributed was by doing it themselves, and he helped found the Film-Maker's Cooperative, a non profit dedicated to doing just that. He made headlines in 1964 when he, along with several others, was arrested on obscenity charges for showing two sexually charged "art films," including Jean Genet's only directorial effort, Un Chant d'Amour. (Aspects of this arrest are included tangentially in some of the film included in this set).

By the mid to late 60s, the time period the six reels of Diaries covers, Mekas was obviously taking his "journal" filming more seriously, and thinking more in terms of how to package the raw content for public consumption (the first public exposition of Diaries was in 1969). The subtitle Walden is no mere accident here. While one obviously thinks of Henry David Thoreau tucked away on a sylvan farm, something about as alien to the urban jungle of New York City as you can get, the fact is Mekas sensed an artistic comrade-in-arms not only in Thoreau's vision of an artist detailing his inner and outer life, but also, frankly, in environmental terms, which may seem stranger, at least on its surface. Mekas, rightly or wrongly, came to view New York City as his own personal kind of Walden, an artists' community obviously more citified, but no less redolent of the creative spirit. In fact, in just one of many allusions to the Transcendentalists, Mekas obviously believed that Spirit (with a capital S) was available to every man wherever he was, making anyone's personal journey (and its resulting "diary," filmed or otherwise) as meaningful as anyone else's.

On first (and even second or third) viewing, Diaries will probably seem like a haphazard collection of images and sounds (these were not filmed with synchronized sound, so the soundtrack often has nothing to do with the images). It's no accident that Mekas starts out with a winter scene of Central Park, at least giving us some filmic vestiges of the country ambience that Thoreau enjoyed when he wrote his own famous journal. But we're then inundated with a variety of frankly weird and often disjointed images, everything from Mekas playing accordion, to fleeting images of Ginsburg and Leary, to shots of a baby sleeping and the Velvet Underground performing. These disparate images are set to an at times pretty annoying soundtrack filled with sounds of subways (which get to be quite wearing after a while), to Mekas quoting from St. John of the Cross, to completely trivial discussions about eggs and the like.

What elevates this set above mere curiosity is the astounding compendium of annotated supplementary material. We're given Mekas' own initial "graph" detailing what is on each of the six reels, who we're seeing, and what exactly we're listening to. Even more comprehensive is the exhaustive paperback book included (containing text in both English and French--as is Mekas' guide), containing some really thought provoking essays by David E. James and Jean-Jacques Lebel, and then featuring a virtually minute-by-minute recounting of what exactly is in the six reels, augmented by personal reminiscences by Mekas and others included in the film. What slowly emerges in this supplemental material, if not (at least initially) the films themselves, is a Portrait of an Artist as Diarist who just happens to be walking through some of the most important history of the late 1960s, a history shaped by such "prophets" of a New Age like Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert (later Baba Ram Dass, but, under his original name, obviously the inspiration for the eponymous mysterious character on television's Lost. (For you silent film buffs, there's also a segment featuring Mekas with none other than an aged Carl Theodore Dreyer, and for you more recent film aficianados, Barbet Schroeder also pops up).

This is a boxed set that virtually screams "niche market," but for a discerning few, those who revel in Warhol's artistic antics or Lou Reed's pulsating music, these are home movies like you've never experienced. It's the avant-garde up close and personal, revealing the humanity behind the artifice, and, perhaps more importantly, a certain kind of intellectual rigor behind what many saw as mere pretentiousness.

Video:
The source elements for these "home movies" are obviously culled from either 8mm or 16mm masters, and frequently show the ravages of time. Grain and softness are the norm here, as is poor contrast due to natural lighting. Color is acceptable, nothing more, but the historical value of these full frame images far outweighs any technical limitations of their source material.

Sound:
Similarly, the mono soundtrack, tacked on seemingly willy-nilly to the images, is boxy, overly compressed sounding and at times frankly annoying (especially in the repetitive use of subway noise). Subtitles are available in English, French, Spanish, German, Italian and Japanese.

Extras:
As described above, an "outline" of sorts by Mekas himself is included in an insert (in French and English), as well as the exhaustively researched and reported bonus paperback book. The book is absolutely essential reading to fully appreciate what you're witnessing in these films.

Final Thoughts:
Not instantly accessible, and often seeming too haphazard for their own good, these Diaries nonetheless are one of the most groundbreaking uses of "personal" cinema in the history of film. This elegant packaging filled with a bonus book that may outshine the films themselves, at least for some, will be a collector's title for anyone with an interest in the 1960's counter-culture movement, or avant-garde film in general. But for anyone seeking to broaden their own notions of what film can be, this set is Recommended.