Mr Amato urged me to accompany him to watch a film by Mekas, a name I have often come across without ever sitting down to watch a film of his. The film takes places in three sections. Mekas in New York, post war, seeking to come to terms with exile. Mekas’ return voyage in 1971 to Lithuania. And, as a coda, a short section on the visit to Vienna which followed the Lithuania trip.
The filmmaking style is informal, homemade. Mekas went everywhere with his camera and filmed everything. His elderly mother, a trip to the Catskills, the dance after the meeting of the collectivist farm. In many ways it seems prophetic of the current era, where everyone documents everything, and lives are captured and mapped out as they are lived. Or at least, a curated version of a life. The images are grainy, beautiful, jagged. It is an assemblage, an act of editing, pulling together the loose strings of the journey to form a tapestry. It is also a cine pobre, stepsister to the Poor Theatre or Arte Povera. Mekas reveals you don’t need a team and lights and gaffers to be a filmmaker, and as such the film reveals how cinema is capable of becoming an egalitarian art form. The other side of that coin is one no-one foresaw in 1972: everyone in the whole wide world is a filmmaker now. What Mekas reveals in the film is the need to both edit and curate. Images acquire another kind of weight/ humour/ magic, when juxtaposed with other images. There’s a difference between a visual information soup and a visual poem.
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