Diaries Notes & Sketches

The film is and wants to be a private "homemade" film, a documentary of its own life - nothing more, nothing less. Therefore, it is necessary to respect this decision and then we can enjoy its almost sentimental desire to capture the feelings associated with the moments it captures solely for the eye and memories of its author. The film is valuable as a sociological probe into the privacy of the American underground filmmaker of that time, which formed a social network around the iconic figure Mekas. In front of the viewer, a subjective image of the New York of the late 60s is revealed, humanized by the people and events whose meaning is constituted by their relationship to someone other than us, the viewers (which may not be a problem for some because you just need to realize how humanity likes to look into other people's windows). However, at the same time, the shadowy side of Mekas' approach stands out to me - his film necessarily, according to his own admission, "celebrates only what it sees. It doesn't search for anything, it's happy." It thus fully corresponds to its source of inspiration - the novel “Walden” (from which it also borrows the narrative structure according to the different seasons) - from which it derives its quietism, but not in relation to nature, but to the observed world. This is personally a fundamental shortcoming for me that lowers Mekas' work to self-purpose, because apart from aesthetic values (which, by the way, are not very innovative for experimental filmmaking of the 60s - it is almost exclusively about simply accelerated shots), the subjective closedness cannot serve as a tool for exploring the possibilities of film medium, a new understanding of the world, or examining the relationship between the viewer and art - such fundamental motifs of modern avant-garde creation! /// Moreover, the principle of "lonely mental life" which his film evokes, also indicates a flawed premise a wrong premise that it is possible to somehow (here through film) capture the most intimate meaning that an event can have. That is a mistake because meaning is always created in the network of relationships to meaning and externally perceived feelings. To put it a different way, words and images that are always foreign are always needed because they cannot capture the true personal meaning, even if we made a thirty-hour family film. Mekas thus falls into a trap from which there is no escape - at the same time pretending that he doesn't need the foreign viewer, and yet the film enforces the existence of the viewer by also not needing Mekas. (2015.10.22)