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Sunday, August 12, 8 pm
Pirate Cinema Berlin
Tucholskystr 6, 2nd floor
Walden
Jonas Mekas
1969, 168 min, 3 x 700 MB
Free entry
Cheap drinks
Copies to go
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Grossartiger Film, über den wir auf die Schnelle leider keinen gleichermassen
grossartigen Text gefunden haben, so dass wir hoffen, dass die beiden unten
angehängten zumindest bei der Orientierung helfen. Nachfilme nach Vereinbarung.
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Walden was Mekas' first diary film, and it was edited as a collection of images
gathered between the years 1964 and 1969. Its original title was Diaries, Notes,
Sketches, which was the intended name for all of his films (they would each have
different subtitles), though when it became too confusing for film laboratories
to distinguish between films, Mekas abandoned the practice. He still kept
Diaries, Notes, Sketches as a subtitle in Walden, Lost Lost Lost, and In
Between, and the name is often used to designate his entire film oeuvre. The
sketches in Walden refer to various films that, edited previously, were later
included in Walden: Report from Millbrook (1965/1966), Hare Krishna (1966),
Notes on the Circus (1966), and Cassis (1966) all occur within the film.
Walden is organised into six reels, loosely cycling through the seasons of the
year. In the first two reels, Mekas establishes his life in New York with
friends, trips abroad and in the country, and activities at the Cinémathèque and
the Film-makers' Coop. Reel two also includes a meeting of the Kreeping
Kreplach, in which a new generation and culture is announced. The next two reels
of the film includes scenes of winter. In one sequence, Mekas remembers a scene
from seven years before, footage of the "women for peace" which later appeared
in Lost Lost Lost. The longest scene of this section takes place during a visit
with Brakhages at their mountain home in Colorado. In the final two reels of the
film, Mekas includes more footage with friends, spring and autumn, weddings, and
Adolfas' spoof on underground filmmaking.
In "I Feel Passionate about the Film Journals of Jonas Mekas", filmmaker Richard
Leacock writes, "to view a Mekas film is to participate in the avant garde film
community, to become a member of it, to share its struggles, to pay homage to
the pioneers of film art." This is perhaps most true of Walden. The film is a
celebration of Mekas' friendships and the vibrancy of the independent cinema
community. We see the marquée at the Cinémathèque, the mailing of Film Culture
magazine, meetings at the Coop and Anthology, and countless filmmaker friends
and family: Gregory Markopoulos, Carl Th. Dreyer, David and Barbara Stone, Tim
Leary, the Brakhage family, Ken and Flo Jacobs, P. Adams Sitney, Tony Conrad,
Storm de Hirsch, Marie Menken, Hans Richter, Andy Warhol, Allen Ginsberg, John
Lennon and Yoko Ono. As a shy immigrant, Mekas' interaction with the film
community was mediated by film itself: "my camera allowed me to participate in
the life that took place around me." He attended weddings, births, and countless
gatherings of friends, and became the home movie-maker of the avant garde.
His seemingly amateur aesthetic, however, is far from accidental. Though Walden
was Mekas' first diary film, he had already fully mastered the technique of
single-framing and rapid changes in shutter speed, focus, and exposure. Full of
motion, colour and joy, his filmic style is as recognisable and as personal as
handwriting. The inclusion of so-called "technical imperfections" are, for
Mekas, what "reveal aspects of inner and outer reality that could not be caught
through technical 'perfection.'" Every movement and every frame is directly
connected to Mekas' reaction in the moment. Editing is in-camera, and nothing is
staged.
http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/05/mekas.html
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Simply the most wonderful three hours of film in existence, Walden, Mekas'
distillation of his filmic "Diaries, notes, sketches" from 1966-1968, is another
late '60s film that watches humans at play, often in nature, despite the
cultural fireworks of the era. Unlike Carolyn, however, Walden acknowledges
those fireworks, flashing them as part of the 60s' political, cultural, and
artistic explosions. Some of the people in the film include: The Velvet
Underground at their first public performance, John Lennon in bed with Yoko Ono
staging what has to be the most peaceful peace rally of the era, Timothy Leary
at his farm in Millbrook, Stan Brakhage snowed in at his country house having
pancakes with his kids, the great critic Amy Taubin, P. Adams Sitney, David
Brooks, Andy Warhol, Nico, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Smith, so
forth, and so on.
Really, they're just excuses for Mekas to go new places, film new sights and
sounds. As Mekas states with rather winning revolutionary naivite, "Cinema is
lights. Motion." and for all the famous figures his movie represents, Walden is
primarily a light show; Painting With Lights' Jack Cardiff was a genius, but
it's Mekas who doesn't seem to capture light so much as project it, flicking and
splattering red and green and blue lights across the screen like brushstrokes
until they come together and form some sort of recognizable image. Mekas edits
with his trademark flutter of stills and stop-and-go splicings, the images
flashing on in bursts and dying out almost immediately as the camera jitters
around its subjects, with an almost tactile sense of rhythm, speeding up,
slowing down, moving in, moving out, like a conductor just barely able to
control his orchestra (despite all the curious comparisons to Godard, Happy
Together always reminds me of a Mekas music video). The exuberant editing, in
fact, is in-camera, every bit as primitive and gosh-awed expressionistic as
Murnau's (in fact, there are numerous parallels between Mekas and Terrence
Malick, another Murnau descendent): in reel two, for example, amidst a flurry of
colors as Mekas visits the animals and trapeze artists of the circus, Mekas
leaves one ballerina on swing swinging back and forth in the foreground of the
screen while he cuts together various other circus acts and rear-projects them
in rapid succession behind her. This in 1966 or so; the whole circus sequence is
matched by what sounds like an old vaudevillian crooning a few ditties from the
Depression. In Mekas' movies all sorts of past lives, personal and public, real
and simulated, tumble over each other, time not so much linear as it is patched
together (there is also some top-notch 60s era punk-and-groove amidst the
soundtrack).
Just as Scorsese and Lynch make movies that are considered "dreamlike" in their
twisted realities and elusiveness, with their bright colors and constant
dissolves, despite the fact that nobody has ever experienced any dream remotely
like such movies, Mekas' movies are the cinematic Form of Memory, years sweeping
by and leaving only glimpses of their very best fragments. Mekas' similarly
brilliant Lost Lost Lost (a later movie that incorporates earlier footage) is
haunted by these passing glimpses, a movie made of equal parts pain, suffering,
and alienation, with occasional bursts of joy, as Mekas looks toward the
Lithuanian homeland of his past and watches it gradually move farther and
farther away. Walden is its counterpart, the naive 60s to Lost's shell-shocked
70s, a view of the paradise that will later be lost, lost, lost, a child's
celebration of a new world, with more color, more nature, and only occasional
bursts of nostalgia. When Mekas plays a jig on his accordian and gleefully
chants along in his crackly Lithuanian accent, "I make home movies--therefore I
live. I live--therefore I make home movies," it is perhaps the happiest moment
in cinema.
Mekas' New York, it becomes rapidly clear, is an imagined and rather timeless
one even if the footage is real and timely. Mekas is a foreigner, after all,
which means real isolation in an imaginary city--with its emphasis on snow ball
fights on Bleeker Street, and fallen leaves in Central Park, Mekas' conjures up
a New York of fading innocence in line with Salinger's and Wes Anderson's.
Walden feels prematurely nostalgic for an America that has only existed
subjectively, but that's only one way the movie's a duplicitous form of memory--
people dancing in the snow, dancing to early punk, doing acid, eating pancakes,
getting married, playing the accordian, flying around in helicopters--Walden is
above all, as Arendt might appreciate, a shortlist of the happy moments we
inevitably forget.
http://videoarcadia.blogspot.com/2006/08/avant-garde-nature-films.html
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