A sort of masterpiece of nothing
October 9, 2024 1:00 AM Subscribe
I don’t know what life is. I know nothing about what life is. I have never understood life, the real life. Where do I really live? I do not know. I do not know where I come from, where do I go. Where am I, where am I? I do not know. I do not know where I am, and where I am going to and where I’m coming from. I know nothing about life. But I have seen some beauty, I have seen some brief... Brief glimpses of beauty and happiness... I have seen, I know. I have seen some happiness and beauty.
'As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty' is a film by Jonas Mekas (previously 1 2 3 4) from 2000 that came upon my path by chance, which is the exactly how this nearly five hour long assemblage of footage shot over 30 years, should come upon one’s path. And in the best avant garde tradition, it refuses to impose any order on the memories and experiences and the life it documents — or indeed to attempt (or pretend) to understand it.
As Mekas says in his introduction to the film :
I have never been able really to figure out where my life begins and where it ends. I have never, never been able to figure it all out. What it’s all about, what it all means. So when I began now to put all these rolls of film together, to string them together, the first idea was to keep them chronological. But then I gave up and I just began splicing them together by chance, the way I found them on the shelf. Because I really don’t know where any piece of my life really belongs. So let it be, let it go, just by pure chance, disorder. There is some kind of order in it, order of its own, which I do not really understand, same as I never understood life around me, the real life, as they say, or the real people, I never understood them. I still cannot understand them, and I do not really want to understand them.
Various excerpts of the film are on Youtube (and the whole thing can be found on a dodgy Russian website by using a search engine) and everything he says in the voice over, which is beautiful to read in its own right, is transcribed here.
'As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty' is a film by Jonas Mekas (previously 1 2 3 4) from 2000 that came upon my path by chance, which is the exactly how this nearly five hour long assemblage of footage shot over 30 years, should come upon one’s path. And in the best avant garde tradition, it refuses to impose any order on the memories and experiences and the life it documents — or indeed to attempt (or pretend) to understand it.
As Mekas says in his introduction to the film :
I have never been able really to figure out where my life begins and where it ends. I have never, never been able to figure it all out. What it’s all about, what it all means. So when I began now to put all these rolls of film together, to string them together, the first idea was to keep them chronological. But then I gave up and I just began splicing them together by chance, the way I found them on the shelf. Because I really don’t know where any piece of my life really belongs. So let it be, let it go, just by pure chance, disorder. There is some kind of order in it, order of its own, which I do not really understand, same as I never understood life around me, the real life, as they say, or the real people, I never understood them. I still cannot understand them, and I do not really want to understand them.
Various excerpts of the film are on Youtube (and the whole thing can be found on a dodgy Russian website by using a search engine) and everything he says in the voice over, which is beautiful to read in its own right, is transcribed here.
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posted by pt68 at 9:46 AM on October 9 [1 favorite]