The Corona Diaries Vol. 85 - Prelude: Jonas Mekas

 

 

(Now go read about the longest film I've ever seen.)

I Lost My Mills Folly Microcinema Virginity

I attended my first Mills Folly Microcinema screening earlier this week which was called "Exits and Entries: Recent Experimental Films".

Experimental film forms a small part of my cinema diet and I usually find myself very ambivalent when I watch things that deviate from the norm. Almost always I find something of interest in experimental films. It might be a stylistic thing such as the cinematography or soundtrack. Or perhaps a character or a specific scene or motif. But I normally find myself grasping for something else.

Sometimes I suspect that I am simply a poor viewer. That I have a deficiency that disallows me from comprehending any kind of intent on the part of the filmmaker. Other times I think, "I know what they're getting at, I just don't find any appeal in the way they choose to get at it."

"Exits and Entries" consisted of 6 shorts. Spirit Emulsion was "Filmed on Super 8 and developed by hand with plant medicines and botanicals" and it looked genuinely wonderful as the flowers and, well, just about everything in the frame, had a spectral tinge. I just felt lost in trying to understand references to Taíno culture. Entradas y Salidas was a moving microportrait of the filmmaker's mother dealing with cancer. Plenty of pathos but I didn't feel like I was drowning in it.

Luminiferous Aether is a short music video with the audio being light transmogrified into sound. It seemed more an experiment than statement. Listening is a portrait of Hildegard Westerkamp, a "Vancouver composer and sound ecologist". It was good but, considering the great importance of sound, I felt that there were times when her voiceover was unnecessary and that the movie should have let the visuals and the sounds of the place do more. Still, a good and valuable look at sound in our lived environments.

My favorite was Swalesong. It's a bucolic fugue which pays to tribute to the North Yorkshire Dales in England. It features a man recording the tones of a river harp, which is apparently a frame with strings strung in it that gets put in water currents so that the strings resonate as the water flows over them. In addition, we see historic photos and hear old interviews with locals about Neddy Dick, "who was infamous for his musical instruments made from nature."

Beautiful scenery and beautiful audio, linking of the past to the present. This one just really struck me and resonated in ways the other shorts that night did not.

"Occasionally" is the operative word here

While I do not watch a lot of experimental movies, I do like to include some in my cinema diet. Such was the case last week when I watched Jonas Mekas' As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty. Made or assembled, really, when Mekas was in his late 70s and released in 2000, it consists of footage he had shot on 8mm and 16mm decades previously. The subject? His life. As I Was Moving Ahead is nearly 5 hours of his home movies, so to speak.

Scenes of daily life in New York City are set against those of his family on vacation. (There's also footage purportedly shot here in Madison but is of another, unknown city.) We see his wife, his daughter, and his cat go about life in their apartment. We also get glimpses of life in the city such as men shoveling snow. Then we're out in the country - Cape Cod, sometimes - and people swim, walk through the woods, etc.

As these images are shown to us, we sometimes get music and, occasionally, it's Mekas himself on accordion. At other times Mekas talks to the viewer about what he is showing us. On the odd occasion we hear diagetic sound, the sound of the streets and its denizens.

Mekas notes at the end that this movie is his memories; it's a record of how recalls his past. And this is indeed an intensely personal work. There are some beautiful passages, and occasional parts with universal appeal. But it's 4 hour and 45 minute running time was challenging, to say the least.