Jonas Mekas’ I Was Moving and the Cinema of the Everyday
By Graham Bertoni
For most of its history, cinema has been an inaccessible medium for most people. In the early days of film, not just anyone could get their hands on a cinema camera, and even fewer were trained to use them. The camera was a big, bulky, expensive tool that, for decades, was mostly used by large commercial studios to tell entertaining stories. These studios effectively defined the medium (at least in America) for decades. In the 1960s and 70s, as cameras and film became more accessible, more films originated from a desire to break away from this studio-designed mode of filmmaking. As the decades moved ahead, the camera became not just a tool for studios or even independent filmmakers, but anyone with enough money to buy a DV camera. Cinema’s journey has been one of inaccessibility to ubiquity—the more people that are able to film, the broader the definition of cinema becomes.
Though the future of cinema is by no means certain, some works in particular envision a brighter, broader future for the medium. By the time Lithuanian-American Jonas Mekas released his autobiographical documentary As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty (2000), the idea of an independent film being an influential work was an old one. Mekas’ work in the avant-garde movement in New York was, at that point, decades old—the strides had been made, cinematic form redefined and opened. What, then, did the 78 year-old filmmaker have left to offer? The result is an examination of Mekas' life, an incredibly long (288 minutes, to be exact) compilation of footage taken in the last three decades of the 20th century. It is a work of grand ideas and great simplicity, one that takes its audience on a great journey through a life of joy and fun with family, friends and cats galore. In turn it envisions the medium as a constant presence in daily life, designed for everyone to capture the beauty of its smallest details. What makes Mekas’ work unique—and, to an extent, prescient—is how he constructs his vision of life over the course of the film. The film is not organized chronologically, instead constructed out of a number of disparate scenes put together “by chance” (Mekas [0:58]). The scenes themselves sometimes concern major life events—the births and christenings of Mekas’ children are included—but the bulk of the film contains what the filmmaker calls “nothing” moments: eating and talking with friends, Sunday naps, and long gazes at the New York skyline comprise most of the film’s runtime. They are the main subject of the film’s narration, which generally occurs near the beginning of each chapter in the film. This construction of events imagines cinema not as a tool for telling a story but as a canvas to express feeling. With events strewn about so haphazardly, and over the course of such a long work, the film encourages you not to string them together but to appreciate each of them on their own merit, absorbing the pureness of each moment as it comes. As cinema becomes more and more fragmented, as the definition of the medium becomes more and more blurred, As I Was Moving points toward a future of film that tells stories as messily as we remember them.
Mekas keenly sees the potential of technology itself to impact the bounds of cinema. In an interview conducted shortly before his death, he remarked, “Cocteau wrote that cinema will become a mature art when you are able to use your camera like your pen, and that’s where we are” (Mekas). As fundamental as writing was to the world of art before the 20th century, Mekas proposes film will be to the 21st century—in other words, a medium whose full potential will be available to all with access to its instruments. As cinema moves from the studios to our homes to our pockets, these instruments reveal the cinematic possibilities within all of us.
As I Was Moving is the embodiment of this philosophy, decades of Mekas’ own life filmed on a 16mm Bolex camera. The film’s narration minimizes the work’s role as a work of cinema, or film, but rather emphasizes it as the result of a process. “I am obsessed with filming,” he says. “What an ecstasy just to film. Why do I have to make films when I can just film!” (Mekas [02:20:19]). This kind of commentary is throughout the film, reminding us that the work we’re watching is filmed, that it is intended to capture moments rather than create a final product. With an emphasis on ‘filming’ rather than the ‘film’, Mekas seeks to redefine cinema itself.
Mekas also emphasizes that technology potentially jeopardizes the humanity it captures. He makes reference to Saint Jerome, who translated the Bible into Latin and “taught a balance between the spiritual and the earthly needs of the community” (Mekas). Technology, despite its potential, has also threatened this balance: “technology is far ahead of humanity and ethics,” he says, indicating that the fixation on the technical qualities of innovations damages the human potentialities of them (Mekas) . As I Was Moving points towards the potential for technology to be the savior of the very imbalance it has created. If we can film everything, perhaps the goal ought to be finding a balance between the natural and the constructed. Mekas says his efforts are focused on “trying to get back what the civilisation took away from humanity”. This civilization is many things—politics, business, art—but in As I Was Moving, it is chiefly the constructs of cinema. All of the things that made cinema what it was in Hollywood—drama, suspense, action—are minimized as much as possible in the film. All that is left are the moments in-between, the humanity Mekas is so invested in. In this sense, As I Was Moving is a rejection of civilization in favor of a simpler, more direct humanity.
Mekas’ rejection of traditional cinema is particularly evident in the narration of Chapter IV, where he discusses his feelings about dramatic construction. “Sorry that nothing much, nothing extraordinary has so far happened in this movie,” he begins. “By now you have noticed I do not like any suspense. I want you to know (...) what’s coming” (Mekas [01:07:09]). If this doesn’t already make his feelings clear, he then plays a game with the audience: “Ok, I’ll give you now some suspense and let’s see…” He starts a stopwatch that silently ticks away as the familiar images fly by. This moment forces us to contemplate time as a concrete entity, not as a unit of story but as a piece of a greater whole—in this case the work itself. At the end of the minute he calls cut, and proclaims that “One minute is longer than one thinks”, reminding us that our perception of time is as conditional as our perception of space (Mekas [01:07:09] ; [01:08:55] ; [01:10:40]).
For as much as it rejects the traditions of cinema, I Was Moving is still obsessed with an element that has always defined the medium: time. The titular moments of the film are, as described, brief. We’re never left in a scene for long enough to get a full sense of what is happening, but we are given instead a mere glimpse of a fragment of time that is in some way important to Mekas. Paul Arthur sees this style as “a metaphysic that frames the word, every experience in it, as constantly on the verge of slippage” (Arthur 2-3). Cinema itself is a form of slippage, wherein each frame is constantly being gained and immediately lost in favor of the next one. Mekas therefore frames his film as a representation of memory itself, of the way that our brains collect and lose our experiences as we move ahead through time. These fragments of cinema will only be more important to the medium as we continue to slowly transition from longform content (in the cinemas) to shorter, more cut-up fragments on our computers, phones and potentially further.
The style of I Was Moving erupts from the domestic spaces it inhabits. It has been described as “the home movie as epic”, with reel after reel depicting Mekas’ life with his family and friends in New York (Mitchell 70). Much of the film is spent inside of his New York City
apartment, watching the sun pass through the skyscrapers, watching the cats stare at the camera, making dinner, or lounging around. Mekas finds something filmic in these spaces, passionately filming the texture of the wood floor, the feeling of the food in his hands, and everything in-between. It is domestic spaces like this that have come to define what people film in the 21st century and will, in the future, define cinema at large. The more that cinema is placed in the hands of the people, the less it is defined by the scale of the worlds it depicts—the definition will broaden until it can inhabit every possible space, no matter how big or small.
The recurring image that consistently grounds As I was Moving is that of an unnamed Paradise. Mekas emphasizes constantly that this Paradise is within each of us, and can be found almost anywhere on Earth. It is something that, as he narrates in the first chapter, “unknowingly, we carry” (Mekas [00:07:25]). He playfully rejects traditional depictions of a heavenly Paradise: “Why do they always, when they paint Paradise, show it just full of exotic trees? No! Paradise, my Paradise was full of snow!” [02:21:32]. Here, he embraces the notion of Paradise not as a universal, uniform picture but as a self-determined idea—Paradise is wherever you are happiest. In one of the final chapters he offers a slightly more definitive idea of his own Paradise: “My dear friends, to be in Paradise is to be with good old friends” [03:48:58]. By embracing diverse concepts of Paradise, he tacitly rejects the traditional cinematic depiction of it, with all the images of Sun, monogamous love, and victory that it usually entails. None of these things are the Paradise of As I Was Moving—instead it is the simple and anti-dramatic pleasures of a stress-free life.
As I Was Moving also represents our era and our potential future in its total rejection of truth. The core of the film is an openly acknowledged facade. He playfully describes his work as “a film about people who never argue or have fights and love each other” in a title card, reminding us that this is still a carefully constructed vision of life being presented to us ([4:38:59]). In many ways, it is not dissimilar to the current social media landscape, where heartbreak and failure is pared away on our profiles in favor of beauty, joy and success. Perhaps the distinction between Mekas’ work and ours is that he’s willing to admit that his is a constructed reality. Never in the narration does he proclaim that his film is a full or even true representation of his life—it is rather intended as an effort to capture moments from his past that he wants to preserve, happiness he wants to impart to the world. In that sense it is a wonderfully honest piece of auto-docu-fiction, inasmuch as it is a non-fiction work.
As Mekas’ film approaches 25 years since its release, its prescience remains as powerful as ever. It envisions cinema as an accessible, universal, and ultimately simple medium that can communicate everything it needs to by capturing life in its smallest moments. It discards the traditional modes of institutional filmmaking and instead opts for a style that is as frenetic and authentic as in a young filmmaker’s work, with as much skill and craft as one has decades into his career. It is a work of great indulgence, running longer than anything that could conceivably survive in cinemas, but its fragmented simplicity makes it easy to connect with. At whatever point you begin watching Mekas’ film, and for however long you watch it, it feels as full and as satisfying as any feature-length story. Its daring, fascinating qualities make it a particularly monumental work and one that, explicitly or not, envisions the future of cinema.
Works Cited
Arthur, Paul. "HOMEWARD BOUND: NOTES AND MUSINGS ON JONAS MEKAS'S AS I WAS MOVING AHEAD OCCASIONALLY I SAW BRIEF GLIMPSES OF BEAUTY." Millennium Film Journal (ARCHIVE), no. 38, 2002, pp. 34-49. ProQuest, http://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/homeward -bound-notes-musings-on-jonas-mekass-as-i/docview/223235212/se-2.
As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty. Directed by Jonas Mekas, Canyon Cinema, 2000.
Mekas, Jonas. Interview with Simon Hattenstone. The Guardian, 2019.
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/jan/24/jonas-mekas-last-interview-godfather-und erground-film-avant-garde-john-yoko-dali-warhol.
Mitchell, Elvis. “One Man’s Parenthood, in Minute Detail.” The New York Times, 2001. https://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/12/movies/film-review-one-man-s-parenthood-in-minute-detail.html.