Images of a winter afternoon in a snowy forest follow one another. They are immediately singular: their cadence is variable and uncertain; they recur and repeat in the same sequence. The soundtrack, mixing excerpts from conversations, music, nature sounds and everyday noises, seems out of sync with the images. They are taken from the diary of director Jonas Mekas. Their singular character is due to the technical means at his disposal and the radical choices he makes, linked both to his status as a self-taught filmmaker, but also to a chosen aesthetic that characterises his entire cinema. Everything we see appear on the screen is filmed and edited, he shoots with an old Bollex camera, which he must regularly rewind by hand. He also changes the duration of the exposure of the images in a mixture which evokes photography as much as it does cinema. More than a structured account of an afternoon among friends, we receive scattered fragments that form a puzzle of emotions and sensations, at the heart of which are the tenuous threads of micro-events: two little girls come home, the dog Roscoe steals the birds' food, a young woman clears the snow from the roof and a donkey is ridden. The intertitles that appear give the viewer several snippets of information which shed an intimate light on the director’s life, who is visiting friends. Jonas Mekas himself appears at the end of the extract, perched on the donkey, affirming his place as a subjective filmmaker. As he lives, feels, and films these moments, he remembers, for later, the rhythm of the camera that he rewinds. He then gives these moments, captured in their transience, a universal scope. These images seem familiar to us: lulled and transported by their singular rhythm, we linger on the red of the girls' clothes, the eye of a grey donkey whose eyelid blinks in close-up, the singular sound of footsteps in the snow and shovels falling from the roof, the harsh and violent light that suddenly crosses the image - "Suddenly, it seemed like spring" and we seem to feel the heavy touch of the melting ice, the warmth of the animal being caressed. The singularity of this miracle lies in the magic of this intimate, "bricolage" cinema, spoken in the first person: in the first person, the film is a story of a man's life. The singularity of this miracle lies in the magic of this intimate and "cobbled together" cinema, expressed in the first person: through these subjective sensations that pass directly through the filmmaker's body, immediately crystallised in a past in the making and which he addresses to us, instantly giving them the taste of lost paradises.
Comment
Images of a winter afternoon in a snowy forest follow one another. They are immediately singular: their cadence is variable and uncertain; they recur and repeat in the same sequence. The soundtrack, mixing excerpts from conversations, music, nature sounds and everyday noises, seems out of sync with the images. They are taken from the diary of director Jonas Mekas. Their singular character is due to the technical means at his disposal and the radical choices he makes, linked both to his status as a self-taught filmmaker, but also to a chosen aesthetic that characterises his entire cinema. Everything we see appear on the screen is filmed and edited, he shoots with an old Bollex camera, which he must regularly rewind by hand. He also changes the duration of the exposure of the images in a mixture which evokes photography as much as it does cinema. More than a structured account of an afternoon among friends, we receive scattered fragments that form a puzzle of emotions and sensations, at the heart of which are the tenuous threads of micro-events: two little girls come home, the dog Roscoe steals the birds' food, a young woman clears the snow from the roof and a donkey is ridden. The intertitles that appear give the viewer several snippets of information which shed an intimate light on the director’s life, who is visiting friends. Jonas Mekas himself appears at the end of the extract, perched on the donkey, affirming his place as a subjective filmmaker. As he lives, feels, and films these moments, he remembers, for later, the rhythm of the camera that he rewinds. He then gives these moments, captured in their transience, a universal scope. These images seem familiar to us: lulled and transported by their singular rhythm, we linger on the red of the girls' clothes, the eye of a grey donkey whose eyelid blinks in close-up, the singular sound of footsteps in the snow and shovels falling from the roof, the harsh and violent light that suddenly crosses the image - "Suddenly, it seemed like spring" and we seem to feel the heavy touch of the melting ice, the warmth of the animal being caressed. The singularity of this miracle lies in the magic of this intimate, "bricolage" cinema, spoken in the first person: in the first person, the film is a story of a man's life. The singularity of this miracle lies in the magic of this intimate and "cobbled together" cinema, expressed in the first person: through these subjective sensations that pass directly through the filmmaker's body, immediately crystallised in a past in the making and which he addresses to us, instantly giving them the taste of lost paradises.