El Frigorífico Anselmo y sus encadenamientos

The influence of Jonas Mekas on the American avant- garde cannot be over- estimated. He was one of the first persons to champion alternative forms of filmmaking in the 1950s by establishing film showings for directors who had no other outlet for their films. He was the founder of Anthology Film Archives, started the Filmmakers’ Cooperative, and founded and wrote for Film Culture magazine. He wrote tirelessly for and about avant- garde cinema during the 1960s, a time when many different forms or types of avant- garde film emerged, including underground, cult, and experimental narrative. Mekas himself made films, and he is best known for instigating a particular avant- garde film type, the diary film, which would be practiced in avant- garde cinema since his work was first shown in the 1960s. Diaries, Notes, & Sketches: Walden (1969) is a mon- umental diary film. A diary film is a very specific form of avant- garde film- making. A diary film lacks a cast or crew, a producer or script, or really any kind of plan or agenda, and is based solely on the director’s filming of everyday quotidian life and events. The director of the diary film, here Mekas, shoots the raw material of reality: natural events, perfunctory encounters with others (and Walden, as it is generally known, is full of famous people that Mekas meets), city life (of New York) and actions, which are all then presented as a rhythmic collage. Walden is, in Scott MacDonald’s description, “An epic chron- icle of Mekas’s personal experiences, of the daily life and seasonal cycle of New York City, and of the cultural scene as Mekas observed it from 1964 to 1968.”29

Mekas’s personal observations— through the camera lens and his own voice- over — structure Walden. The telling details of the filming of seemingly random things— a flower, a wedding, a circus, for instance — offer a deeply poeticized view of empirical reality. Walden is a three- hour film that shows us how real real life is.

Walden is avant- garde because of its very starting point for subject matter,

which essentially means it has no specific subject matter since Mekas points his camera and films, and because of its distinct style. Most of the film is composed of hand- held shots, creating an erratic, even jerky, focalization of the objects

and people he films. But he discovers a kind of poetry through this method. Almost the entire film is naturally lit and offers elliptical narration and different forms of music (from folk to classical to Mekas himself singing). The chronology of the film is occasionally mixed for some dramatic effect, though Mekas is interested in letting the images speak for themselves. And it is also avant- garde because he uses superimposition, sped- up sequences, and double exposures, which often transforms the perception we have of the natural phenomena he films. The section on the circus “Notes on the Circus,” for example, contains hyper-fast images and superimpositions that force us to see the performers and animals in new ways— a heightened sense of seeing and experiencing that oth- erwise seems normal until seen through Mekas’s filming. In many ways, Walden is about the authorship of new perspective (something akin to Thoreau, who provides the impetus for the film’s basic motifs) because Mekas invents a kind of film practice that stems from and forms anew individual consciousness, which is why it is a “diary.” Like a written diary, Walden is a collection of obser- vations, thoughts, perspectives, and comments on and about life; it is a personal look at the world as seen through one person’s life, especially in its frequent moments of simplicity and universality.

Walden is a socio- cultural scrapbook of the 1960s, a diary of events and

happenings, of people and places, that matter first to Mekas and then to his larger audience. Like any diary, the central figure becomes Mekas himself as watcher and listener, and eventually as craftsman. Mekas is interested in estab- lishing a new film form that is antithetical to mainstream cinema, and, in some regards, to typical experimental or avant- garde film. Critic David James has perhaps best articulated Mekas’s process of creating the diary film more than others. In describing how a diary film comes into being, he states:

Swinging across the pun on “film” itself as designating alternatively a medium of activity and a completed artifact, the metamorphosis of Mekas’s film diary into his diary films is summary of the conditions by which an antibourgeois cultural practice negotiates its context in bourgeois society. Just as much as a written one, a diary made in film privileges the author, the process and moment of composition, and the inorganic assembly of disarticulate, heterogeneous parts rather than any aesthetic whole.30

In other words, Mekas has transformed his film diary — the recording of many dissimilar things— into a diary film proper, which means it has undergone a process of aesthetic creation (and editing and embellishment). The finished film is therefore a filtering of Mekas’s thoughts. It is here, perhaps, that Mekas has a string analogue with Thoreau, the namesake for which he called his film, a literal and metaphoric announcement of a certain attitude and compositional strategy. P. Adams Sitney describes Mekas’s process of composition and ties to Thoreau in this way:

Thoreau’s Walden was an account of an experiment, a new life; the description of an isolated place as scenery for the acts of the self; the mediations of an obsessive

journal keeper in one different but well- contained essay. Mekas’s film follows its namesake metaphorically in chronicling the author’s daily life, making New York (and emblematically its Central Park) the focus of observations for an isolato lodged in a simple room at the Chelsea Hotel, and recasting the diary form as an essay on life as art, identifying just enough of the events and the characters to keep the roiling superabundance of what remains unnamed an issue.31

Sitney here designates an important aspect of the diary film — namely, that it is shot in public and recollected in isolation. Walden as a metaphor suggests an isolated place, hence Mekas’s evocation of it, wherein his film becomes an “essay on life as art.” Mekas has said in various interviews that Walden, for him, can be found anywhere. For example, in an interview with Scott Mac- Donald, he says, “To me Walden exists throughout the city. You can reduce the city to your own very small world that others may never see.”32_{And elsewhere}

he reiterates this, saying, “In general I would say that I feel there will always be a Walden for those who really want it. Each of us live on a small island, in a very small circle of reality, which is our own reality.”33_{This idea of living in}

and having one’s own reality is specifically a part of the diary film practice.

Walden is Mekas’s own lived reality, his ode to the self and its reality. Thoreau’s

book is full of descriptions of things that only he loves; likewise, Mekas, in many voice- overs throughout the film, explains himself simply by stating he is “celebrating what he sees,” and that “I am searching for nothing — I am happy.”

Walden as diary film is a kind of avant- garde feature film that takes its

cues from a highly personal viewpoint that cinema need not be constructed beforehand but during the process. Inasmuch as Mekas is filming his self/reality, he is finally making claims about the aesthetic possibilities of filming the every- day, and then transforming it through avant- garde techniques. The personal view of the director is important to almost any avant- garde film, since many are based on an alternative perspective of reality and how that reality may be reshaped. In Walden, Mekas takes the raw footage of life, as it were, and trans- positions it as automatic, authentic, and indisputably personal and idealized. In a sense, by re-appropriating his film diary into a diary film, and by adding intertitles, non-synchronous sounds and music, and forms of narration, Mekas has formed an amalgam of personal ephemera into a whole, a finalized film product that becomes both autobiography and postmodern pastiche. It is a pri- mal, observational film, where the diary form dictates content, style, and atti- tude. Diary films are essentially narrative, but Mekas adds the avant- garde touches of juxtaposition (with sound/image) and superimposition and double exposure to form a specific kind of diarist film form. The syntax of the diary film is somewhat akin to home movies in that the seeming unprofessionalism of its style and method produces great moments of beauty discovered in light, staging, or simply the spontaneity of real life. As MacDonald notes, “Walden announces what had become Mekas’s credo: ‘I make home movies— therefore I live. I live — therefore I make home movies.’ For Mekas, ‘Walden’ is a state of

mind open to the inevitability of natural process, regardless of where or how one experiences it.”34 _{Walden- as- idea is important to understanding Mekas’s}

film, especially in terms of its relative simplicity. Likewise, Sitney says, “If Walden is a name for a home, and for what you see, it is a state of mind, an investment in the present moment just as it is undergoing revaluation under the threat of destruction. In later volumes of the film diary, [Mekas] will some- times call this state paradise.”35

Walden offers a compendium of places and people who populated the cul-

tural, political, social and ideological landscape of the 1960s. Among those who appear in the film are Stan Brakhage, Andy Warhol, Tony Conrad, P. Adams Sitney, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Carl Th. Dreyer, Timothy Leary, Baba Ram Dass, Gregory Markopoulos, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Smith, Nico and the Velvet Underground, Ken Jacobs, Hans Richter, Standish D. Lawder, Adolfas Mekas, Shirley Clarke, Peter Kubelka, and Michael Snow. All of these figures are a ver- itable “who’s who” of a specific cultural milieu that consists primarily of fringe, alternative, avant- garde or outsider artists and thinkers. Mekas is able to present these people as part of the counter-cultural zeitgeist, but he also is able to make them part of his unique subjectivity. Walden appeared at a crucial time in avant- garde film production and also in the specific historical moment. James suggests that “coinciding with the disintegration of the oppositional countercultures and the underground films they had sustained, [Walden] reflects the industri- alization of social aspirations, yet it afforded a means of mobilizing subjectiv- ity.”36_{In other words, the film presents an encapsulation of the socio- historical}

moment captured through a highly personal and personalized form, the diary film. Mekas created a film that was really new; a diary film was not something typically practiced in cinema. In interviews, Mekas has mentioned that the diary film for him emerged after World War II, mainly because people “got tired of invented stories. All that we could still do was to turn to real life, and look around us, and try and understand what was going on, what was real in our own story.”37_{For Mekas, turning the camera on “real life” meant eschewing}

the escapist fare of Hollywood film (even though film noir, arguably, was also created as a reaction to the horrors of the war and post-war society). Mekas continues, discussing the post-war climate that generated his diary film impulses, “Everything else seemed senseless, escapist, unreal. That’s at least my personal interpretation of why I chose the diary form.”38_{James also says:}

Mekas was the first fully to articulate this combination of imperatives— the need to respond immediately with the camera to and in the present, and the need to subjec- tivize that recording — as the essential conditions of the film diary, and the first fully to turn them to advantage, and eventually to invest filmic attention to daily life with religious significance.39

In many ways Walden is a retroactive film practice couched in the primi- tivism of early silent cinema, as well as in a form conditioned by the “religion”

of the everyday, a nod again to Thoreau. The film is dedicated to Lumiere, we are told at the beginning, which shows Mekas’s denouncement of the conven- tions of narrative cinema and also his alignment with early cinematic practice. There is also a simple piousness in the revelation of the everyday. The poeticism of the (non-famous) figures and the mundane objects that appear in Walden suggest this, while the jarring camerawork and editing and the musical accom- paniment and ambient noises all suggest a higher sense of recognition and self- identity, as Mekas reveals himself as much as he does the things around him. It is why Sitney can conclude that

[O]bservation, fragmentation, and revelation ... go to the core of Mekas’s enterprise. The effort to mold the cinematic material into some kind of conformity with expe- rience initiates a dialectic of self-analysis. Starting off in ignorance of his own inten- tions, he transforms the image and its context to make it both more interesting and more his own.40

In short, Walden aspires to be something truly original, an avant- garde feature that is a strikingly original enterprise and a blueprint for the diary film in gen- eral.

Walden’s influence cannot be exaggerated enough — it really does create a

new film form of highly personal, investigative, and reflective cinema. The area that it most directly affects is the personal- essay film, which is, in all regards, a diary film as well, and one that is especially prominent in women’s experi- mental and avant- garde filmmaking. I will detail some of these films in Part III, but for now it can be said that Mekas’s grand enterprise is without peer. Only his other long diary films compare. The diary film is a hetroglossaic text, one that engages in a dialogic and often discursive relationship with its ties to writing (the diary as literature), the past (as in a reflection on the recordings of the self ), and the present, both in terms of the self-on- display and the engage- ment with the larger social and cultural context from which it stems. It is why James concludes, “Where the pure visual practice of the film diary privileged a single sense and a single textual system, the diary film subjects the original images to sounds and disjunct visual material.”41_{Mekas’s style — the abrasive}

cinematography that orchestrates abrupt changes— establishes a rhythm of daily life through images manipulated to some degree through the mechanisms of cinema. Mekas turns the subjectivity of the film diary into a diary film. The constant stream of disparate or complementary images—from a dog to a park, to a foot or legs, to faces or close- up of a face —creates a euphoric feeling of genuine pleasure at the rediscovery of real life. Finding beauty in the observa- tional is crucial to developing an understanding of Walden, and also for the formal avant- garde techniques it employs. As James suggests, “The short bursts of photography and especially the single- framing by which Mekas takes note(s) of the loveliness of daily life characteristically involve swift modulations of focus and exposure that transform the colors and contours of a natural object

or scene.”42_{Through Mekas’s obsessive Vertovian kino- eye, we get to perceive}

anew our world, and that is ultimately a very beneficial thing to learn from the type of avant- garde film he creates, the naturalistic diary film, where vision is altered through the objectivity of the images and through the subjectivity of the filmmaker’s technique. For that reason alone, Walden anticipates many con- temporary feature-length avant- garde films.