Walden: Diaries, Notes and Sketches [1968]

 Jonas Mekas – towering godfather of American underground cinema and pioneer of diary films – made a momentous feature-length debut, composed of ecstatically shot “haikus” or short reels, with Walden. At once epic, pulsating, freewheeling, elegiac and intimate, he made this 3-hour kaleidoscopic work by stitching together a dazzling blend of encounters, moments, happenings, portraits, events and experiences, that he shot from 1964 to 1968 using 16mm Bolex camera – his comrade of 50 years from 1950, when he purchased his first Bolex upon arrival in the US as a displaced person, through to 2000 when he finally switched to digital – via an intensely subjective lens. With its title borrowed from Thoreau and imbued with Cartesian spirit – “I make home movies, therefore I live” – it was particularly remarkable in its capturing of a vital period in New York’s trailblazing art and culture circuit, as we see gatherings featuring Allen Ginsberg, the Velvet Underground’s first performance, fellow avant-garde filmmaker Stan Brakhage at his getaway mountain cabin, Carl Theodor Dreyer’s visit to the city, John Lennon and Yoko Ono carrying out their radical 1969 “bed-in”, etc. Mekas alternated these with moments embodying 1960s zeitgeist – e.g. street protests by a feminist group and African-American construction labourers spotlighted as “back power” – as well as kinetic bursts of “pure cinema” – observational shots of streets and Central Park, an ecstatic montage on a circus, etc. – and even some anachronistic wedding sequences. These protean images – possessing different colour tones, frequently overlapping and often at accelerated speeds – were accompanied by an eclectic audio track which ranged from jazz riffs to throbbing percussive sounds that he mixed by playing his vinyl records and radio, and occasionally also his lilting, chirpy voiceovers.

Director: Jonas Mekas

Genre: Documentary/Diary Film/Essay Film/Experimental Film

Language: English

Country: US