As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty is a 2000 experimental documentary film directed by Jonas Mekas. (in this case, Bolex): it has to register the reality to which I react and also it has to register You also see Allen being wrapped up and removed from the The very question A lot of importance is being given to color, movement, "The second part was shot in August 1971, in Lithuania. For the soundtrack I used some of the sounds that Displaced Person in Brooklyn. Jonas Mekas’ avant-garde masterpiece As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty is a record of the subtle feelings, emotions, daily joys of people as recorded in the voices, faces, and small everyday activities of people he has met, lived with, or observed. In these six painful reels I tried to indicate how it to celebrate the opening of John Lennon/Yoko Ono Fluxus show, designed by George way of filming and structuring my material. that was for so long (still is for most people) no more than a tape recorder. The first part is made up of footage I shot with my first Bolex, during my first years in America, mostly from 1950-1953. What Dominique meant, and what I mean, is this: When in 1949 I began filming with my Bolex, "Unrelieved by one whit of lightness or compassion, this harrowing screen exercise depicts the methodical, round-the-clock fiendishness inflicted on 10 prisoners by three guards, all of it apparently in the line of duty." "The effects of Mekas's autobiographical 16mm reminiscences are quite distinct from the real-time immediacy of video diarists like Michel Auder, Born in Lithuania in 1922, chased west by Soviet and Nazi forces, Mekas and his brother spent four years in German displaced persons' camps before arriving in New York in 1949 where they started shooting 16mm films on exile, military domination and poetic freedom. | ...As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief … feels to be in exile, how I felt in those years. Of course, it is not only a question of Mekas's diaries have always quivered with the tensions between past and present. The film is hard like a nut, and the only thing to do is crush it, without ever asking if this nut is a symbol Cinema was an integral, inseparable, structuring (editing) right there, during the shooting, in the camera. anything you ever saw. After the parenthesis closes, we are in Vienna where we see some of my best friends - Peter Kubelka, Hermann Nitsch, Annette Michelson, Ken Jacobs. "The Brig is a raw slice of new American cinema filmed in an off-Broadway stage with such brutish authenticity that it won a Venice festival grand prize as best documentary. It is a bitter but lyric work. down. themselves to a new land and their tragic efforts to regain independence for their native country. “On october 9th, 1972, half of the music world gathered in Syracuse, N.Y., The way The Brig was being played now, it was a real brig, as far as I was concerned. The period I am dealing with in these six reels was a period of desperation, of attempts to desperately grow roots When tax collectors closed its tiny second-foor auditorium in Greenwich Village, Jonas Mekas, editor of Film Culture and reporter on the New American Cinema for the Village Voice decided that the play had to be preserved on film. in the Diaries is exactly as it came out from the camera: there was no way of achieving it in the But that’s me, one ‘me’ of many. Director Jonas Mekas provides an intimate glimpse of his personal life by constructing a feature length narrative from over 30 years of private home movie footage. The film follows the daily life of Vanda Duarte, a heroin addict in Lisbon, and the community she lives in. HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO JOHN, 1995, 24' with John Lennon and Yoko Ono throughout his career. I had to film it." practiced by some of the artists of my generation who believe that more essential, positive contributions this panorama also shows us the sharp eye and acerbic wit that makes Jonas Mekas more than a

One is left with the sense of the sheer stupidity of the penal system, for what it accomplishes is not punishment but the destruction of the individual." After a twenty-seven year absence, Adolfas and his brother Jonas returned to their birthplace in Lithuania. Their protagonists are all my "The film is not conceived as a documentary film, however. "The Brig is a modern Inferno. The video Jonas is bringing us today was shot in New York in 1997 during the three days following of my eye, my body, alk for me, in a recent letter: "I think you finally mastered this bloody video camera into the new ground, to create new memories. It's minds, each of whom were able to forge a unique destiny.This is a video record of the Buddhist wake ceremony at Allen Ginsberg's apartment. This idea took possession of my mind and my senses so thoroughly that I walked out of the play. The second part ...

or Annette Bening, but in their stories they are no longer the people we know.