Agenda

EN

“In the spoken narration at the start of Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania, over footage of a stroll through the woods in 1959, Mekas recalls with pleasure not having to think about the previous decade, the war and its aftermath. It was, he says, a new beginning, the dawning of a process of assimilation: "There was a moment when I forgot my home." And then: "Hey, I escaped the ropes of time once more" (accompanied by a shot of a nooselike strand of rope dangling from a tree). An entry in his 1961 diary about a group of recent films strikes a note that reverberates constantly in his public pronouncements: "New is moral, it liberates, it frees. Today all old is corrupt, it drags man down, and I am putting my bets on the young and the new" (Diaries, 12 July 1961). Don't look back. Democracy is in the streets. Admittedly, this was a standard line in sixties radicalism of every stripe, yet it suggests one route by which Mekas found his biographical and aesthetic particularities reflected in the emerging counterculture.”

Paul Arthur1

by thin
blood threads

my language
still clings to
childhood
blue

pale
sunbleached
boards
cracking

Jonas Mekas, Daybooks 1970-19722

“In the fifty-five years that I’ve known Jonas Mekas, I have never seen him without a camera, ready to use. First it was a 16 mm Bolex, then a series of video and digital recording devices. Today, most often, it’s a mobile phone. Mekas refers to himself simply as a “filmer” these days, rather than as a filmmaker. He never conceived of himself as a ‘film director.’ Looking back at his enormous body of work in literature – poetry, essays, journals – and in film and photography, Mekas concludes that the form binding all of it together is the diary.”

Amy Taubin3

“In Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania, he again confronts footage from the early fifties, but juxtaposes it to material collected on his return to Lithuania. Though he is there restored to his mother, neither his childhood nor the prewar rural society may be regained; nor can he stay there, for that would now entail the loss of the postwar years spent in New York – a double bind in whose terrors all exiles live.”

David E. James4

“Unlike the literary diary, the film diary does not follow a day-by-day chronology. Structurally, it corresponds more to a notebook, but in its drive towards a schematic or fragmented expression of the totality of the film-maker’s life, it is more like a diary, perhaps one in which the entry dates have been lost and the pages scrambled. Mekas and younger diarists such as Andrew Noren and Warren Sonbert devote their creative energy to shooting, constructing, and revising their filmed lives.

Mekas’s Diaries, Notes and Sketches (1964–1969) and Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania (1971) are exercises in Romantic autobiography. Mekas constantly weaves together celebrations of the present moment, immediately and unironically present on the screen, with elegiac and ironic allusions to a presence that is forever absent to the camera lens: the vision of nature and of his childhood. Like all of the films brought together in this chapter, Mekas’s two diaries are versions of the myth of lost innocence and the failed quest for its recovery. The credo of his commitment to the Romantic dialectic is an article from 1964, ‘Notes on Some New Movies and Happiness,’ in which he combines observations on the films of Ken Jacobs, Ron Rice, Joseph Cornell, and others with thoughts on happiness and sadness from his childhood memories.

He writes: ‘It is neither a coincidence nor anything strange that exactly the same men who have tasted a fool’s happiness, give us also the deepest intuitions of the tragic sense of life. Imitation of the true emotion. Sentimentality. No oneness. No true peace. (Who knows what true peace is?) Nostalgia of things of nature. Or are we going into neo-Romanticism? And what does it mean? Or am I going into neo-Romanticism? And this essay is nothing but pieces of my own new film? Perhaps’.”

P. Adams Sitney5

“In his discussion of documentary film, Cavell claims that the foregrounding of the filmmaker’s presence is ‘a guilty impulse’ that stems from ‘the denial of the only thing that really matters: that the subject be allowed to reveal itself’. The outcome of this denial is a foreclosure of the possibility of revelation. In Mekas’ films the acknowledgement of the filmmaker’s presence results in something far more ambiguous: a rendition of our place in the world in which the experiences of home and homelessness are inextricably intertwined. In Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania evidence of this can be found in the filmmaker’s rendition of his experiences in Semeniškiai. Yet even before we arrive in the village, the film preempts the experience of displacement. In Part 1 Mekas employs many of the images that will reappear five years later in Lost Lost Lost: street footage of the neighborhood of Williamsburg in Brooklyn shot a year or two after the filmmaker’s arrival; displaced persons disembarking at Pier 21 in New York; the émigré poets, artists, and writers gathering at Lape’s house in Stony Brook. He also uses the images of the happy picnickers gathered at the St Andrews Annual Lithuanian Picnic. But in Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania the voice-over narration creates a very different impression of their lives:

Somewhere at the end of Atlantic Avenue, somewhere there they used to have their picnics. I used to watch them, the old immigrants and the new ones, and they looked to me like some sad dying animals in a place they didn’t exactly belong to, in a place they didn’t recognize. They were there on the Atlantic Avenue, but they were completely somewhere else.”

George Kouvaros6

Autour de « Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania ». Dialogue avec Jonas Mekas from La Cinémathèque française on Vimeo.

• 1Paul Arthur, "Routines of Emancipation: Alternative Cinema in the Ideology and Politics of the Sixties", in To Free the Cinema. Jonas Mekas & The New York Underground, edited by David E. James, 22-23. Princeton University Press, 1992.
• 2Jonas Mekas, Daybooks 1970-1972 (New York: Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, 2003), 5.
• 3Amy Taubin on Jonas Mekas, Documenta 14.
• 4David E. James, "Film Diary/Diary Film: Practice and Product in Walden", in To Free the Cinema. Jonas Mekas & The New York Underground, edited by David E. James, 167. Princeton University Press, 1992.
• 5P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film. The American Avant-Garde 1943-2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 393.
• 6George Kouvaros, "Ithaka, or the Open Voyage: Jonas Mekas' Lost Lost Lost and Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania," Screening the Past.

EN

“The Tree, the Mayor and the Médiathèque is a marvelous satirical tract, with a mordant irony that bites fairly. It is directed precisely against the socialists, the technocrats, the environmentalists, Parisianism, parochialism, wheeler-dealers, political mores, the electoral campaign, the development of the territory, and a mayor’s ambitions. Beneath its outward appearance as an amateur film and its acknowledged lightness of tone, this is perhaps one of Rohmer’s most ambitious films, the only one in which his involvement in his time is expressed.”

Antoine de Baecque

Cahiers du cinéma: In The Tree, the Mayor and the Mediatheque, your actors speak “naturally” about politics or philosophy. How can you hold together these things which seem so contradictory: the naturalness of the acting with the stilted soundbites of politicians or the abstractions of philosophical principles?

Eric Rohmer: It’s not the content that matters here, it’s the way of saying it, the gestures if you like. Whether someone is talking about politics, philosophy, or love, the first thing I look for is authentic gestures. I don’t like actors using deliberate gestures, that simplify expressions in contrast to life’s richness, on the other hand I study unconscious, natural gestures very carefully, such as scratching your back while talking about philosophy, or crossing or uncrossing your legs, or any other example. You’ll have noticed that all my actors, whether it’s Arielle Dombasle or Fabrice Luchini, move well and have a natural sense of gesture. I don’t like gestures that act like a language that comes from actors who overdominate their bodies, but I like gestures that escape conscious control and thus, quite simply, lead us to the truth about a person. Bresson tried to fight this gestural language through a hierarchy and the non-gesture; I try to fight against it through the overuse of gesture, the disturbing or unconscious gestures that arise spontaneously. Unlike most directors, I never tell my actors what gestures to perform, but I try to capture their own gestures and record them almost without them realizing, against their will. If an actor becomes aware of their gestures, we have to abandon everything. I prefer it when an actor is so taken with their text that they have spontaneous gestures. Physically they are very interesting gestures, as well. When I’m choosing actors, I talk with them and see how they move their hands. And that’s why I prefer filming in a 1/33 ratio, the format of my last film, with a 16mm camera with an almost square frame, because that allows me to show off an actor’s gestures more effectively.

Eric Rohmer in conversation with Antoine de Baecque and Thierry Jousse1

• 1Antoine de Baecque and Thierry Jousse, “The Amateur: An Interview with Eric Rohmer,” in: Eric Rohmer Interviews, ed. Fiona Handyside. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2015), 131-132. This article was originally published in Cahiérs du cinéma, no. 456, 23 February 1993.

EN

“As I started working on this film, I got hold of a handheld magnifying glass. When I bring piece of glass close to my eye, I see what is in front of me, magnified twenty times. I regularly go on walks with Geert Raeymaekers, a bryologist, an expert on mosses. He is a kind, warm man. Together, we gaze through our magnifying glasses at the tiny world beneath our feet. He identifies the many varied species we hold between our fingers and calls them by their mysterious Latin names. Syntrichia laevipila, Kindbergia praelonga.

Naming things is the first step in learning to look at them, writes Robin Wall Kimmerer in her book Gathering Moss. It is a way of entering into an intimate, nurturing relationship with the world.

When Geert and I look up from that world beneath our feet, everywhere, between the greenery and overgrown concrete, we see cans, bottles, cigarette packets, empty crisp bags, toilet paper, some lonely shoes, a broken umbrella and a bicycle. If we knew the names of all the mosses, plants and trees around us, would this place look different? We take an imaginary stroll towards a way out from this squalid wasteland, following a trail upon our ailing planet. It takes quite a bit of imagination to envision any other future than a dystopian wasteland.

As [Donna] Haraway writes: “... it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what thoughts think thoughts, [...] It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories.”.

I can think of no better medium than film, to envision that other future, to tell that other story, to ‘world’ that other world.”

Bas Devos1

Maria Giovanna Vagenas: Here has a wonderfully quiet pace, allowing us to truly observe and listen.

Bas Devos: The question of tempo is an interesting one. The right tempo is at least as mysterious as the right frame. There is, of course, the tempo on set, that is to say, everything that is montage within the frame. Of course, you have to be very much in tune with the moment and you have to be very attentive in understanding whether a scene is too long or whether an action is eventually too fast or too slow, meaningful or not meaningful enough. That’s one kind of tempo, the tempo within the camera. The tempo in the editing process, once you start to put images next to each other, is a completely different way of sensing time. I am always in debt to my editor, Dieter Diependaele, because he teaches me, time and time again, to perceive the passing of time in the editing and to understand the meaning of a cut. This process is very natural to him, while for me it is much more natural to understand tempo on a set. That’s the mystery! The mystery is that he brings in his sensitivity about length, duration and, most importantly, the non-existing images between two frames, between images that I still don’t really understand. Even after making four films, for me that is still something truly magical.

Bas Devos in conversation with Maria Giovanna Vagenas2

• 1Bas Devos, “Director’s Note”.
• 2Maria Giovanna Vagenas, “Here: An Interview with Bas Devos,” Senses of Cinema, May 2023.

EN

“Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1900 (1976) was a monumental act of hubris. Clocking in at 5 hours 16 minutes, it was butchered by distributors, released to mixed reviews and indifferent audiences, a colossal letdown after Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris proved an international smash. It’s hard not to admire 1900, an engrossing, absorbing historical pageantry for all its preachy excess. 

Alfredo Berlinghieri (Robert De Niro) and Olmo Dalco (Gerard Depardieu) are born simultaneously in 1901 to northern Italian landowners and peasants, respectively. Their childhood friendship's underscored by tensions between Alfredo's father Giovanni (Romolo Valli) and his workers, led by Olmo’s grandfather Leo (Sterling Hayden). After World War I, Olmo becomes a Marxist, while Alfredo inherits the family estate, including fascist foreman Attila (Donald Sutherland). Under Mussolini heir relationship grows strained, with Alfredo’s wife Ada (Dominique Sanda) driving him to distraction while Olmo and Attila clash. After Mussolini falls, a reckoning's in order. 
 

1900 has a luxuriant texture and craftsmanship more often associated with novels than cinema. Bertolucci employs a scope that David Lean and Francis Ford Coppola could only dream about, covering 50 years and dozens of personages in engrossing detail. It’s a Marxist national epic that pairs agitprop with spectacle, a paean to mass action peppered with vivid characterizations. Periodic concessions to vulgarity lightly mar its high-flown pretensions.”
 

Groggy Dundee1

“As noted by Roger Ebert, in an otherwise derisive review (and maybe this is also a grievance), the synopsis of 1900 “might resemble Genesis, filled with marriages and births, deaths and murders, rivalries and betrayals and thefts and passions.” And so it is. Written by Bertolucci, his younger brother Giuseppe, and Franco Arcalli, who also wrote Last Tango in Paris and would work on the story for Bertolucci’s Luna (1979), 1900 opens on Liberation Day, April 25, 1945, where the impending end of World War II is abrupt and unexpected (so unexpected that a young man is instinctively shot as an enemy combatant before he can scarcely mutter, ‘The war is over…’). As word of liberation spreads throughout the countryside, so too does a vengeful reckoning. It first takes down, most vehemently, the vicious Fascist couple of Attila Mellanchini (Donald Sutherland) and his female companion Regina (Laura Betti). The retribution then reaches resident padroné Alfredo Berlinghieri (Robert De Niro), whose pensive expression upon confrontation hints at the reflection to come, a subdued cue that sends 1900 back to the turn of the century when two children are born on the same day, the day, as it happens, of Giuseppe Verdi’s death: January 27, 1901.

Jeremy Carr2

• 1Groggy Dundee, “1900 (Novecento),” Nothing is Written, August 2016.
• 2Jeremy Carr, “There are No More Masters: Bernardo Bertolucci’s “1900”,” MUBI Notebook, 22 February 2019.

EN

“Though there are no shacks or shanties in this ambitious debut feature, class and racial tensions and a generalized paranoia inform, however subtly, every interaction – the resentments and misunderstandings reverberating as a low-level thrum, much like the barely perceptible sounds that subliminally score the film. Set in a well-off oceanfront neighborhood in Recife, a city of four million in northeastern Brazil – where the director himself, a former film critic, lives – Neighboring Sounds burrows deep to expose the unarticulated though ever-present sense of dread gripping its bourgeois characters.”

Melissa Anderson1
 

“Francisco’s foil is Clodoaldo, the seemingly deferential head of the security team that sets up on a street corner, changing the dynamics of life in the neighborhood. Like Mr. Solha, Irandhir Santos, who plays Clodoaldo, is a native of northeast Brazil accustomed to what he called ‘the perverse logic’ of the region’s history of social oppression. ‘Certain aspects of that logic have simply been transferred from the sugar mills to these tall apartment buildings,’ Mr. Santos said. ‘Instead of wire fences to ensure the separation of classes, you’ve got security cameras and guards, and that transposition is what motivated me to help Kleber tell this story.’”

Larry Rohter2

“A film critic and programmer, Mendonça reveals a greater debt to the nouvelle vague than to Cinema Novo in his sometimes flaunty compendia of shots and edits – tilt, travelling, dissolve, rack, follow, zoom (fast and slow), Steadycam, fade, insert, close-up, match, tracking (lateral and not) – and his occasional homage to previous cinema.”

James Qandt3

• 1Melissa Anderson, “Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Neigboring Sounds”, Artforum, Summer 2012.
• 2Larry Rohter, “In Brazil, a Noisy, Tense Prosperity”, New York Times, August 2012.
• 3James Qandt, “Over A Fence. The Return of the Repressed in Neighboring Sounds”, Cinema Guild.

EN

“Cities, like dreams, are built from desires and fears, although the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules absurd, their perspectives deceptive, and everything hides something else.”

Italo Calvino, The Invisible Cities1

“In the world we live in, everybody tries to project image. So I tried to create an atmosphere with my cast where they, without knowing it, would allow me to photograph them without any barrier. I'm not talking about every scene - after all, these are professional craftspeople. But each cast member, in one or two or three moments, allowed me to photograph them that way. The great discovery of the cinema, this new art form, is the closeup. No one has yet come up with anything more extraordinary. With a great screen 30 feet across, to see a face, every line, every movement of every muscle, and wonder who is it inside that face? That's what I was getting into in Fearless, thinking, ah, this is the frontier.”

Peter Weir2

“‘I think, when we fly, it’s one of a few times in contemporary life where we actually think of death.’ In Fearless Max re-evaluates his life after surviving a plane crash. ‘I wanted to film the crash from the point of view of the passengers,’ explains Weir, who interviewed several real-life survivors from an 1989 flying disaster. ‘All them said, it was unreal. It was so real. It was like a dream. I had to make the crash unreal in order to reach its reality. Then it became, in a strange way, horrifyingly beautiful.’ In Fearless Weir explores the often mystical, even ecstatic, implications of near-death experiences.”

P. Huck3

• 1Cited by Silvia Tandeciarz, “Some Notes on Racial Trauma in Peter Weir’s Fearless,” William & Mary Scholar Works, 2000.
• 2Virginia Campbell, “Love, Fear and Peter Weir,” Movieline, September 1993.
• 3P. Huck, “Call to Weir: ‘come in, oh spinner of tales’,” The Hobart Mercury, 2 June 1994, 29.

EN

Filmmaker Magazine: R21 AKA Restoring Solidarity began as part of the process of cataloging a collection of 20 archival films, then making a trailer for each one, before ultimately deciding that they should be combined into a full film. How did that process develop?

Mohanad Yaqubi: The theme of my research is imperfect archives, which is inspired by Julio Garcia Espinosa’s text “For An Imperfect Cinema.” For him, films were all about experimenting, not looking for perfection. Rather than follow a certain canon, art school or film school, he argues for using an aesthetic that reflects the people’s will. I believe that “imperfect cinema” has to be archived in the same way. The Tokyo Reels are one example of an “imperfect archive.” We’re dealing with an archive of a revolution that never succeeded. [Revolutions] that did succeed already have an archive—like the Algerian revolution, which started documenting itself after 1962.

What does archiving mean, at the end of the day? It’s telling history and forming a narrative.  You rearrange history according to your ideology. Cuba is an example; Guinea, too. But with the Palestinians, these films are part of an imperfect archive that was also transnational. The idea was to take these 20 films and make an expanded inventory. An imperfect archive is not framed: you can add to it. What does it mean to add to a collection of 20 films? Should we make a transcript, take stills, make subtitles? I was especially aware that for people in struggle, who don’t have their own archive, any extra material will become important. Being able to produce an archive is a point of vitality. So, we did the transcript first, then subtitling and scanning. Then we decided to make a trailer for each film, which we put together in one timeline. We added the titles and thought, “That’s going to be an art piece somehow.” So Rami [El Nihawi], the editor, said, “How should we organize the timeline?” I said, “Let’s do it chronologically by year of production.” After adding the sixth film, we watched it through again and felt that there was someone else speaking. The collection itself has a voice, which comes from the people behind it. Those people clearly wanted to preserve these films, but didn’t present them as far as we know, and there’s nothing written about them. We wanted to track the voice of this solidarity movement and polish it. So, the film created itself – we just helped.

Watching chronologically, we noticed the changes in the film material, like the move from black and white to color, or the atmosphere around the political movements. Films that are made in 1967 talk about different things than those made in 1973 or 1982. No one before us had looked at the collection as a collection. Only sovereign people can do this kind of reproduction of archives, which intrigued the curators of documenta, but ended up annoying others. It was like, “OK, we’re in Germany: they have a certain way of forming a historical narrative.” We came in with a different narrative through this archive, one that challenged the normal representation of the “conflict” in the Middle East.

Filmmaker Magazine in conversation with Mohanad Yaqubi1

• 1Sophia Haid, Finn Jubak & Andrei Vilcov, ““A Militant Archiving Process”: Mohanad Yaqubi on R21 AKA Restoring Solidarity,” Filmmaker Magazine, 28 February 2023.