Through the rich collection that is Jonas Mekas’s Movie Journal: The Rise of the New American Cinema, 1959-1971 (2016), the reader is presented with the collected writings of Mekas as they were sketched upon the pages of his Village Voice column, which ran between the years of 1959 and 1971. This column, when presented in its full linearity, gifts the reader insofar as she can now trace the dialectical structure that gave rise to the New American Cinema. Upon reading, it becomes clear that this dialectic operated through the vicious police brutality and antagonistic censorship that encircled the filmmakers during the time of their emergence and how, in a symbiotic though resistant relationship to this, an aesthetically revolutionary and collectively unified group of artists burst forth from the gaps left by “the [agents of the] flies of the 20th century” (Mekas 50). What rose out of this technocratic tumult was Mekas’s poetic cinema. This vibrant movement was formed by an assemblage of individuals whose poetry took as its charge the altruistic and rigorous emancipation of the human from within entrenched perceptual and epistemic structures.
Not only this, however, suggests the importance of the text. Throughout his Movie Journal, Jonas Mekas grows to be an eminent thinker on the aesthetic importance of cinema as a perceptual art form. If the reader is attentive, then, she may take note of Mekas’s subtle footfall as it treads toward a phenomenological understanding of the film experience. This is quite evident if the reader notices Mekas’s suggestion that “[w]e are immune to the content and non-verbal intelligence that comes from the immediate experience of the sensed moving image […] which cannot be translated into words or […] concepts” (Mekas 84), which prophetically predates Vivian Sobchack’s seminal The Address of the Eye (1992) by thirty years. She might also glimpse the few short words that appear in Mekas’s comments on the cinema of Stan Vanderbeek, and which suggest a profound and carnal visuality “that could be neither described nor explained [as] the impact was both on our retina and a physical, kinesthetic impact, on our body” (Mekas 221). Quite breathtakingly, these few words lean toward a sensing of cinema as possessing a haptic capacity forty years before Laura Marks elegantly elucidated this multisensory tendency of cinema in her The Skin of the Film (2000).
Onward from this, where Gregory Smulewicz-Zucker in his expansive introduction suggests, as Mekas himself does, a “profoundly humanistic aesthetic sensibility drives [Mekas’s] writings,” that is, “that the camera has the potential to make us see the world anew and thus reflect on our experience and our humanity in new ways” (qtd. in Mekas xii), he fails to notice the ethico-philosophical leanings that gently traverse Mekas’s writings. Conversely, I would contend that these subtle tendencies, pictured, perhaps, in the “patch of green grass” whose efflorescence Mekas “tr[ies] to drink [with his] eyes, just enough green energy of living grass to pull [him] through the day” (300) suggest, in this instance, not only Mekas’s positioning within a tradition of thought that is shared by Walter Benjamin, Henry David Thoreau, and Simone Weil, but the importance to Mekas, though it remains explicitly unstated, of an aesthetics whose affectivity draws one into spaces that are far beyond humanism.
It is this Mekas that, quite charmingly, exceeds his own conceptually humanistic agenda at all turns as he is caught in the swirl of an ethico-philosophical project that blossoms from within a dialogue with, as stated above, Thoreau, Weil, and Benjamin, and, to cast our eyes forward, with the vital materialism of Jane Bennett. For example, where Mekas “drink[s with his] eyes [the] green energy of living grass,” so too does Walter Benjamin “breathe the aura of […] that branch [which] casts its shadow on the beholder” (Benjamin 23). In this context, Benjamin’s auratic perception, once it has been somewhat lifted from its aporetic Marxist position by Miriam Bratu Hansen in her emancipatory exegesis of Benjamin’s aura, might be reinvigorated, in the words of Ludwig Klages, as, firstly, a “form of [higher] vision [that exceeds] the ordinary conditions of seeing and bodily being so as to draw out the peculiarity of experienced reality” (qtd. in Bratu Hansen 369). And, secondly, it is understood as, to quote Benjamin again, “appear[ing] in all things, not just in certain kinds of things, as people imagine” (qtd. in Bratu Hansen 336).
Though toward different ends, Benjamin and Mekas share an emphasis in that an enlightened and elevated perception has the capacity to recognize, for Benjamin, “an elusive phenomenal substance, ether, or halo that surrounds a person or object of perception” (Bratu Hansen 339) as it “appear[s] in all things,” and, for Mekas, that “[a] man is one thing, a tree is another thing, a stone still another […]. And each [was] a field of energy and they acted upon each other and all […] were life” (Mekas 317). Further purchase can be gained upon the footholds of Mekas’s thought if when looking toward the writings of Henry David Thoreau we notice his insistence on a need to “let my senses wander as my thought, my eyes see without looking. […] Be not preoccupied with looking. […] What I need is not to look at all, but a true sauntering of the eye” (Bennett 28). This desire to “[g]o not to the object; let it come to you” (Bennett 28) finds a partner in Simone Weil’s attentiveness, which is that “effort without desire” that, when “tak[en] to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love” (Weil 232). This Weilian prayer, or the ocular sauntering of Thoreau, quite boldly presents itself in Mekas’s thought when he posits, after a viewing of Andy Warhol’s Empire (1964), that “with the shift of our consciousness […] we [will] be able to find aesthetic enjoyment in the subtle play of nuances. There is something religious about this. […] If all people could sit and watch the Empire State Building for eight hours and meditate upon it, there would be no more wars, no hate, no terror – there would be happiness regained upon earth” (Mekas 161).
I would suggest that the tracing of this poetic philosophy that tends toward an ethics of immanent naturalism, in which one may recognize and love unconditionally the recalcitrant life of grass or stones, becomes, despite the fact that it is, as Smulewicz-Zucker quite rightly states, diffused and couched beneath Mekas’s etchings, the most pleasurable and productive way to appreciate Mekas’s often frantic though always captivating penmanship. This is largely due to the fact that Mekas’s ethics are characteristically nomadic, appearing, as it were, in a moribund burst that rises with the boiling blood of the self-proclaimed “raving maniac of cinema” (Mekas 85) only to elude total capture as it dissipates and settles back into his ever-ensuing calm. This, I would contend, adds vibrancy to the text insofar as his elusive ethics, elusive even in their capacity to escape Mekas himself, draws one toward themselves continually only to retreat back into the textual body in a playful game of chase.
If, then, at the closing of Mekas’s text this latent and elusive tenderness has been teased out, it becomes all the more charming that, when looking backward to the journal’s first few words, one finds a hint toward how Mekas’s writings might grip us and present to us their subtle efficacious affectivity. As Mekas says of Maya Deren, and we might say of Mekas; “With all the depth of Maya Deren’s content, we are caught first, not by the intellect of her films, but by the intensity of their visual rhythms, since she is an artist using cinema in its purest sense” (Mekas 7).
Here, if the reader might be comfortable in substituting cinema for writer, she has before her a Movie Journal that offers up not only a topographical map of the poetic cinema in its emergence, but a journal that suggests an ethics that speaks of and to the human and its aesthetics, only to extend far beyond her and into a porous space where cinema “do[esn’t] pretend to do or give you anything, [it is] just there, singing, praying, [like] a stone in the river, a road, a tree, like the birds and like the lilies” (Mekas 286).
With this gentle playfulness colouring the text, and as Mekas’s project quite comfortably stands astride an ethical poetics and a journalistic mapping of the rising New American Cinema, the text presents itself as a rich repository for the academic as well as the lover of cinema. The flowing entries of the journal, written, it sometimes seems, in a hurried dash of anger, joy or sadness, present Mekas’s thoughts as if they were being drawn from a pulsating caesura, allowing the reader to vividly grasp not only the temporal map of Mekas’s poetic cinema but also the tempestuous emotional climate that shaped the movement, thus encouraging her toward a far more holistic understanding of the New American Cinema’s emergence. Through this mode, then, Mekas’s Movie Journal provides a gentle, though gripping, entrance into a richly challenging field of cinema and thought.
Bibliography
Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Second Version.” The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media. Ed. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty and Thomas Y. Levin. Trans Edmund Jephcott, Rodney Livingstone, Howard Eiland, et al. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 19-55. Print.
Bennett, Jane. Thoreau’s Nature: Ethics, Politics, and the Wild. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 1994. Print.
Bratu Hansen, Miriam. “Benjamin’s Aura.” Critical Inquiry 34. 2 (2008): 336-375. Web. 28 Sept. 2016.
Marks, Laura U. The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses. London: Duke University Press, 2000. Print.
Mekas, Jonas. Movie Journal: The Rise of the New American Cinema, 1959-1971. 2nd ed. Ed. Gregory Smulewicz-Zucker. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016. Print.
Sobchack, Vivian. The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. Web. 29 Sept. 2016.
Weil, Simone. “Attention and Will.” Simone Weil: An Anthology. Ed. Sian Miles. London: Virago Press, 1986. 231-237. Print.
Filmography
Warhol, Andy (1964), Empire.
Author Biography
Chris Dymond is a student at the University of Manchester. He greatly admires those individuals that made up the second-wave of American Avant-Garde film, as well as those who became the North American Structural/Materialists.
Book Details
Movie Journal: The Rise of the New American Cinema, 1959-1971, second edition, Jonas Mekas, (2016)
New York: Columbia University Press, 448pp., ISBN: 0231175574 (pbk), $26.00
