Film Matters Magazine

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. Continue reading →

Captain Fantastic (Bleecker Street Media, 2016)

Captain Fantastic (Ross, 2016) imagines an intellectual experiment in child-rearing. In it, Ben Cash (Viggo Mortensen) and his wife, Leslie (Trin Miller), have decided to raise their spawn in a remote area of the Pacific Northwest. We enter the story after she, the victim of episodes of paranoid schizophrenia, kills herself in a Texas hospital, leaving Ben to care for their six children on his own. Leslie’s treatment has been paid for by her wealthy parents, who had considered Ben to blame for Leslie’s condition and who had demanded that he stay away from their daughter. When word reaches Ben that Leslie’s parents plan on ignoring Leslie’s Buddhist wishes by giving her a Christian funeral, he bolts into action and decides that he and the kids will attend. After a short discussion, Ben and the kids jump on their bus “Steve” and begin the journey south. The majority of the film concerns the culture clash between the sheltered, yet highly educated and cultured kids, and contemporary society. Continue reading →