Jonas Mekas:
Selfies Won!
by Jamie Jobb
And that’s just for cameras. It doesn’t account for cell phones that shoot photos and video! Nor does it consider that odd beast called “Light Field Photography” where the camera has no single point of view and “photos” are reconstructed from light data collected at a scene..
Magnum’s self-reflective re-examination among professional journalistic photographers is quite telling for the group started by war photographers Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, George Rodger and David "Chim" Seymour. They were black-and-white still photographers looking for “the decisive moment” as Cartier-Bresson called it.
Now Magnum’s hallowed halls of photojournalism are abandoned or made irrelevant as members drift into territory that for half a century was only ambled by Jonas Mekas, Lionel Rogosin, Alan Berliner and other diary filmmakers who sought some other kind of autobiographical “decisive moment”.
Let's recall that the heyday of "personal journalism" also was half a century ago. Reporters like Jimmy Breslin, Tom Wolfe, Nat Hentoff were trying on first-person writing styles for New York newspapers at the same time Mekas was projecting his very personal public home movies for audiences in The Village. These “personal” styles recognized the prime significance of the observer’s point of view, and the writers did not hide behind any veil of “objective” truth-telling. Their dispatches read like diaries.
* * *
I met Jonas Mekas in Gainesville Florida right before we moved to California in the spring of 1970. My friend Larry Robinson ran a local theater group which had invited Jonas to town to lecture. Now Larry was calling me the night before the lecture ... at 1 a.m.!
Larry asked straight away: “Can you get a Bolex?”
What?!? A Bolex is a hand-cranked 16mm camera used at that time to make short motion pictures. Or for news reporting. Or by auteurs of the French Nouvelle Vague. It also was the trusty rugged hand-held portable camera we used at school when we studied filmmaking as a short unit within our photojournalism course. That’s where I learned to “edit-in-camera” and to work fast at the scene of a story. And how to hand-crank the dang thing all the time, it had no battery! Ah, The Bolex, yes ... But, Larry: it’s 1 a.m.!
“Jonas Mekas wants a Bolex,” Larry insisted. “He left his in New York!”
Oh no! Mekas was renowned at the time as an underground filmmaker who wrote a weekly column for The Village Voice that spoke for avant-garde filmmakers all across America. We felt honored that he’d come to Florida to talk to our small group of campus filmmakers and theater folk.
He founded Film Culture magazine and was director of the Film-Makers’ Cinematheque. A Lithuanian war refugee, Mekas also helped develop the Film-Makers’ Cooperative when everyone really worked in actual “film” and video wasn’t an option because the gear was too big and costly.
Now Jonas is called “the godfather of American avant-garde cinema”.
* * *
Mekas wanted a Bolex in Gainesville and the only available one I knew about was locked in the library stacks on the University of Florida campus. We didn’t have a way to get it on a weekend. This was late Saturday and he was lecturing Sunday. Film cameras were not ubiquitous in those days long before people had constant cell phone video capability.
Instead Larry and I took Mekas without a camera to Devil’s Millhopper State Park. No “diary” film of that February day in 1970 exists, just a dim memory. I recall it because I wrote about it for the local paper. I doubt Mekas, at 93, recalls much of it. I wrote:
“The Millhopper – that Scenic Sinkhole – was quite busy, but we found a place to park. Water from the previous week’s heavy rains had inundated the bottom and Mekas was impressed. He swung on a long vine and yelled something about ‘Tarzan’. Later he lamented his lack of a camera.”
Me too. It would be great to have a film clip of what I saw there in the Florida jungle sinkhole full of rushing water: a small middle-aged man flying through the trees yelling like Tarzan on a vine in bellbottom pants! Instead I’m left with the diary filmmaker’s paradox regarding “decisive moments” – Why do some moments get captured, but most do not?
Mekas, who had been quite silent during our day together, got downright loquacious when the crowd assembled for his talk that night. I covered his lecture for The Gainesville Sun.
“Non-narrative film is the only significant development in cinema in the last ten years,” he said, also pointing out that the films we had been showing on campus to represent ‘New Cinema’ did not represent avant-garde film at all! “They are selected by businessmen who think Europe is the only place short films are being made. Their films are lousy, boring, stupid, banal.”
He then showed us several of his “diary films” which were none of the above – lousy, boring, stupid, or banal. The first time we’d ever seen such things, except perhaps for our families’ own home-movies. I wrote, in summary:
“It flowed. It also jumped quite a bit (due mostly to the single-framing). And it was hard on the eyes after a while. However the films changed pace at most of the right moments, and the images were more recognizable – more ‘realistic’ -- than most experimental films I’ve seen. Content was another matter – obscure things like ‘Wendy’s Wedding’, New York winter scenes, a circus. Mekas called them ‘diary films’ but it wasn’t that simple. It must be edited to make any sense, he said. The films continued. I understood why he wanted a Bolex.”
When you look at his prolific output, you’ll see the long life of Jonas Mekas has been one recorded film recollection after another. That’s why he puts the day’s date on each of his films. Diary, indeed!
Historically speaking, Mekas works at the other end of the spectrum from Thomas Edison and the Lumiere Brothers, men who made the movies move … Jonas Mekas rendered their money-making machines mundane, like a notebook or a sketch pencil. He was producing “selfies” long before anyone knew what that meant.
Spending just one day with that famous cinematic diarist was enough to change my approach to filmmaking forever. I realize now that Mekas introduced me to non-narrated storytelling. And that approach has carried over, naturally, into my video work whether I’m dealing with fact or fiction subjects. Also, a quick gander at “reality tv” or “You Tube” proves the world has been following Mekas’ lead without really knowing it. Filmmakers are still trying out ways to get stories to tell themselves.
* * *
Recently I got an email from my friend Ben Howell Davis (http://benhowelldavis.com/) who was responding to an article I’d sent about how “selfies” are putting portrait photographers out of business. Ben said he’d recently quit teaching a photography class at an Art and Design school, although at first he was excited to take the job because the class required students to use film, 35mm cameras, chemicals and a darkroom like we had in college. He built a syllabus for the class as well as a website for students to find assignments, receive explicit instructions, and chat about their projects.
But he wrote “ … as the semester went on I was more and more disappointed that the students were most concerned about their grades, and not the photos. When we had teacher evaluations, a lot of them complained that I didn't give them explicit directions for assignments which of course was untrue. It was all very disillusioning and I decided that I would not venture into academia ever again … “Selfies won!”
Apparently Jonas Mekas knew that was going to happen all along.
The author in sleeve-face as Clint Eastwood’s son Scott (photo by Dena Zachariah)
FURTHERMORE:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonas_Mekas
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonas_Mekas_Visual_Arts_Center
http://jonasmekasfilms.com/books/index.php?book=I_had_nowhere_to_go
http://camstl.org/exhibitions/front-room/jonas-mekas-walden-diaries-notes-and-sketches-part-6-1969-/
https://archive.org/details/commencementaddr00meka/page/n5/mode/2up
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/15/movies/sleepless-nights-stories-by-jonas-mekas-review.html?_r=1
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/18/nyregion/jonas-mekas-refuses-to-fade.html?_r=0
http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2016/06/03/a-raving-maniac-of-the-cinema/
http://anthologyfilmarchives.org/about/history
Full Magnum documentary (Martin Parr comment at 39:40):
More about The New Bolex: http://www.bolex.ch/NEW/?p=2
Lionel Rogosin, with Mekas, founded New American Cinema:
http://www.documentary.org/feature/american-neorealism-lionel-rogosin’s-docs-reconsidered
https://www.fandor.com/films/black_roots
https://www.fandor.com/films/on_the_bowery
https://www.fandor.com/films/come_back_africa
Also see Alan Berliner another autobiographical filmmaker:
http://www.alanberliner.com/about.php?pag_id=61
https://www.youtube.com/user/alanjayberliner
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdUvpEZvoEw
TAGS:DID NOT FIT:
Nouvelle Vague, edit-in-camera, Village Voice, Film Culture, Film-Makers' Cinematheque, avant-garde cinema, University of Florida, Devil's Millhopper, sinkhole, Tarzan, The Gainesville Sun, non-narrative film, Thomas Edison, Lumiere Brothers, photography class
“Selfies Won” - photo by Martin Parr (Magnum)
I first made a “selfie" back in 1974, using an SLR with a good wide angle lens. Why? we were on a remote mountain top in the Olympics, and NOBODY ELSE was there. I couldn’t ask a marmot to take our picture. Occasionally, I’d brace the camera on a rock and use the self timer in order to get us all in the image. Nothing “new” about selfies whatsoever.
ReplyDeletesubmitted by John Lindstrom
San Francisco Chronicle's Marissa Lang writes from the not-so-fast department:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Most-Americans-don-t-like-selfies-study-finds-9144185.php
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/23/obituaries/jonas-mekas-dead.html
ReplyDelete