Movie Journal

The Rise of the New American Cinema, 1959-1971

Jonas Mekas

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2016
• Edition: 2
• eBook ISBN:
  9780231541589
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

In his Village Voice "Movie Journal" columns, Jonas Mekas captured the makings of an exciting movement in 1960s American filmmaking. Works by Andy Warhol, Gregory J. Markapoulos, Stan Brakhage, Jack Smith, Robert Breer, and others echoed experiments already underway elsewhere, yet they belonged to a nascent tradition that only a true visionary could identify. Mekas incorporated the most essential characteristics of these films into a unique conception of American filmmaking's next phase. He simplified complex aesthetic strategies for unfamiliar audiences and appreciated the subversive genius of films that many dismissed as trash. This new edition presents Mekas's original critiques in full, with additional material on the filmmakers, film studies scholars, and popular and avant-garde critics whom he inspired and transformed.

1959

February 4, 1959

CALL FOR A DERANGEMENT OF CINEMATIC SENSES

Every breaking away from the conventional, dead, official cinema is a healthy sign. We need less perfect but more free films. If only our younger film-makers—I have no hopes for the old generation—would really break loose, completely loose, out of themselves, wildly, anarchically! There is no other way to break the frozen cinematic conventions than through a complete derangement of the official cinematic senses.

February 25, 1959

MAYA DEREN AND THE FILM POEM

The Very Eye of Night, Maya Deren’s latest film, was premiered at a recent retrospective show of her films at the Living Theatre, then given two further command performances at the Cherry Lane.

It would be unjust even to attempt to review the film in this narrow space. One can describe the plot and a few situations of the usual dramatic motion picture. But it is impossible to capture in words a film which is, basically, a poem, and which affects us not by its story but through its visual associations and symbols.

As in our contacts with literature, certain areas of feelings are often pushed into the background by too long an exposure to “sober,” epic forms like the novel. Poetry asks for more sensitivity. So the sober ones say: What is all this about Maya Deren’s films? What is all this fuss about Brakhage, Maas, and Richter?

But to me, The Very Eye of Night is a very thought-out film, clear and crystalline. Maya Deren differs from most of the other experimentalists through her clarity of purpose, clarity of images, universality of symbols. Every poet works in a specific area of feeling, and the area in which Maya Deren digs is not so much her own personal subconscious as a universal subconscious. Passed through her own temperament, the images and symbols acquire a midwinter-sky clarity, with the shining blade of a ceremonial knife sticking out of the moon’s blood.

The Very Eye of Night is best understood in the context of Miss Deren’s whole work, as we trace her inner journey through the space-time breakings, through the modern myths imagery, black-white rituals. The movements and tensions of her films seem to be predestined. The unfolding, growth, and climax of Meshes of the Afternoon, now reinforced by Teiji Ito’s score, have something of the tragic predestination of Greek tragedy, while the suspense is trembling on that blade of a knife. Although The Very Eye of Night is less tense, it has the same tragic predestination of the stars.

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. The intricacy of the various levels of her thoughts and the under-structures of the movies are consciously known only to Maya Deren herself. To us they are hidden beyond these crystal tense black-white images—a hidden snare of her imagination waiting there in the film’s psyche to catch us at the right moment in the right way and work slowly into us.

Since we are nourished on the epic picture only, I have no illusions that film poetry will ever be understood and felt by very many. Most of the time poetical feelings are considered weak and unmanly. The farthest that our “sober” audience can go to meet poetry is in a narrative poetic picture like the Polish Two Men and a Wardrobe, because “it has a story to tell,” or because “it is a straightforward film.”

But during the showing of Maya Deren’s films at the Living Theatre, the place was bursting with people—sitting everywhere on the floor, standing by the walls, on the stairway—a most unusual and exultant moment for a film poet to experience in this sober world.

August 12, 1959

WHAT THE DEVILS WILL DO TO THE DISTRIBUTOR OF LOLA MONTES IN HELL

I’d give much to know which circle of Hell our film-distributors will go to, especially the distributor of Max Ophuls’ masterpiece and crowning achievement, Lola Montes. In all probability, Lucifer will force this distributor to write, again and again, in the blazing heat of Hell’s midsummer, his new title, Sins of Lola Montes, invented in a moment of mundane inspiration. That will not be all. I think he will also be forced to eat, frame by frame, all the sixty-five minutes of the film that he cut out, and I bet he will vomit it out before he finishes the last frame. So that he will have to start from the beginning again.

But more than that—at the same time he will have to restore the film to its original shape—the film which he, in his short earthly life, has dubbed and cut and mixed all up and, as H. G. Weinberg put it, “twisted ass-frontwards.” But since this distributor is blind as a bat, he will never know how to do it, as he never knew in his life what Lola Montes was all about. So the little devils will come around and they will tear out chunks of his flesh, exactly sixty-five minutes of it, and will twist him all around, with his poor back part frontwards.

The brothers Sanders, however, may get away with all that, being young and inexperienced—for massacring Feodor Dostoevski in their film Crime and Punishment, U.S.A. At least their attempt to transfer Dostoevski to modern America was well-intentioned. But, again, as we all know, Hell is paved with good intentions too. And then, maybe it was not even their idea, but someone else’s.

Still, the first film of these two young and talented brothers has a visual freshness and directorial imagination that often goes beyond the grasp of the usual contemporary Hollywood. Its main failure is in its dialogue, which, when translated, sounds like bad dubbing or Sammy Davis, Jr., singing in Chaliapin’s voice. You cannot transplant Dostoevski to modern America without changing his dialogue and his plot completely. Only the central idea should be left.

This is why Anouilh or Cocteau get away with the old Greek myths in their plays. In Orpheus or Antigone, although recognizable elements of the plot are retained, the central ideas are explored from completely different, contemporary, and personal angles. So, instead of just repeating them, Anouilh or Cocteau add to the old myths, expand them, revitalize them, and make them meaningful again. The Sanders film does almost the opposite: It shrinks Dostoevski to the size of a midget.

As I said, however, youth forgives and is forgivable. But not the premeditated massacre of Lola Montes.

October 14, 1959

ON NEW MOVIEHOUSE ARCHITECTURE

When I went to see Pillow Talk, I was given a program printed and laid out like a menu. So I knew immediately that I was going to get a dish, with a lot of Technicolor cream on top, and that I could sit, relax, and dream with all the pleasures of a full belly. The psychology of the new Murray Hill Theatre is that clever.

However, I noticed a few contradictions. After I walked inside, holding onto that menu, I found myself in a place that was lit up in a dreamy, bluish, Turkish-bordello sort of light. As soon as I sat down, two black sticks suddenly descended upon the screen and went back again where they had come from, with—to my great amazement—nothing particular happening. After I got used to this wonder of subliminal architecture (and after I had briefly reflected upon the sad fact that the children of the UN executives are so underfed that the Murray Hill Theatre had to raise money for them), the film began. Looking at the most impressive leg I have seen in a long time—which, by the way, belonged to Doris Day—I felt that slowly I was descending into a dream-world.

But not quite. I did not know the Murray Hill Theatre was following the Brechtian estrangement technique. They got the most uncomfortable comfortable chairs they could find and they squeezed them together as tightly as they could—you know: another chair, another buck, and I can’t blame them—so that during the movie you would be constantly reminded that you are in a “real” theatre: no false illusions, no false dreams. Which, I think, is clever.

Still, after a while (if you’ve heard about Pavlov’s experiments, you know why) I managed to concentrate on the film, which, for Hollywood, is not bad at all. It is a comedy, by the way. The director and the writers managed at least to be economical, direct, and to the point with their clichés. The designer was doing everything to make the movie look visually “modern”—that means to keep it in Madison Avenue designing styles.

To modernize its content they also threw in—very ingenious, Indeed—occasional references to the “beatniks.” That made it really work. And that made me finally understand something I have been feeling for some time now: That there is a basic difference between “beatnik” and “the beat.” Whereas “beat” means—you know what it means—check Kerouac and Norman Mailer’s essays, the word “beatnik” is the bourgeois, outsider’s conception of “beat,” a product of uptowners, tourists, Judge Leibowitz, the (thus like Pillow Talk, etc.—not a description, but a mental projection that carries all the crap of their crooked vulgar imaginations.

November 18, 1959

PULL MY DAISY AND THE TRUTH OF CINEMA

Alfred Leslie’s and Robert Frank’s Pull My Daisy has finally been premiered at Cinema 16, and those who saw it will now (I hope) understand why I was so enthusiastic about it. I don’t see how I can review any film after Pull My Daisy without using it as a signpost. As much of a signpost in cinema as The Connection is in modern theatre. Both The Connection and Pull My Daisy clearly point toward new directions, new ways out of the frozen officialdom and midcentury senility of our arts, toward new themes, a new sensibility.

The photography itself, its sharp, direct black-white, has a visual beauty and truth that is completely lacking in recent American and European films. The hygienic slickness of our contemporary films, be they from Hollywood, Paris, or Sweden, is a contagious sickness that seems to be catching through space and time. Nobody seems to be learning anything, either from Lumière or from the neorealists: Nobody seems to realize that the quality of photography in cinema is as important as its content, its ideas, its actors. It is photography that is the midwife, that carries life from the street to the screen, and it depends on photography whether this life will arrive on the screen still alive. Robert Frank has succeeded in transplanting life—and in his very first film. And that is the highest praise I can think of. Directorially, Pull My Daisy is returning to where the true cinema first began, to where Lumière left off. When we watch Lumière’s first films—the train coming into the station, the baby being fed, or a street scene—we believe him, we believe he is not faking, not pretending. Pull My Daisy reminds us again of that sense of reality and immediacy that is cinema’s first property.

One should not misunderstand me: There are many approaches to cinema, and it depends on one’s consciousness, sensitivity, and temperament which style one chooses, and it also depends on which style is more characteristic to the times. The style of neorealism was not a sheer accident. It grew out of the postwar realities, out of the subject matter. It is the same with the new spontaneous cinema of Pull My Daisy. In a sense, Alfred Leslie, Robert Frank and Jack Kerouac, the film’s author-narrator, are only enacting their times in the manner the prophets do: The time expresses its truths, its styles, its messages, and its desperations through the most sensitive of its members—often against their own consciousness. It is therefore that I consider Pull My Daisy, in all its inconsequentially, the most alive and the most truthful of films.

November 25, 1959

SHOOT THE SCREENWRITERS

There is no doubt that most of the dullness of our movies is concocted in advance in the so-called heads of the so-called script-writers. Not only the dullness: They also perpetuate the standardized film constructions, dialogues, plots. They follow closely their textbooks of “good” screenwriting. Shoot all scriptwriters, and we may yet have a rebirth of American cinema.

December 23, 1959

ON FIGHTING UGLINESS WITH UGLINESS

I sat down to write this column in a gloomy mood. It is Christmastime; there is something in the air, some kind of ideal. And all this ugliness around me, all these ugly films! And through my window I can see a corner of the Women’s Prison.

Still, I have to write.

You can go and suffer through the heavy unimaginativeness of Black Orpheus and make your life still more miserable. Or you can go to Aromarama, a travelogue through China, accompanied with smells. You can smell the orange, you can smell the pine tree, you can smell the harbor. You walk out full of concentrated nulls, and you gasp for fresh air; or you rush to wash out your hair and take your suit to the cleaner. Still, all this is fun: You pay your money for it. All this would leave nothing but a memory of a practical joke, if the distributor hadn’t added to the film an anti-Chinese commentary to make it anti-China propaganda. Which is ugly, ugly, ugly, and cannot be killed with any smells.

Kramer’s On the Beach and Kobayashi’s The Human Condition are more documents than films. The first reminds us of the absurdities of our own militarists (today’s headlines: “U.S. Informs NATO It Leads Russians in Nuclear Arms, Will Keep Edge”…“Youths in Jail Get Military Classes”); the second reminds us of the atrocities of the Japanese in Manchuria. As such, both pictures make their points.

But then I thought:

So what? Don’t we have enough ugliness already? And don’t we know these thin...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Foreword: The Great Mr. Mekas
• Introduction To The Second Edition
• Introduction
• 1: 1959
• 2: 1960
• 3: 1961
• 4: 1962
• 5: 1963
• 6: 1964
• 7: 1965
• 8: 1966
• 9: 1967
• 10: 1968
• 11: 1969
• 12: 1970
• 13: 1971
• Afterword
• Appendix
• Acknowledgments
• Index
• Series List