NOTES FROM FROM NOWE HORYZONTY — 2
Autobiography of a man who carried his memory in his eyes — Jonas Mekas (2000)
More. Notes from Wroclaw, July 2022. Yesterday I ate lunch with a friend, sat out in the street — Vietnamese — and drops of rain fell down, and then the sky cleared. I thought about (spoke about, actually) speeding the rhythm of these notes up, mostly out of the fear that I’d forget certain details, specifics. My notebook is filled with useless, incoherent notes. This is ok really.
Mekas, his body (filmic instrument). His, a process – a practice – grounded in revisitation, making him really a kind of auto-archivist. Nowhere is this more obvious than Autobiography of a man who carried his memory in his eyes. Year, 2000. Looking back at the accumulated ‘detritus’ (let’s call it that) of his life-in/as-film. Filmic instrument (his body).
For the first time, perhaps, here, in the year 2000, he angles the camera back at himself, and at the ontological question of film as a device for (re)assembling a life. In film, what remains – and what story can be told (of your life; of yourself, Etc), when the moment itself has passed? “Young people need to know what happened” (Mekas).
Field of flowers (shoulders draped in robes), lunging smiling half smiling he (body) twirls this way and that. Autobiography of a man who carried his memory in his eyes (2000), it as preceded by a portrait film shot in the front-yard of a midwestern house (a three-film programme). Mekas, drinking a beer; he addresses the camera he speaks of himself. Telling, actually, for a man whose filmic output can be understood as a project of self-making, of perpetual documentation, to state first (a) how rare his talking-to the camera (addressing is) and (b) how he remarks that really very little of his life has been subject to film. A few seconds here, a few moments there. He is right, of course; and yet we come away (from his films) with the impression that he is not so much a film-maker (a body carrying a camera) as an eye that records, constantly rolling. I think of how Blanchot spoke about Gide: “the influence of his works is in the direction of making of literature [or film, actually] a vital experience, an instrument of discovery, a means for man to feel himself, to try himself”.
Fragments come and go; like blinking. But Mekas decentres himself, the third person: autobiography of a man. He repeated this in 2012, with Out-takes from the life of a happy man. The subject is himself, but the subject is also experience – the experience of life/living. Right.
What is novel about this film – this film in particular? Really, it is the generation of an expanded frame – how Mekas demonstrates his process, how he centres his body within this making process. We glimpse his workspace: a desk, an editing/cutting machine, the crank handle he must turn to move the film forward and backward (how it moves quickly, now slowly), and the sound made by this machine, because he is recording everything, and the projector and the projected image it throws out. Such a thing destabilises Schefer’s exegesis on the cinema, of the “giant object” of the screen and the viewer/spectator who is suspended before it, almost passively – wrapt. Here, the space between lens and projected image is an entanglement of arms and gestures and intangible thoughts. Even sweat, sipped water, extraneous sounds that flow toward and into the film.
Bars of flickering black roll down the screen. These bars are unique to Autobiography. They roll down the screen like waves and the screen is then the beach, the breaker. The anatomical, embodied theorization of film – where is it located? The affective experience of film, as it were. Vivien Sobchack wrote about this in the 1980s, her phenomenology of affect. These theories centre the observer, anatomically (vision as an embodied thing, the thing which Schefer kind of disregards or shuffles away – preferring a kind of disembodied eye-seeing). What of the un-severed eye? The machine has not ‘conquered’ the body (Anne Rutherford writes this). The spatial organization of shooting applies also to editing. I’d really like to see an approach to this, because with Autobiography Mekas reminds us that the shooting-editing body is a body.
Bands of black that roll down the screen, first obscuring (like stata, layered over) then revealing. It is a slick, oil-like substance (light; its inverse) that obliterates and so creates the image. It reminds us of the body between the screen and the lens, and all of the accumulated equipment of shooting. This is a very mournful film. Mournful because we are reminded of the gap that has opened between the shot moment (the event) and the act of recollecting. Mekas is older here, and he turns his camera on himself and speaks — rarely, for him — diegetically to the camera. Time flows forward, it rushes forward. Much of the footage in this film is black and white. It really belongs to a now evacuated past.
What is left? You can always return. Editing is time-travel. You can recur, repeat. Film allows you – permits you – to return to the past, even while it demarks the absence of that past. This is a kind of cruelty. But why then is it so beautiful?
The ‘man’, past tense. Who “carried”. Words are not inconsequential for Mekas. Language is not irrelevant. It is what structures his ‘memories’. So-and-so’s wedding. Dinner with somebody. A date, a designation – and his oftentimes lyrical digressions that attempt to shore up all these seen (archived) moments and to subject them to the architecture of memory. It is like living life backwards. A body suspended between past and future. Mekas faced the past. The past carried him forward.
If you liked this newsletter then please consider liking, sharing or subscribing. It’s lonely here.