WALDEN (US, 1969, Jonas Mekas)

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TITLE CARD OF WALDEN (1969) BY JONAS MEKAS. SOURCE: WIKIMEDIA COMMONS.

 

Since 1950 I have been keeping a film diary. I have been walking around with my Bolex and reacting to the immediate reality: situations, friends, New York, seasons of the year. On some days I shot ten frames, on others ten seconds, still on others ten minutes. Or I shot nothing. When one writes diaries, it's a retrospective process: you sit down, you look back at your day, and you write it all down. To keep a film (camera) diary, is to react (with your camera) immediately, now, this instant: either you get it now, or you don't get it at all. —Jonas Mekas

FRAMES FROM WALDEN (1969) BY JONAS MEKAS. SOURCE: LIGHT INDUSTRY.

Filmed from 1964 to 1969, WALDEN is Jonas Mekas’ first completed diary film, composed of moments, people, and events captured with his Bolex 16mm camera. At once intimate and epic in scope, WALDEN vacillates between the New York avant-garde scene of the mid-to-late 1960s (with Mekas’ lens documenting such notable friends and colleagues as Andy Warhol, John Lennon, Yoko Ono, and The Velvet Underground) and quotidian moments from Mekas’ family and day-to-day life.

Dedicated to the motion picture pioneer Lumière, WALDEN established Mr. Mekas’s reputation as a personal filmmaker nonpareil… WALDEN, shot with a handheld camera and characterized by wildly kinetic bursts of imagery, broke new ground; with it, Mr. Mekas freed himself from both conventional film technique and narrative restraint… Although the focus is largely on people, WALDEN has passages of pure cinema that feel like spontaneous jazz riffs. Shooting a day breaking over the Bronx through the window of a moving train, Mr. Mekas orchestrates a percussive jumble, with a great orange sun bouncing over a jittery skyline. At times, he seems like the last Impressionist, in his mix of bucolic and urban subject matter as well as his crazy energy. WALDEN is essentially a welter of fragmentary sensations. It’s also a offhanded social history. Filming his friends and colleagues, Mr. Mekas documents be-ins and peace marches as well as the first performance of The Velvet Underground… the movie ends with a “bed-in” staged by John Lennon and Yoko Ono in the spring of 1969, only months before the film’s premiere. —J. Hoberman, The New York Times

WALDEN
(US, 1969)

Director: Jonas Mekas

  • 180 minutes
  • 16mm
  • Color
  • Sound
Distribution Format/s: DSL/Downloadable 1080p .mp4 file on server

Published By: Re:Voir Video

Institutional Price: $500

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