SCENES FROM THE LIFE OF A HAPPY MAN: THE FILMS OF JONAS MEKAS
Fri 1/20 – Sat 2/18 @ Harvard Film Archive

Few aspects of contemporary reality inspire more anxiety and dread than the surveillance state, whose indetectable, inescapable, ever-compounding eye colonizes our putatively personal space and time by recording and reporting them to government, industry, or to whomever or whatever receives or thieves its feed. For decades, the now 93-year-old Jonas Mekas has offered a camera-positive inversion of this nightmare scenario, in which the gaze is always personal and the process of grazing and collecting images serves poiesis rather than power. A legendary figure whose influence looms large over every aspect of the last half-century of American avant-garde filmmaking, Mekas’ own work is predicated upon productive contradictions, most saliently that between the cinematic panopticon of his ever-rolling camera—whether 8mm, 16mm, or, eventually, digital—and the delicately lyrical, light-suffused, eminently breathable quality of his so-called film-diaries. Mekas’ films may seem to go on forever, yet they are miniaturist and momentific, never totalizing and brutal. Though some of his films feature an impressive array of his bohemian acquaintances, from Warhol and Maciunas to Yoko Ono, they bear no resemblance to “documentary” in the sense we’re used to; these are passing scenes as seen by a passing self. While his self may be passing, it is not past: Mekas himself will be on hand for a couple of the HFA’s screenings, and his films are built to outlast the collapse of our age’s shabby panopticons.
–Matthew Martens