Celebration and abstraction: the documentary mode of Jonas Mekas's diary films
ENIn the 1960s, the Lithuanian American filmmaker, poet, and critic Jonas Mekas (1922–2019) was one of the pivotal representatives of the New American Cinema movement and published his signature “diary films,” including Diaries, Notes, and Sketches (also known as Walden) (1969), Reminiscences from a Journey to Lithuania (1972), or Lost, Lost, Lost (1976). These works are known for their fleeting record and ‘celebration’ of everyday life between the city and idyllic nature, work and leisure. Mekas’ documentary aesthetic follows two divergent principles: On the one hand, it bears a clear neo-avant-garde mark by virtue of the “shaky camera” (Mekas), constructive editing, and a noisy soundtrack. On the other hand, this materiality and physicality is filtered through a temporal distance, a ‘gap’ between the captured moment and the rearrangement of its footage. The films represent a search for the past—Mekas’s Lithuanian childhood, his years in German Labor and DP camps, and his first years in Brooklyn—through poetic voiceover comments and inserted citations. Avant-garde estrangement devices are thus contrasted by a poetics of memory and lament. Paradoxically, this discrepancy between formalism and nostalgia constitutes Mekas’ original abstract documentary mode. Keywords: Jonas Mekas, documentary, ego-documents, diary film, 1960s, abstractionism, New American Cinema, underground, avant-garde, emigration.
