Lately I’ve been watching and re-watching the films of Jonas Mekas – or of the so-called “godfather of American avant-garde cinema”. The all-time favorites of mine are As I Was Moving Ahead, Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty (2000) and Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania (1971–72). His films are built as video-diaries that seek to capture the beauty of what is ordinary – what appears, at first sight, to be the most mundane and ephemeral moments of our everyday life.
This week I’ve had an unexpected chance to attend a public talk with Mekas himself. When somebody commented on his immense “archive” of footage and asked how he chooses among all of it what deserves to be included into a film, he replied “I’m not an archivist. I’m not a collector. […] There is no rationality or order in my choices. […] There are no flashy things, no big drama in my films. The beauty of ordinary moments is hardest to capture”.
Here’s a small excerpt from his film:
So it made me wonder: is this the right strategy to follow if we want to notice the fleeting beauty of the mundane and the evanescent in our own lives?
Let me ask you something. How many times today were you distracted by your experience of the present moment? I suspect that the count is critically low. Our minds are constantly busy thinking about the past and worrying about the future. We multitask. We make lists of things to do and worry when they are not done. We spend lots of energy feeling unsatisfied with our lives and we try to fix this by spending our hard-earned cash and buying stuff that we do not need. It gives us a brief satisfaction until we just want the next thing. Who has time for “the present” when there are so many things to be done, so many tasks to be fulfilled? It’s almost as if you have to put up a front of a “busy person” if you want to be accepted as a respectable and worthy person. You should always be in a rush and let everyone know how stressed out you are by a never-ending flow of duties. And don’t forget to feel guilty if you are not busy enough and actually have the time to experience “now and here” – to be mindful.
Contrary to our fixation on the “doing” mode, the films of Jonas Mekas are a meditation of being in and noticing the present. They flow gently and quietly, filled with random moments of daily life. And exactly because there are no big flashy things in their storyline, these constellations of ephemeral randomness reveal what’s beautiful in our own mundane lives.
I’m getting a video camera to record my story of the ordinary.
memories of the future 