La última carta fílmica de José Luis Guerin a Jonas Mekas (2011) para la exposición Todas las cartas. Correspondencias fílmicas constituye un diálogo intimista entre sus orígenes como cineasta, el ...reciente tsunami acaecido en Japón y el viaje místico realizado por él a este país un año antes, entre otras cosas, para renovar la botella de sake que el año previo había dejado en la tumba de Yasujiro Ozu como homenaje a otro de sus maestros en el cine. Tras los casos de violencia histórica comentados en las cartas anteriores, la mirada estática, estética y dialéctica sobre los libros y otros objetos de su pasado en Barcelona, sobre los gestos de las mujeres que limpian pausada y alegremente el cementerio, sobre las hormigas que suben una pequeña ramita por la tumba de Ozu o sobre las hojas movidas por el viento se manifiesta como la mejor arma para trascender el yo y reconocer al otro, eliminando la dicotomía sujeto-objeto. Desde un giro estético que abandona posicionamientos universalistas y preceptivos, Guerin enseña la capacidad del cine para desarrollar el pausado y personal compromiso con lo que hay más allá de la cámara, impulsando un acercamiento antirreduccionista que necesita de tiempo para establecer la continuidad entre el yo y el otro. De esta manera, se rompe la división entre forma y contenido, imágenes y discurso, lo individual y lo cultural y, en definitiva, se promueve la simbiosis entre ética, estética y empatía.
Este artigo explora o diálogo entre Lost Lost Lost (1976), filme do cineasta lituano Jonas Mekas, e seu diário escrito, I Had Nowhere to Go. Diary of a Displaced Person (1991), a partir do problema ...do exílio de um sobrevivente dos DP camps, da Segunda Guerra Mundial, tendo em vista discussões que perpassam uma epistemologia do ensaio enquanto gesto político a legitimar um novo regime de visibilidade no cinema tanto quanto problematizar a experiência da subjetividade do ser deslocado. Sob esse ponto de vista, Lost Lost Lost, filme mais autobiográfico de Mekas, oferece um singular registro de reconstrução da memória e do processo de aculturação na América. O diário de Mekas, escrito entre 1944 e 1955, constitui-se como matéria fundacional na compreensão de um projeto estético fundado na urgência da primeira pessoa escritural
In this article, I argue that by considering Ludwig Wittgenstein's methods, we can better understand and appreciate Jonas Mekas's diary films. Based on Wittgenstein's notion of “aesthetic ...puzzlement”, I identify the main confusions encountered by the viewer upon watching Mekas's films, such as: 1) fragmentation; 2) persistent repetition; and 3) the importance placed on the everyday. I discuss three films – Walden (1969), Lost Lost Lost (1976), and As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty (2000) – and demonstrate that the aesthetic puzzlements within them may be dissolved by looking at the format of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations (1953). Mekas's lifelong interest in filming the most mundane and domestic scenes can be understood as a puzzlement in itself: why not just admire the ordinary whilst living in it? Wittgenstein's thought experiment in Culture and Value helps us understand the aesthetic puzzlement of Mekas's interest in filming, remembering and presenting an extensive array of everyday activities, and also explains why the viewer can find the most mundane and domestic activities in his films remarkable. Additionally, I discuss how Mekas's diary films may be regarded as coming close to Wittgenstein's aesthetic ideal of art as being able to represent “life itself”. I aim to show how Mekas's cinematic practice places extreme importance on ordinary acts and offers a mode of thinking which echoes Wittgenstein's own views on philosophy. I conclude with a discussion of “nomadism”, a notion that elucidates the peculiar form of the works of both Wittgenstein and Mekas.
The article examines Jonas Mekas's immigrant experience through a close analysis of his diary film Lost, Lost, Lost (1976). After explaining Mekas's diary film practice, it studies the narrative of ...his American immigrant experience, helped by the chronotopic approach to literary analysis proposed by Mikhail Bakhtin.
Pramaggiore explores the dynamics of marketing "queer" works and how narrative conventions in cinema are revised (or not) in the interest of appealing to a relatively "non-queer" audience.
On a map or from the air, nothing defines New York City
more clearly than the rectilinearity of Central Park at the heart of the
curvilinear island
of Manhattan. And nothing encodes the paradox of ...the thinking that
created Frederick Law Olmsted's first great park
– and simultaneously
distinguishes it from many of the parks inspired by Central Park
– than the
virtually perfect geometry of its outline. The Park simultaneously
confirms the grid structure of the streets of Manhattan and dramatically
interrupts this structure: streets that run vertically uptown and downtown
or horizontally across town must, when they reach the horizontal and
vertical boundaries of the park, leave their verticality and horizontality
behind to traverse the Park before rejoining the grid of streets and
avenues at the far boundaries of the Park's expanse.
If the Cartesian clarity
of midtown Manhattan has come to represent the efficiency of American
capitalism that was making the United States a major industrial power
during the years when the Greensward Plan was designed and Central
Park constructed, the Park represented (and continues to represent) a
counter-sensibility: as Olmstead and Vaux predicted.
Jonas Mekas
Art in America (1939),
01/2022, Volume:
110, Issue:
1
Magazine Article
Jonas Mekas (1922-2019) is best known for his work in support of other filmmakers, but he was also a prolific creator in his own right, making videos and installations that married documentary and ...diaristic approaches, taking advantage of portable cameras to capture his relationships to people and places. "Jonas Mekas: The Camera Was Always Running" at the Jewish Museum, where Mekas ran a film program from 1968 to 1971, coincides with a separate but related retrospective in Mekas's home country of Lithuania, at the National Gallery of Art in Vilnius, on view through Feb. 27, 2022; both mark the centenary of his birth.
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