Movie Journal, by Jonas Mekas

second edition

foreword by peter bogdanovich

movie journal the rise of the new american cinema,

1959-1971

jonas mekas

edited, with an introduction, by gregory smulewicz-zucker

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Introduction JONAS MEKAS

Excerpt One from my True Diaries: November 8, 1958. I am a regionalist, that’s what I am. I always belong somewhere. Drop me anywhere, into a dry, most lifeless, dead, stone place where nobody likes to live— and I’ll begin to grow and soak it, like a sponge. No abstract internationalism for me. Nor do I put my stakes on the future: I am now and here. Is this because I was uprooted from my home by force? Is that why I always feel a need for a new home because I don’t really belong anywhere but there, in that one place, which was my childhood and which is gone forever?

That year, sometime during the summer of 1958, I decided to make another run for life. My first act toward it was to cut out my tonsils. . . .

Somewhere, in the gardens of the Western Civilization, in the forced labor camps, I had caught a chronic cold, and I was told to get rid of my tonsils, or else. . . . So I did. As I was leaving the gates of the hospital, still groggy, I took my second decision toward liberation: I decided to drop my job at the Graphic Studios where I was working five days a week.

Instead, I took a part-time job at Cooper Offset, two hours every day, for eighteen dollars a week, and I became practically a free man ready to explore Whatever It Is. I felt very free. Almost as free as fifteen years earlier, in 1944, after completing college: then, too, I felt free. I thought I should be a writer and live from writing. I felt life opening in front of me like a huge flower. But two

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months later I found myself in the wet suburbs of Hamburg, in a forced labor camp, together with Italian, French and Russian war prisoners, slaving for the Third Reich. It took me another fifteen years and many fragments of many different languages and countries to end up on 515 East 13th Street and again declare my total independence.

As my third act, I went to see Jerry Tallmer, at The Village Voice, and I asked him why there was no regular movie column in his paper. He said, why don’t you do one? I said, O.K., I’ll have it tomorrow. My first column appeared on November 12, 1958, and a by-line said, “Movie Journal begins this week as a regular feature in the Voice.” And that was it. What I did not realize at that time was that with this act I almost voluntarily got myself into the same situation as in 1944: I became a slave of the New Cinema, working in its forced labor camps, digging its ditches.

This collection of Movie Journals, this book that you are holding in your hands, represents approximately one third of the columns I did for the Voice since November, 1958. Some of the columns are reproduced in full, others in excerpts. Here and there are slight changes, a word dropped, or syntax improved. These changes were needed either a) to bring to the original manuscript state the places distorted by the typesetters (the early Voice issues were notorious for the printer’s mistakes) or b) to polish my English here and there. Most of the columns or parts of the columns that I eliminated from this collection were either badly written or uninteresting or dealt with Hollywood or European art films which have been discussed by other writers better than I have. In preparing this collection I stuck to the core of my basic preoccupation of this period, which was with the independently made film and the related Expanded Cinema, which since has become known as the New American Cinema, and sometimes is also called the Underground Cinema.

When I began writing my Movie Journal, it was the very beginning of the New American Cinema. Cassavetes had just completed Shadows.

Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie were shooting Pull My Daisy. The film bug had already bitten us, and the air was becoming more and more charged with energy and expectations. We felt the cinema was only beginning— with us! So that though I had intended, with my first columns, to become a “serious” film critic and deal “seriously” with the Hollywood film, very soon I discovered that my critic’s hat was of no great use. Instead, I had to

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take a sword and become a self-appointed minister of defense and propaganda of the New Cinema. Nobody took the new film-maker seriously. The non-narrative cinema was not looked upon as cinema. My colleagues either ignored it or hit it right between the eyes. The best time to kill something is when it is too fragile to defend itself. Those who give birth to life or things of art are vulnerable during the birth periods. That’s why animals hide in inaccessible places when they give birth: they try to get as far as possible from the Established Movie Critics. . . .

As is illustrated in these columns, very soon after I started my Journal, I had to drop the critic’s hat and become practically a midwife. I had to pull out, to hold, to protect all the beautiful things that I saw happening in the cinema and that were either butchered or ignored by my colleague writers and by the public. So I kept running around my chickens, cackling, look look how beautiful my chickens are, more beautiful than anything else in the world, and everybody thinks they are ugly ducklings! Since I had to do plenty of cackling, I couldn’t afford wasting any of my space writing on commercial cinema. I invited Andrew Sarris, my co-editor on Film Culture magazine, to do that part of the job. We divided the field.

Looking back through twelve years of my Voice columns, I am amazed at the correctness of my critical judgment. I have no regrets, I have no corrections to make. The masters remained and will remain masters, and history will remain history.

An excerpt from my True Diaries: May 23, 1960. Why do I do this, why do I do that? Why do I write my Voice column, why do I publish Film Culture? Why don’t I just make fi lms, they ask me. Why do you do so many things at once? All those questions! It’s like being on a swing: fi rst I have to move the swing; then I swing with it, and then it swings me, and then I am also swinging the swing. Where does the swing begin and where does it end, and what is, really, the swing?

Third excerpt from my True Diaries: June 25, 1962. After a long night of thought, I decided to leave The Village Voice, to end my journalistic bit and go to other things. It’s beginning to interfere with my work.

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I went to the Voice today with this idea. But the first thing I heard, when I walked in, was “Jerry Tallmer is gone. He went to the Post.”

I thought there was a small warning of fate in this. It was I who spent a sleepless night trying to make a decision; it was I who made the decision to leave: but somewhere the numbers of dice got all mixed up and Jerry left instead of me! That’s a weird irony. So I think I should stick a little bit longer.

I cannot leave the Voice today. So I said nothing and went home.

Fourth excerpt from my True Diaries: March 2, 1964. This is a farewell note.

I have been thinking of giving up my Movie Journal for some time now.

But kept fi nding excuses.

My excuses have run out.

I have built and fed a strange creature in my columns. Sometimes I don’t know if it’s real or imaginary.

There is no doubt that I can be of use to the independent fi lm-makers. I am a fanatic and I can do much. But it is my fanaticism that is also my danger.

I have a tendency to impose my own dreams and visions on others. Some of my observations and fantasies have been own up out of proportion and have become directives pulling others in their orbits and winds. I have become a force, a leader even a saint . . .

It is time to dissolve all forces and all orbits and all saints.

Even art can enslave man, take away his freedom. I feel today that only that art is sacred which has no “ideas,” no “thoughts,” no “meanings, no “content,” but is simply beautiful; serves no other purpose but its own beauty; it just is, like trees are.

Underground cinema won’t get anything from public success. Popularization drags beauty down.

I am tired of force and action.

It is very easy for a man, and I am talking about myself, of course to begin to feel that he is needed and important.

It is unimportance that I am after.

My argument for continuing my Voice column went like this: But shouldn’t I simply be a humble servant of the fi lm-makers and do my duty do at least some good to my fellow humans? Are you telling me that my

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freedom is more important than to serve men? Aren’t you like one who leaves people and retreats to the Himalayas busy with himself? It’s your egoism that is guiding you, not the sense of freedom.

It’s so easy to think that what I am doing is needed!

Really, nothing is needed.

That includes this column.

I wrote this on March 2, 1964. But the next week, I did another column for the Voice. Why do you think I did it? Ha, I am not going to tell you that! To find out that, you’ll have to read my True Diaries, where everything’s explained . . . But if you’re keen enough, Dear Reader, you’ll find it all answered in this collection of my Movie Journals.