Jonas Mekas: pratiche di spostamento dai diari scritti ai diari filmati

Jonas Mekas, the Lithuania-born leading film-maker of the so-called New American Cinema, is also a poet and a film critic, curator
and activist. Trying to enclose his complex and variegated activity is not only impossible, but essentially meaningless. All his work,
whether it belongs to literature, film criticism or film-making, echoes the same deep desire to talk, look and act at the first person. So it
seems not to be by accident if the private journal, together with the poetry, early becomes one of his privileged form of expression. From
1944, first in a Nazi Forced Labor and then in a Displaced Person Camp, Mekas begins to keep a written diary (partly published in
1991 with the title of I had Nowhere to Go). When he reaches New York with his brother Adolfas, he buys his first Bolex 16-mm
camera and he starts to film everyday life. Only several years later, in 1969, this everyday filming practice produces the first diary film:
Walden - Diaries, Notes and Sketches is a montage of his archive footage taken between 1965 and 1968. Together with other
following films, particularly Lost Lost Lost, this work becomes representative of Jonas Mekas’ artistic practice: a practice based on a
radical subjectivity that rejects every codes from classical cinema, or professional tools and dialogues with the private-writing process and
language. There, the gaze of the “displaced person”, the gaze of twentieth-century-Ulysses operates as a center of intersection and
displacement between literature and cinema.