J The Rise of a New American Cinema, 1959-1971 r ---D 1 Jonas Mekasj ${.'.95 “It is not my business to tell you what it’s all about. My business is to get ex¬ cited about it, to bring it to your atten- I tion. I am a raving maniac of the cinema.” I _ —Jonas Mekas The readers who already know the work of Jonas Mekas will rejoice at this collection of the best of his Village Voice pieces from the past decade. Those who do not know him yet but who love film will find here great treasures of percep¬ tion and analysis. Mekas involves him¬ self deeply in the films that he loves, and then writes about them in Movie Journal with great wit, clarity, honesty, and grace, and with the widest humanism. He can illuminate the film he is discussing, pene¬ trating with equal facility the holy terror of Andy Warhol, the mystical vision of Brakhage or Markopoulos or Jack Smith, the silence of Antonioni, the despair of Kurosawa. Sometimes he can illuminate the moviegoers, too, explaining deftly just why we see a film one way, often persuading us to a revision, to a new way of seeing. Mekas is a unique and vitally important film critic. He is a good deal more than that, as well. Through his passion for beauty and honesty in film, he has evolved a virile new aesthetic, a way of watching movies that requires a temporary surrender of the ego in order to embrace wi:h joy and freedom the sensual poetry o:’ the; new (Continued or bc.ckiaj] JOURNAL The Rise of the New American Cinema 1959-1971 JONAS MEKAS * * i The Macmillan Company, New York, New York L Copyright © 1959, i960, 1961, 1962, 1963, 1964, 1965, 1966, 1967, 1968, 1969, 1970, 1971 by The Village Voice, Inc. Copyright © 1972 by Jonas Mekas All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher. The Macmillan Company 866 Third Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10022 Collier-Macmillan Canada Ltd., Toronto, Ontario Reprinted by permission of The Village Voice. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 74-171569 FIRST PRINTING Printed in the United States of America Introduction page vii 1119)581 page i 1119ft© page 9 111 ©ft! page 22 196t page 46 CONTENTS 19>ft 5 page 77 1964 page hi 1965 page 173 1966 page 222 1967/ page 264 1968 page 303 113436 VI CONTENTS page 329 1I»W page 365 page 41I INTRODUCTION 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 Viii INTRODUCTION be a writer and live from writing. I felt life opening in front of me like a huge flower. But two months later I found myself in the wet suburbs of Hamburg, in a forced labor camp, together with Ital¬ ian, 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 fea¬ ture 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 hold¬ ing 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 1 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 be¬ come 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 begin¬ ning 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 becom¬ ing 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 Introduction ix and deal “seriously” with the Hollywood film, very soon I discov¬ ered that my critic’s hat was of no great use. Instead, I had to 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, i960. 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 films, they ask me. Why do you do so many things at once? All those questions! It’s like being on a swing: first 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.