Reseñas (1)
Confession of the moral and emotional dilemma of one generation in one country at one time, which maintains its role as an intermediate stage from today's retrospective perspective: looking back, it is necessary to reach into the American environment, just like the protagonists of the film, into the depth of their nonconformism in their lyrical expression, to the American Beat Generation, forming itself from the mid-1950s; looking forward, it is necessary to sense the unrest of the 1960s with the fight for nuclear disarmament, imperialist wars in the third world, and the desire for greater and greater self-realization in an explicit embryo. However, in the realm of film, this dual retrospective movement applies only on one level. From the perspective of film history in general, continuities can be sought: the film strongly evokes Cassavetes' cult film Shadows (1958) in the environment of the American independent film scene and at the same time serves as a very dignified precursor to later intellectual films and film essays (e.g., Jon Jost in the American underground scene), where fictional narration will intertwine with poetic, political, or otherwise appealing declamations. On what retrospective level, however, does the desire to pigeonhole the film into some continuous line fail? On the level of the author's own cinematic history - here there is no intermediate stage, but rather a rupture: his films will never be narrative like here (although this film is relatively non-linear and narrative compared to common bourgeois cinema!), fictional in the classical sense, universal in their testimony, speaking to everyone from the perspective of artistic depersonalization, sensed only by the hidden subject behind his work, which does not primarily speak about him. Mekas' later films will all be fragments of a private film reel, through which he will try to capture his life in images, without any intermediate stage that was supposed to be a fiction film sublimated by the author, as seen here.
()