As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty

For thirty years Jonas Mekas filmed his family and the people around him. The footage was never gathered for a film; it was kept like a diary. In the end he put it all together into a film of about five hours. In it: meeting his wife, the birth and growing up of his children, a flat in New York, meals with friends, walks in the street, the sea, snow and the faces of his friends. Jonas Mekas directs. The film dates from 2000. Mekas was an immigrant from Lithuania; he left his country during the war and became one of the founding figures of experimental cinema in America. The form is a diary; the footage comes in short pieces, unsteady and mostly a few seconds long. The narrative is not chronological; Mekas orders the sections by his own remembering and speaks in his own voice between them. The matter it treats is whether happiness can be recorded; the narrator asks it directly and leaves the answer uncertain. The length is deliberately long and Mekas said the film could be watched in parts. Sound and image do not match in most places; music, ambient sound and silence alternate. Who it is for: anyone curious about experimental cinema and diary films. Who it is not for: it is very long, there is no plot, and the image quality is deliberately crude.