Jonas Mekas’ ‘As I Was Moving Ahead…’ is the most political movie ever made
A nearly five-hour home film that contains, quietly and without apology, everything.
There is a moment, somewhere in the middle of Jonas Mekas’ As I Was Moving Ahead, Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty, where Mekas himself, speaking over a shimmer of summer footage, says flatly into the void: “This film is political.”
This might seem strange. You are watching children chase each other through a yard. You are watching light fall through a curtain. Somebody is playing cards. A cat is doing nothing in particular. It is mentioned again later, and again and again. This film is political. This film is political. It is almost insistent in it’s tone as if it’s not going to be believed right away, but feel compelled to point it out.
Because it happens to be true. And to understand that you have to understand who Jonas Mekas was before he became the godfather of American avant-garde cinema. Before the Anthology Film Archives, before The Village Voice column, before Andy Warhol and Allen Ginsberg and the whole luminous downtown New York art world , there was a young Lithuanian poet, twenty-two years old, fleeing his occupied country with his brother Adolfas, trying to reach Vienna. They were arrested en route and sent to a Nazi forced labor camp in Elmshorn. They escaped. They hid on a farm near the Danish border. They spent years afterward in displaced persons camps in Wiesbaden and Kassel — stateless, wanted by Soviet police, unable to go home, unable to go anywhere. They finally reached New York in 1949 with nothing but the habit of survival.
Mekas wrote a poem collection in one of those camps. He wrote about the Lithuanian fields, the cobwebs of late September, the wooden roadside Jesuses, the smell of forests. He was trying to remember a home that was already, in every practical sense, gone. The impulse to hold beauty still, to press it flat like a flower between pages before it disappears, never left him. It became his cinema.
On arriving in New York, Mekas found himself struggling to express his art through his poems because of the language barrier and that made him naturally drawn to a visual form of poetry that required minimal words. He found his newfound love to be filming, and as he mentions in the movie, he is not a filmmaker, he is a filmer.
“Nothing happens in this film”
As I Was Moving Ahead is nearly five hours long. It is assembled, by Mekas’s own admission, purely by chance. It cuts and pieces together over 30 years of his recorded life on film in no discernible order. There is no plot. There is no arc. There is no before and after. There is no argument being made, no revelation being built toward.
“Nothing happens in this film,” Mekas says, in that familiar muttered voice-over, somewhere early on. He says it again. And again. He seems almost pleased about it. He says it the way a person describes a day that was, in retrospect, perfect. A day in which nothing happened, and the nothing was the whole point.
What you see instead is his wife Hollis and their children, Oona and Sebastian, in light that makes them look slightly mythological. Friends at a picnic. A Manhattan snowstorm. Someone’s birthday. A hammock. A dog. Flowers. The footage is grainy, hand-held, often over- or under-exposed, shot with the kind of 16mm Bolex camera that has a shutter that clicks like a heartbeat. It shakes. It goes in and out of focus. The colors shift — warm amber, then a cold blue that Mekas uses almost as a key signature for memory, for loss, for the past stained with longing.
Why Nothing is Everything
Here is what you have to understand about Mekas’s “nothing”. For a man who spent his twenties in labor camps and displaced persons camps, who spent years as a stateless exile, who never returned to Lithuania for twenty-seven years and found, when he finally did, a country remade by Soviet occupation, the ordinary is not banal. The ordinary is what was taken from him. The ordinary is what he had to fight continents and decades to arrive at.
Watching a child take her first steps is not a small thing when you have been a person with nowhere to go. Sitting in a backyard with friends playing cards is not nothing when you spent your formative years in a camp, writing poetry about a home you couldn’t reach. The warm light of a summer afternoon in New York is not trivial when the alternative was a kind of darkness that strips you of your purpose.
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Nothing happens in this film is not a confession of failure. On the contrary, Mekas is telling you what he has decided to pay attention to, and in so deciding, what he has refused to pay attention to. He refuses the need for a spectacle. He refuses the dramatic. He refuses the mechanisms by which cinema usually earns your attention, the stakes, the turning point, the catharsis. As to him cinema should mirror the real life and the point is defeated when you make cinema larger than life. He replaces the high stake spectacles with a cat, shimmering afternoon light, a birthday cake. He is insisting, very quietly and very firmly, that this is enough. That this, in fact, is everything.
This film is political
In a culture that monetizes attention and one that has always monetized attention, choosing what to look at is an act of power. The decision to spend five hours watching the director’s life filmed “unprofessionally” and with no particular structure where it seems clear that these are the memories that are particularly dear and personal to the director rather than conflict and climax and resolution is not a passive choice. It is a refusal. It is an act of resistance. Resistance against a system that feeds off of your need for need for conflict, climax and resolution. Because joy is an act of resistance.
The film’s content is evidently very personal to Mekas, and the lack of context given should make it increasingly difficult for the viewers to relate, however the case is entirely the opposite. We may not know any of these people, however we have all experienced the personal little celebrations and joys, the ecstasy of a child making the first steps, the importance of a tree in spring suddenly all in blossoms, the miracles of everyday, little moments of paradise that are here now.
Mekas came from a world where politics made even the little joys of life inaccessible and a far fetched dream. He saw what it looked like when the state decided what mattered and what didn’t. He spent years in a camp and years in exile because the wrong people had decided the wrong things were important. When he finally arrived somewhere he could point a camera freely, he pointed it at the things politics ignores, private joy, small ceremonies, the texture of an ordinary afternoon. He did not point it at grand events. He did not make a film about the horrors he had survived. He made films about the horrors’ opposite: the radically ordinary, elevated to the level of the sacred.
The political statement is not in the content of the images. The political statement is the images. To choose happiness as a subject, relentlessly, for nearly five hours, across thirty years of footage , when you know what its absence looks like, when you have lived in that absence, is one of the most pointed things a filmmaker can do.
What the film asks of you
This film asks a lot. Nearly five hours is not a casual commitment. There are stretches where the footage seems to circle , another summer afternoon, another snowstorm, another child, and you may find yourself wondering if anything will shift. That restlessness, I’d argue, is part of the experience. Mekas wants you to notice your own impatience for something to happen. He wants you to feel the habit you’ve developed of needing narrative, needing event, needing resolution. And then he wants you to let go of it.
When you do and you will, somewhere around the second or third hour, when the film’s rhythm has replaced your own , something loosens. You stop waiting for the film to explain itself. You simply look. A woman brushes her hair. Light moves across a wall. A child holds a toy and examines it. And you realize that you are, improbably, moved , not by drama, but by the simple, relentless insistence that this is worth looking at.
This film is political because it disagrees with almost everything contemporary culture tells you about what deserves your attention.
Nothing happens in this film because Mekas decided, after everything that happened to him, that happiness is the only subject worth this much film and this much time.
