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

When i stumbled upon this film i thought that it is a wonderful idea and i was really excited to watch it. I understand that a certain rawness can be part of an artwork, but if you make a film and you want the recipient to stay with you for over 4 hours, i think it s also important to make it somewhat watchable. Sadly the shaky camera work and the way it is edited does not work for me. The fast cuts, the low frame rate and the changes in tempo make it very hard to get in to the mood of the moment. He seems to have a had a very nice life and i would have loved to participate in it for a bit longer, but i had to drop out after 30 minutes or so.

As I Was Moving Ahead is a record of people's subtle feelings, emotions, everyday joys as recorded in the voices, faces, and small daily activities of people I've met, or lived with, or observed- something I've been recording for years. In contrast to the spectacular, entertaining, sensational, dramatic activities that dominate a great deal of contemporary filmmaking. All this now has to do with my understanding and conviction of what acts really affect the positive changes in man, society, humanity.I am interested in recording the subtle, almost invisible actions, experiences, feelings as opposed to the harsh, harsh, loud, violent activities and political actions of our time and, in particular, the political systems of our time.

• by Jonas Mekas

I'm personaly someone who can't stand "experimental" art. I don't think that being incomprehensible or 10 hours long makes a movie good. Looking at Mekas, it might seem like he's one of those pretentious "experimental" filmmakers who thinks that just filming anything for nearly 5 hours will fool smug film-buffs. But thankfully he isn't anything like that.

Even though I'm an inpatient and strict movie watcher, I can't say that the 5 hours of this film feel long. I admittedly skipped some parts but none of it feels unnecessary or boring. The big provocation of Mekas (in out time) is - tellingly - that he does not only portrait family life as happy and funny but he is casually showing some utopia of normality and family almost opposed to modern day politicized pathological mental fights against windmills and sick nihilist post-modern meta-jokes.

Most of the film consists of angelic blonde children crawling, stumbling, dancing and jumping through the video in the forest or on the lake. Much of it is Mekas and his wife with their kids and relatives just hanging around, having a good time, playing cards or eating while you can hear folkloristic music or some classics in the background if Mekas isn't explaining things from the off or talking to himself in this sort of memory diary.

There are just some dissonant parts, for instance when he films some hippie-girls and zooms to their butts, followed by some other hysterical hippie-girls protesting for abortions (in a film that mostly depicts happy families with beautiful children).

When I give the film a 7/10, it's actually a positive/high rating for me. This is obviously not perfect and has no intention of being that but it's more beautiful and has more "soul" to it (in a metaphorical way) than most mainstream movies anywhere from the beginning of films to this day.

I think it is sort of a misconception to say that this film is about the beauty of life, and nostalgia for the past. Through the narration and the titles, ambiguity is introduced into the mix. Mekas remarks multiple times the fact that this images are to an extent unreal: people are not so innocent as these images show them to be, people do not love each other as much, other people's perceptions of the same events are quite different, and he isn't just filming his children but he is inventing his own childhood through them. "This is a political film", says the movie repeatedly, and yet in the artificial idealized world of the film politics is entirely absent -there's no poverty, no war, no questioning of his bourgeois lifestyle-, and that's precisely the point: to show not how the world is, but how we want it to be, and how that desire can sometimes become a shallow fantasy. We long for paradise, but paradise is lost. We can only get glimpses of it, not in everyday life, but through it, beyond it, inside us.

My complain with the movie is a matter of form. I just don't like the accelerated frame rate, the fast cuts, the repetition, the inflated length, the out of tune music. I sort of enjoyed it for the first hour and a half, but after that it became a blur. It had in me the effect of starting out as a beautiful experience and ending as a nightmarish reality without meaning from which I just wanted to escape; one is dying to know people's names, to hear someone's voice (besides the rather silent Mekas), and to stay in one place for a while. But then again, that feeling is also part of Mekas' scheme. Beauty comforts us by what it evokes, but hurts us by how unreachable it actually is.

Much like Prousts "A la recherche du temps predue" Mekas's, "brief glimpses of beauty" is a refleciton on the years of his life past as seen through the eyes of a man who is percieving his own death. Mekas beautifully edits together the scraps of film that fell to his cutting room floor while he was working on projects he "percieved" as important, not realizing that what was truly important were the deatils that he missed, that he left out in favor of the shot in focus, the shot in composition. He strings together these family films of his children, his wife, his friends, New York during a lightning storm, all while narrating the film from what seems to be "His Death Bed." This film is by far one of the more touching, more emotional films I have ever seen. It is an homage to life as much as it is a recognition that beauty lies in the places we least expect it and as we walk we may occasionally catch brief glimpses of it, if we are lucky enough to have our eyes that wide open.