And the loving footage he took of his toddler granddaughter. Or exploring the maze of boxes cluttering his new apartment like a cardboard Stonehenge after his divorce. You also see him working until the wee early hours of the morning editing the footage he shot that day while his family is fast asleep.
Fragments movie movie#
That footage nearly bookends the movie and it lets you know right away that this is going to be an unusually unvarnished portrait. But many clips here are being shown for the first time, such as the moving video footage of Mekas, near the end of his life, weeping and crying out “Who am I?” and asking if his life mattered. There are clips from his acclaimed diary films “Walden” and “Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania,” home movies injected with the DNA of experimental cinema that have one foot on the living room couch and one in the white cube of the museum gallery. What sets “Fragments of Paradise” apart is how much of the movie is built around never-before-seen footage Mekas shot himself. His energy and his pronouncements stuck with you, in sayings like “I’m not interested in reality, I’m interested in poetry.” Mekas with daughter Oona in the 1970s And indeed, Mekas never stopped introducing himself in other ways too: he’d previously starred in four self-reflective documentaries by Peter Semple and showed up in virtually any documentary ever about the Beat movement, experimental cinema, or anything related to the cultural life of downtown Manhattan.
(One of the first talking-head soundbytes in Davison’s movie is Allen Ginsberg saying Mekas was a one-man “social center.”) Until the very end, he’d never stopped preaching the gospel of avant-garde film and his poetic lease on life. IndieWire’s Eric Kohn wrote about how, just months before Mekas died in January 2019, he mingled until 1:00am at the New York Film Festival’s closing night party.
Perhaps it’s fitting that “Fragments of Paradise” opens with those media introductions flinging superlatives about him: Mekas incessantly introduced himself in his life, becoming a jovial gad-about you’d see at festival parties, gallery openings, and the many events at which he was honored in his last years. It’s a tribute to art’s power to connect, even with those who are gone.
Davison (“The Soul of America”) seems to have anticipated these quibbles and shows she knows her audience: “Fragments of Paradise” is a more than skin-deep overview of the late Mekas’ life, one that feels like a final message from him directly. Where to Watch This Week’s New Movies, from ‘Talk to Me’ to ‘Haunted Mansion’įear not.
0 kommentar(er)
