Prosper Hillairet
Passages du Cinéma
Author Prosper Hillairet
Format
Year 2021
Pages 330 pages
Language French
Description
From 1949, when he arrived in New York with his brother Adolfas after fleeing his native Lithuania, experiencing forced labor camps and then displaced persons camps in immediate post-war Germany, until 2012 when he edited Out-Takes from the Life of a Happy Man before his last strips of film faded forever, Jonas Mekas filmed his life: first the years of exile and the poor neighborhoods of Brooklyn in Lost Lost Lost, then the legendary years of the birth of underground cinema, the Fluxus movement and pop culture in Walden, Scenes from the Life of Andy Warhol, Zefiro Torna or Happy Birthday to John, and finally the more intimate years of friendship and love in As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty. […]
[…] From one paradise to another, from the lost paradise of childhood to the rediscovered paradise of cinema and poetry, Mekas, by his own account, never stopped shooting one and the same film for over half a century, which he at one point titled, when he became aware of it, Diaries, Notes and Sketches. Beyond the apparent diversity of his works, this small book strives to trace this slender but continuous thread, even if it means confronting the immense work in progress that has just been completed, indirectly for some but also head-on for several of them, exemplary of this new Odyssey.
Summary
Day by day /// The time of exile /// The crossing of destinies /// Paradise on earth
Patrice Rollet is a professor at the École nationale supérieure d'arts de Paris-Cergy. An essayist and film critic, he is one of the founders, along with Serge Daney, of the magazine Trafic, after having been successively an editor at Vertigo and literary director of Cahiers du cinéma. Author of Passages à vide published in 2002 by éditions P.O.L, he also published Je n'avais nulle part où aller by Jonas Mekas there in 2004.