Format VOD
Original format 16mm
Year 1969
Language(s) English
Artist(s) Jonas Mekas
Sous-titres French, Lithuanian, Spanish, Italian, German, Japanese
Running time 138 min
Films
WALDEN: REEL 1 (1969) 30'
WALDEN: REEL 2 (1969) 30'
WALDEN: REEL 3 (1969) 24'
WALDEN: REEL 4 (1969) 25'
WALDEN: REEL 5 (1969) 32'
WALDEN: REEL 6 (1969) 37'
Description
"After nearly thirty years, Jonas Mekas's "Walden" stands as a central cinematic document of the daily life of the New York art community at one of its most splendid moments. Although Mekas is neither shocking nor confessional, he has marked every instant of this very long film with the nuances of his own personality. In the vast gallery of characters, most of them anonymous or designated only by their first name—even though some are world famous—the only true psychological portrait is that of the filmmaker himself: an exiled Lithuanian poet, fascinated and tormented by his slow Americanization.
The film is animated by a nervous, staccato rhythm that opens up to frequent lyrical flights.
The massive accumulation of images offered Mekas a unique archive from which to construct this visual diary, the first of a long series he has made. Seeing it again today allows us to rediscover a sensation of that place and that era that no other film could restore.
As a secondary character, appearing from time to time in front of my friend's camera, I recognize how fragmentary and elliptical his representation of others can be, and yet these images have become for me the strongest visual clues to what I was thirty years ago. This is perhaps the heart of Mekas's art: by finding a cinematic form capable of capturing his changing moods without imposing a coherent mask of himself, he has created a work that allows others to appear in all their phenomenal ambiguity."
— P. Adams Sitney