There were memories and passages of experiences I could even relate to. I like how some images melt into others and the dreamlike quality they have. As an exercise in style and aesthetics, the film has its charm. Its loose structure and casual attitude ruin it for me. But I don't think that in order to achieve this purpose one can purely rely on chance and improvisation. I understand that the film is about life and that its random nature and sequences of disconnected images are meant to represent how memories work that Mekas wants to trigger the viewers into reflecting on their own life and memories. This, in addition to the cheap field recordings and the home made piano and accordion tracks, only drag the film and make me feel that I am watching an absolute amateur experiment. His honesty can be heartwarming sometimes, but there are many other times in which he just sounds childish or poetically pretentious because of this lack of preparation. Mekas seems to improvise and share his thoughts arbitrarily, trying to sound poetic. Mekas himself addresses the fact that there is no order in the movie, that he just organized the tapes and images randomly, without any sequence and with no intention to give it a plot or even meaning. On paper, the concept of the project is not that unappealing to me, but its lazy and carefree approach makes it almost unbearable to watch. A four hours and a half movie about nothing but disconnected images of the life of the filmmaker. I am astonished by the praise that this movie receives. I do not normally write reviews, but after watching this film, I had the urge to do it. Beauty comforts as by what it evokes, but hurts us by how unreachable it actually is. But then again, that feeling is also part of Mekas' scheme. 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. I sort of enjoyed it for the first hour and a half, but after that it became a blur. I just don't like the accelerated frame rate, the fast cuts, the repetition, the inflated length, the out of tune music. My complain with the movie is a matter of form. We can only get glimpses of it, not in everyday life, but through it, beyond it, inside us. We long for paradise, but paradise is lost. "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. 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. Through the narration and the titles, ambiguity is introduced into the mix. I think it is sort of a misconception to say that this film is about the beauty of life, and nostalgia for the past.
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