Barthes's writing is unctuous. He seems often to be defining a new category of the object under observation, but when you start to examine what he says, you find that it isn't as essential as the revelatory tone of the writing suggests it is. And some of the ideas are really ludicrous. "The Death of the Author" [in Barthes,
Image-Music-Text
(New York: Hill and Wang, 1977, translated by Stephen Heath)] is this essay written by a very distinctive stylist, with a name, and
he
says that the individual writer is subsumed in the totality of writing, that there really is no writer. It's an arch little essay by a famous author! A lot of "theory" is like that. And in Barthes's
A Lover's Discourse,
the supposedly revolutionary tack is that there's no reference to gender. It's sex with no body. The book becomes this vapor of extraordinary style, perfume.
Mythologies
is interesting, but pretty strange, too.
There's a fashionable idea now, especially among academic theorists, that the personor the subject, as they say these daysis totally culturally shaped. I don't believe that at all. I think somebody is born, that there is an organism that has functions. It can be twisted; it can be hurt; but there's still a specific person there. Every person is born with a certain complicated set of possibilities. Of course, there's a lot of breadth to that, but I don't believe that culture totally shapes the person. Individual people also shape culture, which is, after all, one of the functions of art. Those who have commented on the way in which dominant ideologies totally shape people often seem to assume
they've
been able to escape that process. Very mysterious!
Philosophy has been very important to me: Plato, Aristotle, Nietzsche, [Maurice] Merleau-Ponty, many many commentaries like Havelock's
Preface to Plato
. One of my favorite books is Heidegger's
Early Greek Thinking
. I've read everything by Wittgenstein, I think. Derrida is very interesting, a kind of Hegel/Mallarmé. Lacan is medieval Christian Zen. Laura Mulvey seems a university student in this context. Years ago I read a lot of Paul Valery and was quite affected by his writing, though sometimes he's arch in a way similar to Barthes.
My feminist reading is fairly wide. I've even read books by Andrea Dworkin! Joyce Carol Oates is terrific, Germaine Greer too. I like
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Fernand Braudel, Norbert Elias, George Steiner. I'm reading Mandelbrot on fractals and Jack Chambers's
Milestones
(on Miles Davis) right now. I read
October
and
Critical Inquiry
and other journals, and various art and film magazines. I've thought of my film work as a kind of philosophy.
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Jonas Mekas
Jonas Mekas has made substantial contributions to film history as an organizer, as an editor and writer, and as a filmmaker. The driving force behind the New American Cinema Group, Mekas sought to change the film society model of noncommercial exhibition and distribution epitomized (in the United States) by Amos Vogel's Cinema 16. In place of what he called the "potpourri" approach to programming standard at Cinema 16 (on any given program, Vogel might present an experimental animation, a scientific documentary, a cartoon, a psychodramaall by different filmmakers), Mekas established the single film-artist show, first at New American Cinema Group presentations, and later at the New York Cinematheque and Anthology Film Archives, which under his leadership became and has remained a leading institution devoted to the maintenance of the heritage of independent cinema. In place of Cinema 16's selective distribution policy (Vogel decided which films by an independent filmmaker he would distribute), Mekas promoted the cooperative distribution system in which filmmakers decide which of their films to distribute and receive all rentals minus the basic expenses of keeping the cooperative afloat. The result was the New York Filmmakers' Cooperative.
Mekas's commitment to making a cultural space for avant-garde film also energized his editorship of
Film Culture,
which published several issues a year, beginning in 1955 and continuing into the seventies (in more recent years, the journal has appeared irregularly).
Film Culture
remains a remarkable compendium of information and commentary about many forms of cinema. Mekas may have had his broadest influ-
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ence as a polemicist for independent cinema in "Movie Journal," the weekly column he wrote for
The Village Voice
from 1959 to 1971 (selected columns are available in
Movie Journal
(New York: Collier, 1972) and subsequently for
The Soho Weekly News
. No writer has written with more passionate insight about avant-garde film.
Mekas's dogged labors on behalf of independent cinema would have assured him a place in film history, had he never made a film of his own, but in fact he has been a prolific and influential filmmaker. At first, filmmaking was Mekas's primary means of dealing with his status as a refugee in the United States. Mekas and his brother Adolfas had fled Lithuania in 1944, as the Nazis took over (their pro-Lithuanian newspaper had made them a potential danger to Nazi control). They spent eight months in a German forced labor camp; then, after the war, four years in displaced persons camp (the experiences of these years were chronicled in regular diary entries, available now in
I Had Nowhere to Go
(New York: Black Thistle Press, 1991).
In 1949, the Mekas brothers arrived in New York, found a tiny apartment in Brooklyn and bought a 16mm camera. During the fifties Jonas Mekas documented the Brooklyn community of displaced Lithuanians at their meetings and on their outings. Later, when he had broken away from that community and moved to Manhattan, he chronicled the film and art scene he discovered there. In 1960, he completed the angstridden experimental feature narrative,
Guns of the Trees
. In 1963, hoping it would be the first installment of an alternative film "periodical," he recorded aspects of the New York art scene for
Film Magazine of the Arts
. And in 1964, he critiqued cinéma-vérité style by documenting the Living Theater's off-off-Broadway production of
The Brig
as though it were a real event.
By the end of the sixties, Mekas had developed an erratic, hand-held filmmaking style and a sense of imagery roughly analogous to the poetry he had written in Lithuania (Mekas remains a well-known literary figure in his native land), and he had completed
Walden
(1968), the first of a series of films called, for a time,
Diaries, Notes & Sketches
.
Walden
is an epic chronicle of Mekas's personal experiences, of the daily life and seasonal cycle of New York City, and of the cultural scene as Mekas observed it from 1964 to 1968, including portraits and evocations of Tony Conrad, P. Adams Sitney, Stan Brakhage, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Timothy Leary, Marie Menken, Gregory Markopoulos, Allen Ginsberg, Andy Warhol, the Velvet Underground, Ken Jacobs, John Lennon, Yoko Ono, and many others. And it announces what had become Mekas's credo: "I make home moviestherefore I live. I livetherefore I make home movies." For Mekas, "Walden" is a state of mind open to the inevitability of natural process, regardless of where or