Sightlines · a reading

A Deleuzian reading of As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty

2000 · Jonas Mekas · As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty on Sightlines

Snow on a window. A table set for a meal. A child's face, gone before you've properly seen it. Each image lasts a few frames, sometimes just one, and then the next arrives, flaring, overexposed, tilted by the hand that holds the camera. Over it comes a soft, accented voice. It belongs to Jonas Mekas, and early on it tells us, more or less, that he doesn't know what order any of this is in. He strung the reels together "by chance."

That admission is the door into the film. Nearly five hours long and split into twelve chapters, As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty gathers more than thirty years of Mekas's home movies: his marriage to Hollis Melton, the births and childhoods of Oona and Sebastian, seasons in the city and the country, gardens, weddings, funerals, friends. It has no plot and no arc. It isn't trying to tell you what happened. It wants you to feel how a life arrives when you aren't looking at it in order.

Start with the camera. Mekas shot on a spring-wound 16mm Bolex. Its clockwork motor runs for about half a minute before it needs rewinding, and it can expose one frame at a time. Mekas tapped the release in bursts. The result pulses. Light seems to breathe.

Gilles Deleuze, reading the philosopher Henri Bergson, noticed something basic about cinema. Older arts went after the privileged instant: the posed climax, the perfect gesture frozen in marble. Cinema works differently. It samples motion at regular intervals, and no frame counts for more than any other. Deleuze called this the any-instant-whatever. Mekas takes that idea further than almost anyone. His single-frame taps refuse the decisive moment entirely. A wave of a hand counts as much as a birthday candle. Beauty, the title says, comes only occasionally and only in glimpses. The camera's job is to be there when it flickers past, not to stage it.

Then look at the man behind the camera. Deleuze split film history into two regimes. In the first, the movement-image, a character sees a situation and acts to change it, and the editing serves that chain. In the second, the time-image, action stalls. The character can only look and listen. Deleuze called such moments pure optical and sound situations, and the person caught in them a seer. Mekas is a seer in the plainest sense. The title is his job description: moving ahead, occasionally I saw. He changes nothing. He doesn't fix, rescue or resolve. He watches his daughter grow, the snow fall, the light on a friend's face, and the film is the record of that watching. What drives it isn't a goal. It's attention.

The chance ordering is where Deleuze helps most. A conventional flashback is dated. It says this was 1971 and returns us to a former present. Mekas gives us nothing like that. A child is small, then older, then small again. Winter in one city, summer in another, then winter again. Deleuze, following Bergson, argued that the past isn't a line of dead moments behind us. It is a vast coexisting region that we move through, settling into one layer or another. He called these layers sheets of past. Mekas's scrambled reels work like that. You don't go back to a memory, you drift between strata of it, and the recurrences (children, seasons, the same faces aging) start to rhyme. Under the domestic happiness an undertow builds. Nobody announces mortality here. You feel it from the accumulation.

The sound pulls in its own direction. Mekas's voice comments, remembers, apologizes, sometimes sings. Ambient scraps and bits of music are layered around it, often out of sync with the picture. Image and sound meet by association, not by correspondence. Deleuze's term for this is audiovisual disjunction: voice and image each holding their own line, touching across a gap. The voice doesn't caption the pictures. It's a second diary, written later, speaking beside the first. White-on-black intertitles break the flow and turn the screen briefly into a page. Mekas the poet stands next to Mekas the cameraman.

Where does this sit in film theory? André Bazin argued that photography and film embalm time, rescuing a moment from decay. Mekas's flicker says something sadder and more alive than that. The images don't hold still long enough to be preserved. You see them passing. Mekas described his method as filming "in the present tense," and the film keeps the past in that tense, always arriving and always slipping away.

The method has a history, and Mekas was open about his debts. Marie Menken's Notebook (1962) gave him the wrist-driven Bolex, the camera as a dancing, gestural instrument sketching light and water. Willard Maas's Geography of the Body (1943) showed that domestic intimacy could carry spoken poetry. Stan Brakhage, in Window Water Baby Moving (1959), treated childbirth and family as sacred subjects, with rapid superimpositions and single-frame bursts. His The Dead (1960) set the gestural single-frame cutting and saturated reversal color that Mekas builds his shimmer from. Paul Sharits's N:O:T:H:I:N:G (1968) is a near sibling. It shares the single-frame flicker but locks it into a perceptual grid, where Mekas keeps it accidental and personal. Mekas's own Walden (1969) had already worked out the method: accumulated reels, staccato bursts, intertitles, collage voiceover. As I Was Moving Ahead distills it to its most intimate. The thread runs forward too, into Mekas's web-based 365 Day Project (2007) and his digital diaries.

What did the film do to narrative? It suggests that a life doesn't need a story to have shape. Much of the editing was done in the camera, years earlier, one frame at a time. The chance arrangement came at the end. So the montage is doubled, and somehow an aesthetic of accident ends up with a steady, musical cadence. That's the open question the film hands you: if order is given up, where does all that rhythm come from? Maybe from the hand, the breath, the habit of looking.

Watch it in pieces if you need to. Mekas paces it in chapters and stretches of black leader to give you room. Don't wait for anything to happen. Watch the way light hits a table, how a child turns her head, how the voice drifts in. By the second hour you may notice you've started glimpsing things outside the film too.

Concepts in play

the time-image — No plot, arc or causal chain; the film is built from accumulated, present-tense observation scrambled out of order, so time and recurrence carry it instead of action
any-instant-whatever — The Bolex's single-frame and few-frame taps give ordinary moments (a hand, snow, a candle) equal weight and refuse the posed, decisive instant
the seer (voyant) — Mekas as handheld cameraman who watches family, seasons and friends without intervening; the title itself ('as I was moving ahead occasionally I saw') names a watcher, not an agent
pure optical and sound situations — Fleeting glimpses of light, faces and weather registered for their own sake, with no action they serve
sheets of past — Reels assembled 'by chance' without chronology: children appear small, then older, then small again, and seasons recur, so the past works as coexisting strata to move through rather than dated flashbacks
audiovisual disjunction — Mekas's later voiceover, ambient scraps and music are deliberately unsynchronized with the image, meeting it by association rather than correspondence

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