film

The Lithuanian-born American filmmaker Jonas Mekas fled Lithuania during the Second World War and settled in New York in 1949, where he quickly immersed himself in the city’s experimental arts scene. He started making films in the Fifties, and with films such as Walden (Diaries, Notes & Sketches) from 1969, Lost, Lost, Lost (1976) and Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania (1972), he helped define the language of diary-style experimental filmmaking.

Rather than a conventional narrative, Walden unfolds as a stream of impressions organised into short, titled sections that reflect the rhythms of memory. Mekas’s handheld camera, rapid cutting and bursts of overexposed colour skilfully forge a sense of spontaneity and emotional immediacy. Walden captures a particular cultural moment and features figures such as Andy Warhol, the Velvet Underground and Allen Ginsberg, but resists straightforward documentation, instead turning everyday experience into a lyrical, subjective record of time passing.