Fragments of Paradise review – moving account of legendary radical Jonas Mekas – The Guardian
Hailed as “the godfather of American avant garde cinema”, Jonas Mekas led a unprecedented, multi-hyphenated profession whose wide-ranging affect will need to have proved a problem for a documentary to embody. When Mekas arrived in New York as a Lithuanian exile in 1949, the very first thing he purchased was a Bolex digicam. For the displaced immigrant, when language faltered photos grew to become a way of communication.
As Fragments of Paradise charts Mekas’s skilled milestones – a critic, a film-maker, a curator, and so forth – what emerges most movingly is his philosophy of inventive togetherness. In founding Movie Tradition journal, the Movie-Makers’ Cooperative, and afterward the Anthology Movie Archives, Mekas succeeded in constructing a nurturing house for these forgotten by the mainstream. It’s the type of community-oriented work reflecting the assumption that, for him, the house is the cinema.
In addition to his fostering and championing of another movie tradition in New York, Fragments of Paradise additionally highlights his legacy as a pioneer of the “diary movie”; sadly, in contrast with the fractured but intimate spirit of Mekas’s best-known works similar to Walden (1968), the standard type of KD Davison’s route is painfully obvious. Whereas Mekas’s digicam strikes with the jagged vitality of New York streets, this documentary containers its array of starry interviewees – together with luminaries similar to John Waters and Martin Scorsese – in static, talking-head pictures.
Extra severely, this basically hagiographic account fails to say assertions by historian Michael Casper, who argued that Mekas had misrepresented his wartime actions, and that he had written for collaborationist magazines in Lithuania. Fragments of Paradise begins with the uncooked, never-before-seen footage shot by an aged Mekas who wails to the digicam, “What’s me?” It’s a complicated and troublesome query that the movie is finally reluctant to totally interrogate, on each formal and analytical ranges.
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