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July 24, 2024 – Review
Jonas Mekas’s “Requiem”
Lukas Brasiskis
Flowers were important to Jonas Mekas throughout his life and work, serving as a recurrent visual and thematic motif. Starting from the early 1950s, after his arrival in New York, the great avant-garde filmmaker would record his daily life, later revisiting and editing it into cohesive yet nonlinear stories. Among the best-known of these films is Lost, Lost, Lost (1976), which contains a memorable scene in which the artist, referring to himself as a “monk of the order of cinema,” captures close-ups of a grassy field in the early dawn. This almost ritualistic act illustrates perfectly how Mekas connected to nature through the medium of film.
Not only did he credit his early mentor, Marie Menken, with teaching him how to film these delicate subjects (Menken’s 1957 Glimpse of the Garden uses rapid edits to capture their ephemeral beauty), but they are frequently referenced in his poetry: “Flowers die / and return to the earth, / with the same scent / touching faces,” he wrote in 1966. Given his lifelong fascination with the natural world, it seems appropriate that his final film Requiem (2019)— made when he was ninety-six, now installed in this deconsecrated seventeenth-century church—should be an observation and …