Travel Songs (1981)

 

Director: Jonas Mekas

Canon Fodder

 

May there be happiness -

The name Jonas Mekas is legendary, a figure of great importance of American avant-garde cinemas a Lithuanian migrant who came to American and contributed to avant-garde filmmaking in his own work and he help in others work, co-founding the Film-Makers' Cooperative in 1962 and the Filmmakers' Cinematheque in 1964, which eventually grew into Anthology Film Archives. The interesting thing seeing his work, and it is cinema not as readily available as one would hope unfortunately, is that nothing in his work is "experimental" in the sense of requiring a different attitude to approach the material. This twenty plus minute short is exemplary to this.

Travel Songs, in all honesty, is a compilation of home movie fragments. It is not difficult; it could be sold to any viewer with ease if they found a fascination in exploring any person's old films, vacations or chronicles of a place in an old time period, and appreciate the experience. Mekas' career, with his own filmmaking, is a man who picked up a film camera and recorded his life over the decades until his 2019 passing. In the span of twenty minutes here, from the late sixties to the eighties, we hop through the various countries he has travelled within, snapshots of times of the past. In fact, Travel Songs as I viewed it is actually a compilation of shorter work - The Song of Assisi (1967), The Song of Avila (1967), The Song of Italy (1967), The Song of Moscow (1971) and The Song of Stockholm (1981) at least.

Stan Brakhage, speaking of avant-garde filmmakers he would have crossed paths with, becomes a point of note here as, whilst this does follow common traits to other Mekas films I have seen, noticeable for me is how he intercuts the silent footage filmed in these environments, literal fragments in places, and rapidly cuts between them, a barrage of memories especially with Italy, which has the longest segment over fifteen minutes, very much like Brakhage. Yes, these are home movies of travels, but that is inherently rewarding as time capsules to the past, which Mekas recorded amongst large portions of his own life, especially between those we see rushed through in snapshots, as if recounting memories which suddenly flash up when least expected in barely glimpsed form, or when we are allowed to breathe and take them in.

His trademark is not to hide behind the camera as a silent figure, not necessarily in front of it presiding, but his voice is that of a commentator on his own work. Here, it is sparser than other work where his voice and ideas dominate as much as the visuals are allowed to breathe. He relies here on a few text intertitles, which in the rawer look of the footage, where shots were recorded on shaking moving transport or dependent on the environment, is themselves as handcrafted to be filmed as everything else.

As someone who documented the United States from the perspective of a Lithuanian migrant extensively in the likes of Lost, Lost, Lost (1976), here this feels like a relaxed view of the world beyond. Snippets of Moscow, its famous onion domes on Saint Basil's Cathedral barely appearing onscreen but enough to register, whilst Stockholm in Sweden is a place of humility, with Mekas placing great emphasis throughout these films-within-a-film on ordinary life and the joys of it, from simple acts to dining to looking on the people that pass in front of the camera (adults and especially children) with an admiration for them. Italy as having the longest segment becomes an ode to ordinary, non-glamorised reality between cafes to barbers rather than an elaborate piece with a commentary on the culture.

In his segment in Ávila, Spain the longest of his monologues here, near the beginning, emphasises the point of the whole Travel Songs. He reflects, with his accented voice with calm happiness, a "little dog" suddenly coming up to him and licking the dust off his shoe that came from the paths he was walking. Said dust connected him to the place, the dog and everyone there, as these films connect us viewers even decades later this time. Only the fact recorded footage, especially on physical materials he had to use rather than digital, creates its own beautiful distortions in time changes anything from us being there with these people and places of time before.  

It is a compelling piece altogether, but for me, their real worth comes with the larger scope of Mekas' filmography. Again, these films are not as easily accessible, but when they include Lost, Lost, Lost (three hours long, spanning his migration to the United States in the late forties to the sixties), to As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty (2000) (nearly five hours long), this is a small piece of a filmmaker's work, a real case of one where the author's entire career is in goal to one large composition, his life depicted on camera. This little piece by itself though still reaps a reward, but its place in the larger framework is where the power grows further for its virtues.