As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw...

Director: Jonas Mekas

2000 / 288min / 16mm

The apotheosis of Mekas’s decades-long project of documenting his everyday life in frenzied images shot on an ever-handy Bolex, the ecstatically alive As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw…, a Whitman-esque outpouring of blissed-out lyricism, is comprised of material filmed between 1970 and 1999, including records of domestic landmarks like a child’s first steps, rounds of bibulous parties and picnics with appearances by stalwarts of the international avant-garde, and peregrinations that take us from Madison, Wisconsin, to various stops in the Old World, all accompanied by the filmmaker’s lilting, ruminative voiceover. “Few films have so poignantly embodied André Bazin’s notion of cinema as ‘time mummified,’ as a thing that lives and breathes and dies… Operates as one extended flashback, with memories unanchored from their context, and leaps in time rendered almost irrelevant and indistinguishable by the uniformly granular, discolored look of the 16mm stock.” —Andrew Chan, Reverse Shot

Please note: There will be a 15-minute intermission after Chapter 6.

Distributor: Canyon Cinema

Part of The Memory Palace