This month we are delighted to be presenting Walden, a major work of the late 60's by Jonas Mekas, widely regarded as one of the central figures of the American underground movement and more recently recognised further afield with major retrospectives at galleries and institutions worldwide.

Walden: Diaries, Notes, and Sketches is in many ways a quintessential Mekas film, taking it's energy and spirit from the celebration of life in the present moment, through homages and portraits of close friends and colleagues (including many familiar names from avant guard cinema and the arts in general). Within this outward looking eye and heartfelt sentiment, at the centre of all its flux and energy is the inner life of the poet, reflecting in solitude on both the inherent beauty and the essentially transitory and temporary nature of all things.

These reflections take the form of occasional narration form the filmmaker himself, or rather, the marriage of these words with the movement and life of the images. There exists then, in these early films in particular but throughout all of Mekas' works a double layered poetry of the pure film image and the literary or lyrical text. Jonas Mekas is himself also an accomplished poet, writing both in his native Lithuanian and adopted English, and publishing numerous volumes of writing ranging form diaries, prose, poetry, anecdotes and scrapbooks. Like that of any true poet, Mekas' life and work are inseparable, and the various ways in which he has for many years created a prolific document and homage to a life once uprooted and re-aligned time and again in the present, seems to resonate on a deeply universally human level. At times clearly politically charged with a passion, the film is also a reflection on a world that is slowly disappearing in the late 1960's, perhaps it has all but vanished in 2015, making some of the reflections all the more poignant and subtlety radical in their concise simplicity and tone of mourning.

It is however the positive celebration of life through the poetry of the small and personal, through cinema, through reflection, that perhaps accounts for the enormous success and recognition of these works and this is introduced to a viewer in no short fall in a full sitting of Walden.

We look forward to welcoming you to Spektrum Berlin for what should be a truly moving, communal viewing experience!

Programme: - Walden: Diaries, Notes, and Sketches (Jonas Mekas, 1969, 180 min.16mm, color) (digital screening)

Free Entrance