Abstract

Jonas Mekas develops the diary film practice as a way of celebrating and preserving his lived experiences through the act of representing them. In addition to making his life the subject matter of his diary films, Mekas wants his filmic recordings to be traces of his own gestures as he moves ahead in search of glimpses of beauty. Therefore, the diarist adopts a set of techniques, associated with avant-garde cinema, and inserts them in an autobiographical context, with the intention of creating a cinematic language capable of representing his interiority. This essay will analyze the techniques employed by Jonas Mekas and the way in which they attempt to represent the diarist’s self.