@uncannyarchive (Memory is stronger than any reality around me) Video by π•Ώπ–π–Š π–€π–“π–ˆπ–†π–“π–“π–ž π•¬π–—π–ˆπ–π–Žπ–›π–Š

⋅

My Notes: Memory is stronger than any reality around me

Jonas Mekas’s As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty (2000) is an epic act of remembrance that transforms home movies into a meditation on time, memory, and the elusive texture of the everyday. Composed entirely of footage shot over decades of domestic lifeβ€”birthdays, walks, meals, moments of laughterβ€”the film’s five-hour duration refuses conventional narrative cohesion. Instead, it unfolds as a stream of consciousness where meaning emerges not through linear progression, but through rhythm, repetition, and the fragile persistence of the image. Beneath its surface of warmth and nostalgia lies a quiet uncanniness: the sense that the very act of recording domestic happiness is haunted by its own disappearance.

The uncanny in Mekas’s film does not erupt through shock or estrangement, but through familiarity stretched across time. The images are intimate, yet their context has evaporated; the children, lovers, and friends who populate the film are both vividly present and irrevocably lost. Each frame bears the trace of a moment once lived, yet now displaced into perpetual replay. As Freud noted, the uncanny often arises when the boundary between the living and the dead blursβ€”here, that liminality is mediated by celluloid itself, which resurrects life as spectral repetition. The grain of the 16mm film, its scratches and flickers, become the texture of memory’s decay.

Mekas’s voice-over reinforces this double movement of tenderness and loss. His commentary drifts between recollection and forgetting, laughter and melancholy, producing a “reflective nostalgia”β€”an awareness of the impossibility of true return. The film’s refusal to differentiate between significant and trivial moments also unsettles conventional hierarchies of meaning, suggesting that beauty resides precisely in the transient, the overlooked, the fragmentary. Yet this democratisation of memory carries an uncanny undercurrent: the recognition that to preserve every moment is also to confront its ghostly residue.

Ultimately, As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty is a cinema of haunted joy.

#experimentalfilms #cinephilecommunity #uncanny #filmblog

Instagram by: π•Ώπ–π–Š π–€π–“π–ˆπ–†π–“π–“π–ž π•¬π–—π–ˆπ–π–Žπ–›π–Š (@uncannyarchive)

Source: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DRUAmkTjKxV/?igsh=MXZxazV4ZWc5cGQyNA==

No Comments