As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty

2000

Action / Biography / Documentary

7
Rotten Tomatoes Critics - Rotten 78%
Rotten Tomatoes Audience - Upright 78% · 100 ratings
IMDb Rating 8.2/10 10 1672 1.7K

biography diary film

Plot summary

A compilation of over 30 years of private home movie footage shot by Lithuanian-American avant-garde director Jonas Mekas, assembled by Mekas "purely by chance", without concern for chronological order.

Director

Jonas Mekas Photo
Jonas Mekas

Top cast

Peter Kubelka Photo
Peter Kubelka as Self
Stan Brakhage Photo
Stan Brakhage as Self
Ken Jacobs Photo
Ken Jacobs as Self
Andy Warhol Photo
Andy Warhol as Self
720p.BluRay 1080p.BluRay
2.55 GB
948*720
English 2.0
NR
Subtitles us  
24 fps
4 hr 44 min
Seeds 6
4.74 GB
1422*1080
English 2.0
NR
Subtitles us  
24 fps
4 hr 44 min
Seeds 30

Movie Reviews

Reviewed by eminkl 9 / 10

With words of Jonas Mekas

As I Was Moving Ahead is a record of people's subtle feelings, emotions, everyday joys as recorded in the voices, faces, and small daily activities of people I've met, or lived with, or observed- something I've been recording for years. In contrast to the spectacular, entertaining, sensational, dramatic activities that dominate a great deal of contemporary filmmaking. All this now has to do with my understanding and conviction of what acts really affect the positive changes in man, society, humanity.I am interested in recording the subtle, almost invisible actions, experiences, feelings as opposed to the harsh, harsh, loud, violent activities and political actions of our time and, in particular, the political systems of our time.by Jonas Mekas
Reviewed by sanwolfx 8 / 10

More complex than it seems

I think it is sort of a misconception to say that this film is about the beauty of life, and nostalgia for the past. Through the narration and the titles, ambiguity is introduced into the mix. Mekas remarks multiple times the fact that this images are to an extent unreal: people are not so innocent as these images show them to be, people do not love each other as much, other people's perceptions of the same events are quite different, and he isn't just filming his children but he is inventing his own childhood through them. "This is a political film", says the movie repeatedly, and yet in the artificial idealized world of the film politics is entirely absent -there's no poverty, no war, no questioning of his bourgeois lifestyle-, and that's precisely the point: to show not how the world is, but how we want it to be, and how that desire can sometimes become a shallow fantasy. We long for paradise, but paradise is lost. We can only get glimpses of it, not in everyday life, but through it, beyond it, inside us.My complain with the movie is a matter of form. I just don't like the accelerated frame rate, the fast cuts, the repetition, the inflated length, the out of tune music. I sort of enjoyed it for the first hour and a half, but after that it became a blur. It had in me the effect of starting out as a beautiful experience and ending as a nightmarish reality without meaning from which I just wanted to escape; one is dying to know people's names, to hear someone's voice (besides the rather silent Mekas), and to stay in one place for a while. But then again, that feeling is also part of Mekas' scheme. Beauty comforts as by what it evokes, but hurts us by how unreachable it actually is.
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