The Onion headline: MTV Movie Awards Snubs Director Jonas Mekas Yet Again. The fake-quote gem:
“It is a travesty that Mekas’ stark vision of elegiac melancholia has not been rewarded with the coveted Golden Popcorn statue,” Boston University film studies professor Ray Carney said. “His [1997] film Letter From Nowhere—Laiskas Is Niekur No. 1 should have easily walked away with Best On-Screen Duo, or Best Kiss, or at least Best Ass.”
Tee hee and everything, but there actually isn’t a huge gulf between Mekas’ most recent major project and the kind of thing you might see on post-Tila Tequila MTV.
In 2007, the 85 year-old experimental filmmaker made one short video per day with his camcorder, and then uploaded all of these videos to his website. The videos are diaries, confessionals, interviews, collages. In this one, he holds the camera right up to his face and laments “all the papers making jokes about Paris Hilton.” On Day 52, he films a full-page shot of Britney Spears mid head-shave and asks, “Why don’t they leave her alone?”––beating Chris Crocker to the same sentiment by seven months.
The videos were available for download for free on the day of their release; now, each one can be purchased for $1.99 each. But some of the clips have made it to YouTube, like Britney clip, and like the segment above. On Day 93, Mekas spent about six minutes with Harmony Korine, who reminisces about the time he tried to get the legendary filmmaker to “smoke heroin.” “It failed, completely,” Mekas laughs from behind the camera. He then promises (threatens?) to edit footage of Korine at his most drug-addled into a film, “someday, when you are really, really famous.” To which Korine responds: “Yeah, that’ll do wonders for my career.”
Forget about winning an MTV Award––MTV should give Jonas Mekas his own show.
11 Comments
Agreed. Mekas has more charisma than most pop culture pundits, and he’s hipper than all of them combined.
Because I’m surprised that no film blog or commentator has made this connection, I need to point this out– Chris Crocker probably stole the whole look or feel of his “Leave Britney Alone” vid from Jonathan Cauoette. In Cauoette’s personal documentary Tarnation, there’s a series of videos that Cauoette made as a kid/teenager, and many of them are ‘direct confessionals’ of imagined, hyperbolic characters that look exactly like Crocker’s infamous video.
I think suggesting that Chris Crocker is familiar with ‘Tarnation’ might be giving him too much credit.
I don’t know– just because your respect for Cauoette doesn’t match your regard for Cocker doesn’t mean I may not have a point. Take a look at those scenes in Tarnation and you’ll see what I mean.
Or: disregard for Cocker is what I mean.
I don’t actually have much respect for Caouette. My point is that dedicated YouTube pop culture diarists and consumers of experimental diary cinema tend to not practically overlap, mostly due to vagaries of distribution, even if they probably should.
Well, I think your making an overly pat conclusion to my observation. Yes, there’s doubt to my assertion, but what about giving it the benefit of the doubt?
I’m not making a “conclusion” at all. I just think you have to understand that “Tarnation” is fairly obscure in relation to YouTube culture.
TARNATION is obscure to most of pop culture. How does that make it any less likely that someone like Cocker rented it from a video store or a online rental service, watched it, and then emulated it for his video? And there are a lot of things that are on You Tube that are about very obscure things, or imitate very obscure things.
This is all motivating me to waste my time making a mash-up You Tube video of Caouette’s video with Cocker’s video just to prove my point!
*This is all motivating me to waste my time making a mash-up You Tube video of Caouette’s video with Cocker’s video just to prove my point!*
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[...] Rorro wrote an interesting post today on Jonas Mekas, Ray Carney Embroiled in Onion Joke…Here’s a quick excerpt:On Day 52, he layers a full-page shot of Britney Sticks mid head-shear and asks, “Why don’t they depart her alone?”––beating Chris Crocker to the same sentiment by seven months. The films were available for download for gratis on the day … [...]