A foreigner in one’s own tongue: Jonas Mekas, minor cinema and the philosophy of autobiographical documentary

Abstract

Abstract This article explores how philosophical ideas, a literary and filmic practice and the biographical predicament of being a migrant intersect to create a form of cinema that could be best described as ‘minor’. It uses thereby Deleuze’s and Guattari’s concept of ‘minor literature’ in regard to Jonas Mekas’s classical 1960s’ and 1970s’ diary films Walden: Diaries, Notes, and Sketches (1969), Reminisces of a Journey to Lithuania (1971) and Lost, Lost, Lost (1976) – films that can now be regarded as important predecessors to autobiographical documentary film practices today. The article proceeds by first outlining philosophy’s difficult relation to autobiography, before situating the emergence of autobiographical documentary practices within the transnational cine-writing culture of the 1960s as well as within a genuinely American ‘culture of the self’ that stems from Romanticism and Transcendentalism. With figures like Mekas, not only a practice, but a whole ‘philosophy of autobiographical documentary’ emerges in the 1960s in America, one in which documentary filmmakers explore themes like accented or embodied authorship, the relation between images and words or autobiographical approaches to memory and perception. Taking all of this into account, the article explores, towards the end, Mekas’s oeuvre as an exemplary case of minor cinema.