Diaries, Notes, and Sketches

Diaries, Notes, and Sketches (1968)

Also known as Walden, Jonas Mekas’s first diary film is a six-reel chronicle of his life in 1960s New York, interweaving moments with family, friends, lovers, and artistic idols. Blending everyday encounters with portraits of the avant-garde art scene, it forms an epic, personal meditation on community, creativity, and the passage of time.

Date of release
1968-03-01
TMDB
7.3 / 10 (32)
Runtime
3h 0m
Genres
Documentary
Director
Jonas Mekas

Casting

Interesting facts

Walden, originally titled Diaries, Notes and Sketches , is a 1968 American film by experimental filmmaker Jonas Mekas. After several years of filming everyday scenes from his life, Mekas was commissioned by the Albright–Knox Art Gallery to make Walden. It was his first major diary film, and he named it after Henry David Thoreau's 1854 memoir Walden. Mekas's film has received acclaim as a work of avant-garde cinema.

Production

Mekas shot Walden on a Bolex 16 mm camera between 1964 and 1968. He made use of many types of film stock based on availability, sometimes switching to black-and-white when he ran out of color stock. Mekas ordered one-light prints from film laboratories, and the lack of color timing meant that prints had very different tints. He had a Nagra and a Sony audio recorder with which he recorded sound from the scenes he was filming.

Mekas's cinematography differs sharply from the style of home movies. Where most hobbyists aim to replicate the look and feel of conventional studio movies, Mekas's camera work is aggressive and unstable, moving erratically in wild gestures. The improvisational rhythms of Marie Menken's camera work were a major influence on his style.

As Mekas continued to film over the years, financial constraints limited his ability to make completed films. The Albright–Knox Art Gallery commissioned him to make a film for a celebration it was planning. The gallery gave him ten months to complete the project, with a small grant of around $2,000.

Musician John Cale recorded some background music for the film. Mekas doubled the speed of Cale's recording and used it for a 15-minute segment in Walden. While editing, he played vinyl records, a radio, and televisions in various combinations so that he could seize any opportunity to record interesting music for the film. He used the film stocks' different tints as a way to structure some of the sequences based on color.

Mekas continued editing the film after the premiere and added additional material, using about a third of all the footage he had shot. He finished working on it in 1969.

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