Perhaps Mekas’s masterpiece and the work that best embodies his lifelong filmmaking project, this epic film-diary captures pivotal years in arts and culture in New York City, especially for the New American Cinema and the cinematic avant-garde. A kaleidoscopic chronicle of people, places, happenings, and time’s passage, Walden refracts an ocean of documentary footage through the prism of Mekas’s emotional life by way of a rigorous edited-in-camera aesthetic. The result is a work that is both a landmark cine-portrait of artists and the city in which they live and a convulsive, energetic, and radically subjective take on the documentary, composed under the sign of Mekas’s own twist on the Cartesian cogito: “I make home movies—therefore I live. I live—therefore I make home movies.”

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