Quartile rating: 7/10 · 1 rating
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.
Jonas Mekas's nearly 5-hour lyrical diary film is one of the most singular works in avant-garde cinema — a stream-of-consciousness collage of super-8 home footage assembled without chronology, punctuated by Mekas's poetic voiceover meditations on memory, happiness, and loss. Cinematography earns a 4 for its genuinely beautiful, tactile grain and fleeting luminosity that no other film quite replicates. Novelty is unambiguously 4: the film is utterly one-of-a-kind in form, duration, and philosophical intent — a 288-minute anti-narrative that defines a genre unto itself. Plot receives a 2 because by design there is no conventional narrative structure, and the associative drift, while intentional, can feel shapeless to the point of inaccessibility. Acting is not really applicable and scores accordingly at 2. The ending, like much of the film, resists resolution, which is philosophically consistent but leaves little cathartic or structural payoff, earning a 3.