Without memories, what do we have left? How
do we fill our life with meaning?

As a stream of seemingly unimportant home video clippings flood
through the screen, Jonas Mekas contemplates these very questions, intercutting scenes with splices of poetry and thoughts in his massive four hour, forty-eight-minute masterpiece: As I Was Moving Ahead I Occasionally Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty, where the audience is taken on a journey through the pages of a man’s life.

It is a film without plot or structure, and seemingly without any importance, but it is the substance within these small moments in montage, that when all together, create an undeniable representation of
the human condition.

This memoir is less structured like a documentary but more like music or poetry. Unlike a book, the film expresses memory through words, music,
and narration. Intertitles and images combine not just to describe memory but to share it. You see the world with wonder and weariness through the eyes of Jonas Mekas.

In short, to ask, What is the meaning of this film? Is to ask, what is the meaning of life.

Leaving Lithuania, he became imprisoned in a German labor camp with his brother, and after escaping they went into hiding in a farm near the
Danish border.

When the second World War ended, he moved to the United States, bought a camera, and started shooting documentary movies.

Today he is known as the godfather of American avant-garde cinema.

In 1961, he and twenty-one other independent mostly experimental filmmakers including Andy Warhol founded The Filmmakers Cooperative, a non-profit distribution center for a new age of avant-garde film.

He soon became one of the most influential names of the New Cinema Movement creating inventive and unique documentary films including
Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania (1972) and He Stands in the Desert Counting the Seconds of his Life (1987).

Brief Glimpses of Beauty came out in 2000 and is a culmination of his style.

I’ve had some trepidations about writing an article on this film because it’s so massive, yet understated and most importantly, unconventional.

It’s a rare opportunity for an audience to see a person’s life on film, comparable to Gordon Parks’ Moments Without Proper Names, but not parallel in sheer length and substance.

As a reoccurring intertitle reads: Nothing happens in this film. Later corrected with: Everything happens in this film.

As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty is an optimistic film about life, but also a weary film, made by a man aware of his mortality, reflecting on scraps of memory, coming to terms with age, the past and dying.

Jonas Mekas says it best, in the opening words of the film, “I have never been able, really to figure out where my life begins and where it ends. . . There is some kind of order in it—order of its own, which I do not really understand, same as I never understood life around me. The real life, as they say, or the real people, I never understood them. I still do not understand them, and I do not really want to understand them.”