Con la memoria negli occhi: la vita (ri)trovata nel cinema di Jonas Mekas

This article focuses on the last production of the avant-garde filmmaker Jonas Mekas and its relationship with the found footage practice. By analyzing the film As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty and other works of the early 2000s – the video work Autobiography of a Man Who Carries Memories in his Eyes and web project My First Forty – this study aims at drawing the outlines of a poetics rooted in the archive and in the reuse of (re)found images as a cartographic space to interrogate life. Through the montage – in Mekas a dialogue between the moving image and both written and spoken word – the Lithuanian-born filmmaker traces the form of a "memory's gaze" able to transform the present time through a continous re-emergence of the past. At the same time, far from embracing a nostalgic view of the cinema, Mekas' work is based on the idea of happiness to be found in fragments of the everyday, where, within the gaps of the lost time, one can capture and feel the moments of now. In this perspective, cinema is for Mekas a means of experience and rediscover life.