Date: 22 October 2011 | Season: London Film Festival 2011 | Tags: London Film Festival
SLEEPLESS NIGHTS STORIES
Saturday 22 October 2011, at 9pm
London BFI Southbank NFT3
Jonas Mekas, Sleepless Nights Stories, USA, 2011, 114 min
Jonas Mekas’ opening confession that he suffers from insomnia will come as no surprise to anyone aware of his singular contribution to cinema. Over 50 years he has established and promoted a viable culture for truly independent and avant-garde filmmaking, and his recent acceptance by the art world has brought a long overdue wave of attention and success. Sleepless Nights Stories is the latest in the series of long-form diary films that Mekas has been making since his arrival in the USA in 1949. Eating, drinking, singing and dancing with friends, the tireless octogenarian is full of life and wonder, casually weaving together contemporary folk tales collected during travels across the globe. Marina Abramovic fantasizes about domesticity, Lee Stringer recounts an episode from his crack-addicted past, and the protagonist toasts the ‘working class voice’ of Amy Winehouse. Marina Abramovic, Björk, Harmony Korine and Patti Smith also appear. Treating significant and inconsequential moments with equal import, Mekas’ modern day saga presents the first episodes from his ambitious ‘1001 Nights’ project. (Mark Webber)
Also Screening: Tuesday 18 October 2011, at 9pm, VUE3
& Thursday 20 October 2011, at 7pm, BFI Studio
PROGRAMME NOTES
SLEEPLESS NIGHTS STORIES
Saturday 22 October 2011, at 9pm
London BFI Southbank NFT3
SLEEPLESS NIGHTS STORIES
Jonas Mekas, USA, 2011, video, colour, sound, 114 min
For two hours we stroll with Jonas Mekas through New York nights, through apartments, studios, backstage rooms, galleries, bars and clubs. We meet old acquaintances like Ken and Flo Jacobs, Yoko Ono, Patti Smith, Carolee Schneemann, Marina Abramovi?, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Pip Chodorov, friends, brothers and sisters, sons and daughters, and we also make many new acquaintances. The father of the diary film begins a film with the words ‘I can’t sleep’. Who hasn’t been in this situation? Sleepy and yet wide awake at the same time, you find yourself in the world of those exhausted from the day’s exertions; the drunk, the relaxed, the dancing, the brooding, the mourning, the pensive, the partiers. In this film Mekas dives into a time vacuum … and it becomes increasingly unclear whether we really did get up and go out, whether what we’re seeing are remnants of the day that we’re remembering, or remnants of films by one of the greatest avant-garde filmmakers whose life wrote film history. (Berlinale)
This film originated from my readings of the One Thousand and One Nights. But unlike the Arabian tales, my stories are all from real life, though at times they too wander into somewhere else, beyond the everyday routine reality. There are some twenty-five different stories in my movie. Their protagonists are all my good friends and I myself am an inseparable part of the stories. The storyteller of the Arabian Nights was also part of his or her tales. Some of the people in the movie you’ll recognize, some not. The fact that some of them you’ll recognize has no bearing on the stories: after all, we all recognize John Wayne or Annette Bening, but in their stories they are no longer the people we know. The subjects of the stories cover a wide range of emotions, geographies, personal anxieties, anecdotes. These are not very big stories, not for the Big Screen: these are all personal big stories … And yes, you’ll also find some provocations … But that’s me, one ‘me’ of many. The very question ‘What is a story?’ is a provocative question. (Jonas Mekas)
www.jonasmekasfilms.com
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