By 1964, post-JFK assassination, the American atmosphere was considerably grimmer. In a year in which he spent time in jail for exhibiting
Jack Smith's
Flaming Creatures and
Jean Genet's
Un Chant d'amour, Mekas attended the original production of Kenneth Brown's
The Brig, a proto-Guantanamo hallucinatory vision of a play set in a Marine base in Japan. Simultaneously electrified and horrified by the all-too-real events transpiring before his eyes, he immediately resolved to film it in a
cinema-verite manner, and shortly thereafter completed what is possibly the shortest schedule in the history of fiction feature-film production:
The Brig, photographed with the camera hand-held by Mekas himself, took no more than three hours to shoot. The film proved a major success of the New American Cinema, and was a further salvo in the direction of what would become Mekas'
modus operandi of a completely spontaneous and responsive filmmaking form. Although it could be called "scripted", the shooting itself was almost entirely improvised--this dichotomy mirroring what Mekas increasingly found to be the paradigm of the modern world: the fixed "establishment" reality vs. that of the free, the open, the brave. He was well on his way towards becoming the self-described "raving maniac of cinema"....
"The Mekas brothers are no longer the gentle poets that we thought they were:
they are two wild Indians drying scalps." -Cahiers du cinema
Not on video!
Winner of Prize for Best Fictional Film at the 15th
International Documentary Festival of Venice, 1964.
