Jonas Mekas is the quintessential man with a movie camera. Long before the advent of YouTube, camera phones or social media, the New York-based poet and filmmaker was pioneering a diaristic, impressionistic style of documentary that depicted his day-to-day activities, his friends and social milieu, his chance encounters and observations, all captured in jittery, handheld, super-8 footage. He filmed everything from art-scene gatherings, featuring Andy Warhol and John Lennon, to journeys around his native Lithuania, to – in a prescient nod to today's internet memes – recurring images of cute-looking cats.
The results are enthralling and mundane – both, oddly, often at the same time. In a work such as the feature-length 'Outtakes from the Life of a Happy Man', made specially for this show and compiling over 50 years' worth of previously unused footage, the point is that such distinctions and hierarchies cease to make a lot of sense. Instead, the work's essentially random sequencing, combined with skillful sound editing, produce the effect of a hypnotic, endless montage, a meditation on what the voiceover terms 'the reality of images' – the equality of all things before the camera's relentless gaze.
Unfortunately, this idea of reusing old footage and juxtaposing unconnected images, starts to become wearying during the course of the exhibition – with too many other works culled from previous projects, or celluloid strips recycled as enlarged photographs, or stacked TVs playing multiple footage simultaneously.
It's not that Mekas doesn't make more accommodating, structured films – just that they're being shown elsewhere, as part of a season at the BFI. Still, there are occasional gems here – particularly 'WTC Haikus', which, with its compilation of clips where the World Trade Center simply happens to be in the background, is one of the most evocative, most quietly powerful memorials to 9/11 I've come across.