Diaries, Notes, and Sketches

6.3

Birth of a Nation

Filmmaker Jonas Mekas films 160 underground film people over four decades.

1997-08-06 | en

0.0

Layering

This short experimental diary film reveals my struggles with mental illness in my adolescence and queer adulthood while simultaneously reflecting upon my joyous childhood experiences. I investigate when and how my depression began and explain that my relationships with the people I love have supported me through my harder times. The film incorporates footage shot over May and June 2023 and archival home videos. Overall, I aim to resolve my "growing pains" through the medium of diary film and by reconnecting with my younger self.

2023-07-14 | en

0.0

beer cans under my bed

This short, started early on into sobriety, finished about nine months in, is a collage of diaries and notes, collected from within addiction and into recovery.

2024-03-08 | en

0.0

June

A letter of love to my past self who discovered himself.

2024-12-31 | en

7.0

Lost, Lost, Lost

Jonas Mekas adjusts to a life in exile in New York in his autobiographical film, shot between 1949 and 1963.

1976-09-14 | en

7.6

As I Was Moving Ahead, Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty

A compilation of over 30 years of private home movie footage shot by Lithuanian-American avant-garde director Jonas Mekas, assembled by Mekas "purely by chance", without concern for chronological order.

2000-11-05 | en

8.2

He Stands in a Desert Counting the Seconds of His Life

A film collage tracing the story of the lives, loves, and deaths within the artistic community surrounding Jonas Mekas.

1986-02-22 | en

6.0

La deuxième femme

Over the course of more than fifteen years, Clémenti films a series of intimate diaries, starting from daily encounters. In La deuxième femme, we see Bulle Ogier and Viva, Nico and Tina Aumont, Philippe Garrel and Udo Kier, a performance by Béjart, a piece by Marc’O, concerts by Bob Marley and Patti Smith (not always recognisable)... It’s like a maelstrom of psychedelic images that are passed through a particle accelerator.

2008-11-30 | fr

0.0

Hotel Diaries

Made over six years in the hotels of six different countries, Hotel Diaries charts the 'War on Terror' era of Bush and Blair through a seven-part series of video recordings that relate personal experiences to the ongoing conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq and Israel/Palestine. In these works, which play upon chance and coincidence, hotel rooms are employed as 'found' film sets, where architecture, furnishing and decoration become the means by which the filmmaker’s small adventures are linked to major world events.

2007-10-20 | en

0.0

Mathilde

An old man comes across a fascinating archive, then meets a woman who introduces him to the life of a banker, patron and philanthropist. A moving essay that is part documentary, part film diary.

1985-01-01 | fr

5.2

Homeo

Homeo is a mental construction made from visual reality, just as music is made from auditive reality. I put in this film no personal intentions. All my intentions are personal. I’ve made this film thinking of what the audience would have liked to see, not something specific that I wanted to say: what the film depicts is above all reality, not fiction. Homeo is, for me, the search for an autonomous cinematographic language, which doesn't owe anything to traditional narrative, or maybe everything. Cinema is, above all, part of a way of life which will become more and more self-assured in the years and century to come. We are part of this change, and that’s why I tried in Homeo to establish a series of perpetual changes, in constant evolution or regress, which tries, above all, to focus on things.

1967-11-15 | en

0.0

American Teenagers

A short documentary project that attempts to encapsulate what it looks and feels like to be an American Teenager in 2022.

2022-11-13 | en

0.0

Shotgun Baby

A personal documentary questioning the ways in which family imposed narratives force us into roles that we spend our lives either rebelling against or conforming to.

2025-03-01 | en

5.5

In the Bathtub of the World

On January 1st, 1999, Caveh Zahedi started a one-year video diary. The idea was to shoot one minute each day. This is the result.

2001-04-29 | en

5.2

Day Tripper

A woman walks, loves, eats and washes herself, dances. It all takes place in a bedroom. At times flashbacks, or visualizations of previous or following scenes. Unless her life in the bedroom becomes an obsession, she lives through the other scenes.

1966-01-01 | fr

5.8

Chromo sud

One of the very few films made by Etienne O'Leary, all of which emerged from the French underground circa 1968 and can be very loosely designated 'diary films.' Like the contemporaneous films by O'Leary's more famous friend Pierre Clementi, they trippily document the drug-drenched hedonism of that era's dandies. O'Leary worked with an intoxicating style that foregrounded rapid and even subliminal cutting, dense layering of superimposed images and a spontaneous notebook type shooting style. Yet even if much of O'Leary's material was initially 'diaristic,' depicting the friends, lovers, and places that he encountered in his private life, the metamorphoses it underwent during editing transformed it into a series of ambiguously fictionalized, sometimes darkly sexual fantasias. - Experimental Film Club

1968-01-01 | en

0.0

Heart of a Tiger

Somewhere between a diary and a filmed letter made while Caroline Champetier was shooting Benoît Jacquot's film L'Intouchable in India.

2009-01-01 | fr

0.0

Return to Khodorciur—Armenian Diary

Raphael, Yervant Gianikian's father, survived the Armenian genocide in 1915 in Eastern Turkey. In April 1988, while living in Venice, he sat for his son's camera and read an excerpt from his memoirs, translated from Armenian into Italian.

1986-01-01 | it

0.0

this evening out of boredom washed my hands three times in succession in the bathroom

Reminiscences of a trip to Čáslav

2024-08-11 | en

0.0

Notes before the Wind

A loose collection of scenes in Hong Kong shot over a five-year period, this film begins with the Umbrella Movement in 2014 and ends right before the summer of 2019, when large-scale social unrest and violent resistance erupted. The everyday scenes capture the ambience and the landscape of change in the city, standing as a quiet prelude to the ensuing conflicts.

2020-01-01 | cn

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