A Calendar of “Eye-Pod Poems”: Jonas Mekas and the 365 Day Project

Abstract

In 2007 (only one year after the launch of YouTube) Lithuanian-American avant-garde filmmaker Jonas Mekas embarked on his first transmedial creation between cinema and the Internet, entitled 365 Day Project. Radicalizing the performative dimension which had characterized his experimental diary films, the then-octogenarian Mekas—one of the seminal figures of the “New American cinema”— challenged himself to create and publish a short film on his website for each day of the year 2007. All the short films (whose running time ranged from one and a half to twenty minutes) were free to be downloaded on the day of their publication, while later they could be bought for an inexpensive price. Footages were both old and new, creating a fragmented temporality (resulting in shifts in years, locations and topics) that brought the immediacy of the diary form into dialogue with memory and history. Mekas called these videos “eye-pod poems,” a wordplay that, on the one hand, indicated the confluence of aesthetic forms (film-poems, almost enacting Alexandre Astruc’s prophecy of the caméra-stylo), while, on the other, showcased an awareness of the plurality of the then-new devices through which they could be viewed. In fact, some of the films were not available to online viewing only, but were also displayed in various exhibitions.

Drawing on Henry Jenkins’ theories, this essay analyzes Mekas’ online film project as a creation that exemplifies the collision between old and new artistic media—typical of what Jenkins has called “convergence culture” (2006). Comparing the aesthetic strategies of Mekas’ online project with those of his diary films, the essay also argues that Mekas anticipated the modes of self-narration and self-representation of the social media, albeit with an unquestionably lyrical and artistic quality.