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...can never overstressed. I, myself, I am not interested in adapting plays, I always said so and I am repeating it here again. The Brig, the movie, is not an adaptation of a play: It is a film play; it is record of my eye and my temperament lost in the play. --Jonas Mekas, "Shooting the Brig", 1965 (1)
What is remarkable about Jonas Mekas's The Brig is neither simply the clarity with which it tells us about the American military nor its interest as a record of a theatrical production in the 60s. Rather, as Mekas himself suggests, it is a record of Mekas himself--a record of Mekas's own understanding of and relation to repressive societal apparatuses and the social function of art. We will read The Brig in the context not only of Mekas's personal trajectory as historical subject and filmmaker, but in so far as that trajectory is carved in the broader film, protest and beat cultures of which he was a part. We hope thereby to trace and illuminate some of the contradictions endemic to the specific filmic, social, and political practices prevalent in some oppositional cultures of the 60s in America, especially in relation to a dominant register of that opposition, the problem of agency.
Our reading of The Brig is polemical and allegorical. We will suggest that the text embodies a critique of late industrial capitalist society (represented here by a military brig); it gives expression to the impulse of the beat generation, the New American Cinema, and Jonas Mekas himself (as cameraman), to retreat from society in the hope of procuring self-expression and thereby social renewal and a "clean[ing] out" of "our civilized inheritance." (2) Finally, we will argue that the text literalises its own collusion with the structure that it purports to resist and negates its own utopian operation in a recuperative gesture which instantiates the paradox of resistance and recuperation that seems to beset American oppositional politics even today.
The Brig is perhaps Mekas's most concentrated textual instantiation of the topography of contradictory shifts and retractions that mark the relation between the underground and what he saw as the dominant American culture in the 60s. It is instructive to examine the circumstances of the film's production and consumption. Mekas films The Brig illegally in March 1964, sneaking into the theatre with the actors and stage crew the night before the play was to be closed by tax authorities. (3) But although the film, in terms of both its production and distribution, constituted itself outside the mainstream commercial industry, it did enjoy a great deal of mainstream critical reception after winning a prize at the Venice Film Festival. (4) Furthermore, the censorship battles Mekas waged around Flaming Creatures and Un Chant D'Amour in the same year he made The Brig attracted the attention of the police and subsequently the press. This foregrounded for the self-defined underground the question of different forms of social agency and a dialectic of visibility/invisibility, of insider/outsider positioning in relation to dominant society.
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Mekas concludes his overview of 1964 in his Village Voice column by describing the three options that face the underground at a moment when it comes into contact with dominant society:
In 1964, film-makers left the underground and came into the light, where they immediately clashed with the outmoded tastes and morals of the Establishment, the police and the critics. [...] By autumn, however, the tone of the press, the snides, began to change to fatherly friendliness. The fashion was about to be born. The magazines and the uptown decided to join the underground and make it part of the Establishment. These new tactics of the Establishment brought an obvious confusion into the ranks of the underground. The year 1965 starts with the underground directors, stars, and critics regrouping and meditating. There are three choices: 1. to be swallowed by the Establishment, like many other avant-gardes and undergrounds before them; 2. a deeper retreat into the underground; 3. a smash through the lines of the Establishment to the other side of it (or above it), thus surrounding it. (5)
Mekas seems to set out three options--cooption, retreat, and intervention--options which he articulates in complex ways in his writings of the period. In the discussion which follows, we observe two slippages in Mekas's formulation: first, that retreat is itself construed as intervention and indeed is theorised as the only possible and desirable form of social action still available to resisting subjects in late industrial capitalist society. Second, this slippage between retreat and intervention instantiates a further contradiction of the historical moment: intervention as retreat is always already recuperated, "swallowed by the Establishment."
We can see how retreat is theorized as intervention in "Where Are We--the Underground?", a commencement address to the Philadelphia College of Art, where Mekas narrativises a 'history' of the Beat Generation:
There were poets, and filmmakers, and painters--people who were also walking like one thousand painful pieces. And we...
NOTE: All illustrations and photos
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