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

As I Was Moving Ahead, Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty (2000) is a documentary you can watch online on iFILM — the personal film diary of Jonas Mekas, the Lithuanian-American filmmaker who helped found avant-garde cinema in New York in the 1960s. Mekas assembled the film from over three decades of 16mm home footage, deliberately throwing out chronological order and cutting by feel alone.

The result runs nearly five hours: picnics, children, faces, rooms, street corners, light. Mekas narrates over the images — thinking aloud about memory, chance, and what it means to notice beauty in passing. Allen Ginsberg, Andy Warhol, and Nam June Paik move through the footage. This is not documentary filmmaking in any conventional sense. It either catches you immediately or it doesn't — but nothing else looks quite like it. Stream As I Was Moving Ahead online on iFILM.