Fragments of Paradise: Jonas Mekas documentary offers a tidily drawn portrait of an avant-garde evangelist

For Jonas Mekas, films were “fragments of paradise”, ways of capturing the glimpses referred to in the title of his copious 2000 film As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Caught Brief Glimpses of Beauty. That overwhelming five-hour work, stitched together from decades’ worth of Mekas’s 16mm home movies, is only the longest of many such diary films that Mekas compiled from his life as Lithuanian émigré, Williamsburg bohemian and indefatigable evangelist – as critic, filmmaker, archivist and shy impresario – for the visionary tradition in underground cinema.

Such a vast, intimate, autobiographical archive presents both a gift and a challenge for a biographical portrait like K.D. Davison’s Fragments of Paradise. At half the length of such celebrated Mekas memoirs as Diaries, Notes and Sketches (1969) and Lost, Lost, Lost (1976), let alone his five-hourer, Davison’s documentary is necessarily an act of compression. And where Mekas assembled As I Was Moving Ahead… in random, out-of-sequence order, it is Davison’s project to impose a linear chronology, to tame the profusion and tell things from top to bottom.

Davison and her editor – Ken Burns alumnus Michael Levine – borrow the Mekas method in breaking up the flickering chronicle with printed section titles, grainily filmed. But rather less Mekas-like is the inclusion of the kind of sat-in-cinema-seats talking-head testimonies that are the white-bread and butter of the modern-day feature doc. Nonetheless, it’s an illustrious lot: Martin Scorsese and John Waters talking about the thunderclap experiences of seeing the impure likes of Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising and Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures (both 1963) at Mekas’s legendary avant-garde screenings in New York – the latter event getting Mekas arrested on an obscenity rap. Jim Jarmusch, Amy Taubin, Peter Bogdanovich and Marina Abramović are here too, alongside archive footage of the many artistic luminaries who made up the downtown demimonde in which Mekas moved: John and Yoko, Andy Warhol, Allen Ginsberg and so on.

Their insights make for a digestible and frequently fascinating primer, but the conventional approach and hosanna tone have the effect of turning the material of Mekas’s rearview-reveries into a kind of lifetime-achievement showreel. Left out is the debate over accusations made by historian Michael Casper, who in a 2018 article for the New York Review of Books claimed that Mekas had concealed his work on collaborationist newspapers in Nazi-occupied Lithuania, prior to him fleeing the country in 1944. It’s a missing fragment that completes the sense of a portrait that’s been too tidily drawn.

 ► Fragments of Paradise is available to stream on YouTube and Dogwoof on Demand now.