Travel Songs

23 mins
7.4 / 10 (1781)
23

Synopsis

Drawn together from two decades of itinerant shooting, this short evokes Jonas Mekas’ improvisatory approach to sightseeing—including songs of Assisi, Avila, Moscow, Stockholm and Italy. In short bursts and single frames, memories of European journeys rush by like landscapes through train windows.

MUBI's take

Our avant-garde hero Jonas Mekas ventures outside his usual N.Y.C. for this travelogue across Europe: a compilation of short films shot between 1967 and 1981. Excerpts of Mekas’s diaries, read in voiceover by Angus MacLise, accompany Mekas’s typically pensive, typically tender 16mm footage.