I've been watching Walden at least once a year for many years now. Often, I don't go beyond reel 1. This is because Mekas' images often accompany me in my sleep. I invoke them when I feel sad, and I use their power like a potion, an incantatory poem that keeps me on the side of light, bringing me back into the world of the living, inhabited by flowers, children, cats, and buds bursting in spring in the city. There are pivotal works that stay with us forever, and we must revisit them constantly. We return to them like an obsessive first love, impossible to leave. We would like to evolve, move on, but the heart of what concerns us is too entirely contained in the film that it's impossible to look away for any length of time.

You can't fight it, or even try to understand it. You must surrender, accept that love and tears overwhelm us. Let go of judgments, critiques, theoretical or moral postures. Everything goes. And what remains in us, once the critical tensions have passed, is just that; the light and the movement, and the grandiosity of being able to live for the unprecedented privilege of touching, sometimes, rarely, what most resembles grace or beatitude.

I don't know why Walden has this effect on me. It just does. Perhaps it will leave you indifferent or annoyed. I don't want to proselytize. When it comes to love, unfortunately, words are no longer precise enough. I simply wish you to know your own Walden and to rest there when the light falters.

 

Naomie Décarie-Daigneault
Tënk Artistic Director