Jonas Mekas
"June 29, 1961
IN DEFENSE OF ACTION FILMS
Navarone insults your intelligence? There you go, always searching for ideas. The best intelligence today is no intelligence at all, if you know what I mean. No intelligence is better than false intelligence. So enjoy the mountain dangers. Enjoy the man in action. Explosions. Ocean storms. Close escapes. Gregory Peck. Simple things like that.
As for cinema, let's not fool ourselves. Village of the Damned, Underworld U.S.A., or Mad Dog Coll has as much of it (in any case, not less) as any "art" movies you see today. Ideas? How many ideas does a man need? Count: Some ideas are useless. If you want ideas, the right ones, don't fool yourself: Go to India or China, study Sanskrit. Go to India and get lost, as Allen Ginsberg says. Don't read anything after 300 B.C., after Plato - it will only confuse you more. Unless it's the new American beat poetry, written after A.D. 1950 (Diane di Prima's new book, Dinners and Nightmares, for instance). Or watch old slapstick movies, pure Zen.
Yes, there are a few films which enrich our understanding of man and ourselves in a more realistic or, one could say, scientific manner. L'Avventura, for instance, or Ashes and Diamonds, or La Dolce Vita. But that doesn't give you the right to deny the other cinema, other kinds of knowledge, the knowledge gained through slapstick or a murder story, to name but two.
Some of you wonder how I can like L'Avventura and Mad Dog Coll at the same time. Yes, it is strange indeed. I will tell you my secret: It is my way of psychoanalyzing myself by embracing everything. It is the immorality, the dishonesty of man that I detest, not man himself."