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“Here Are Materials Strewn Along the Ground”

This chapter investigates the philosophy of the ordinary and the everyday proposed in the films of Stan Brakhage, Jonas Mekas, and Phil Solomon. It places their work in the context of an interest in ordinary experience and language that, for philosopher Stanley Cavell, unifies the thinking of Emerson and Wittgenstein. By pursuing Brakhage’s explicit interest in Wittgenstein and Mekas’s engagement with Transcendentalism through Thoreau, the chapter looks at how these filmmakers construct their films from overlooked means or in-betweens (for Brakhage and Solomon, the materials of the filmstrip itself; for Mekas and Brakhage, everyday happenings). This practice reflects these filmmakers’ collective investment in the ethical philosophy of “finding as founding” that locates ends in means to privilege the contingencies of individual experience over an authoritative truth that is found rather than made.