If anyone still wants to make a “real” movie out of Brown’s play, to “adapt” it to cinema–he may well do it. Brown once told me he had an idea for a million dollar production of The Brig, with thousands of prisoners. It should be done. The point of cruelty done by one man to another can never be overstressed. I, myself, I am not interested in adapting plays, I always said so and I am repeating it here again. The Brig, the movie, is not an adaptation of a play: It is a film play; it is record of my eye and my temperament lost in the play. –Jonas Mekas, “Shooting the Brig”, 1965 (1)

What is remarkable about Jonas Mekas’s The Brig is neither simply the clarity with which it tells us about the American military nor its interest as a record of a theatrical production in the 60s. Rather, as Mekas himself suggests, it is a record of Mekas himself–a record of Mekas’s own understanding of and relation to repressive societal apparatuses and the social function of art. We will read The Brig in the context not only of Mekas’s personal trajectory as historical subject and filmmaker, but in so far as that trajectory is carved in the broader film, protest and beat cultures of which he was a part. We hope thereby to trace and illuminate some of the contradictions endemic to the specific filmic, social, and political practices prevalent in some oppositional cultures of the 60s in America, especially in relation to a dominant register of that opposition, the problem of agency.
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(read on: The Brig: the paradox of resistance and recuperation.)