Critics reviews

Few films have so poignantly embodied André Bazin's notion of cinema as "time mummified," as a thing that lives and breathes and dies. . . . As I Was Moving Ahead… operates as one extended flashback, with memories unanchored from their context, and leaps in time rendered almost irrelevant and indistinguishable by the uniformly granular, discolored look of the 16mm stock.

The film plays like a box of photographs overturned, mixed around, and then tossed into the air. Meanwhile the filmmaker's voiceover, often recorded decades after the footage it accompanies, somewhat undercuts the radical-ness of the randomness by underscoring his purpose.

The home movie as epic... It's a fleeting storm of a film, with pockets of rhythms that suggest the ebb and flow of a naturally unfolding event... Mr. Mekas understands the unreliability of memory. More astoundingly, he manages to tame that phenomenon and get it on film.

As I Was Moving Ahead serves not just as a meditation on the nature of cinema, beauty, and time, but also as a monument to the bonds of family and friends. Mekas’s diaries have always quivered with the tensions between past and present. This one, created by an artist soon to enter his eighth decade, finds a secret paradise in the rich harvests of a lifetime’s memories.

Length and style may deter [the film's] prospects, but won’t inhibit auds bold enough to spend four hours and 48 minutes with the godfather of a key movement in the American avant-garde.