Luminous Time Capsule, Bobbing Alongside the Present Jonas Mekas calls his blissed-out new movie "Out-Takes From the Life of a Happy Man." It's an honest, direct title for a transcendently lovely and delicate work created from images that didn't make it into the filmed diaries he made from 1960 to 2000. During those years, he produced some of his most enduring films, like "Walden" and "Lost Lost Lost." He also published "I Had Nowhere to Go," his often haunting memoir that traces his early life as a Lithuanian refugee during World War II, and his later struggles both as a displaced person in Europe after the war and then as an immigrant living, working, yearning and shooting his first films in New York City. He was poor only in the most literal sense, and few have given as generously to American film culture. It was Mr. Mekas who in 1963, published Andrew Sarris's landmark essay on the auteur theory in Film Culture, a journal founded by Mr. Mekas and his brother, Adolfas. By that point, Jonas Mekas had been working through own his ideas on the art and rejecting what, writing in his column in The Village Voice, he condemned as "official, dead, conventional cinema." It was a moment churning with possibilities, the dawning of the New American Cinema, as filmmakers declared their aesthetic and industrial independence. As Mr. Mekas and some like-minded souls feverishly put it in a 1962 statement, "We don't want rosy films - we want them the color of blood." "Out-Takes From the Life of a Happy Man" doesn't look as if it was made with blood, though it sometimes pricks the skin. In tone, mood and image quality, it is suffused with light. At times, it is brightened by sunshine that poured through windows of the SoHo loft in which, once upon a Manhattan time, Mr. Mekas lived with his young family, several cats, a lot of plants, many more books and stacks and stacks of film cans and boxes. The streaming sun turned hair into halos and illuminated faces and rooms. It also flowed through Mr. Mekas's camera, inscribing shadow images of these children, those plants, the dancing cats, that smiling woman, on the loops of film he has now returned to. Although he speaks in intermittent voice-over in "Out-Takes," Mr. Mekas doesn't, I think, say the woman's name (Hollis Melton), perhaps because it's too private or painful or just incidental to the way she looked at his camera back then. She appears throughout the movie, along with their children, Oona and Sebastian, and together they present an unposed, casually intimate portrait of domestic tranquillity. Every so often, one, two or three will walk on a city sidewalk or in some country greenery. She looks at the camera more than the children, who often ignore it as if it were any other household appliance, which it was. Only once does a child seem irked by the camera's presence or possibly the man behind it; whatever the case, it jerkily shifts view, a move suggestive of a hurriedly averted gaze. His early films were more conventional and made with an eye toward the market. By the late 1950s, with films like Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie's "Pull My Daisy" pointing the way toward true independence, Mr. Mekas shifted his sightlines from the commercial cinema and its restrictions. In a 1959 Voice column, he wrote, "We need less perfect but more free films." Art and industry must be decoupled: "There is no other way to break the frozen cinematic conventions than through a complete derangement of the official cinematic senses." He lived what he wrote and over time broke free, too, developing a deeply personal, palpably handmade style in diary films in which the past jostled against the present and the thrum of everyday life became an occasion for ecstatic reverie. Part time capsule, part memento mori, "Out-Takes" is also a blast back to Mr. Mekas's earlier bohemian past. Although much of its focus is on his wife and children, his extended family is also represented in the form of the literary likes of Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs, and filmmakers like Ken Jacobs and Peter Kubelka. Every so often, Mr. Mekas slips in contemporary images of himself at a table, winding reels and splicing together bits of films. Before movies were edited on computers, they were cut with a blade and the resultant pieces often joined together with glue or tape, a labor-intensive task. He looks like a factory worker at that table, which seems paradoxical given that he abandoned industrial filmmaking, but it also fits his cinematic labors of love. The scholar Paul Arthur once made the case in an essay that "fragmentation and incompleteness" in Mr. Mekas's work "emerge as stylistic tokens of commitment to the present and its consequent forging of a new social identity." At the same time, the past and memory play considerable roles in Mr. Mekas's moving pictures, pressing insistently against the present, as suggested by the titles of films like "Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania." It's unsurprising, given the material in "Out-Takes From the Life of a Happy Man" and the movie's confessional-sounding title, that Mr. Mekas is again sifting through the past. Yet while these are friends and fragments from his own life, as these images skip and scatter across the screen they also convey a universal sense of memory. So it's somewhat of a jolt when Mr. Mekas, speaking in his still-heavily accented English, announces that these images are not memories but reality, a declaration that late in the movie opens up a Pandora's box of philosophical questions about the nature of film and memory. Like so much of his life's work, the movie is a gift from a man who, in between making films and writing about them, helped establish both the Film-Makers" Cooperative and Anthology Film Archives. It's at Anthology that this most-happy man - who turned 90 in December - will appear on Thursday with "Out-Takes From the Life of a Happy Man." If you go see this beautiful movie, you can wish him a belated happy birthday, and then thank him for everything that he's done. Out-Takes From the Life of a Happy Man Opens on Thursday in Manhattan. Written, directed and edited by Jonas Mekas; director of photography, Mr. Mekas. At Anthology Film Archives, 32 Second Avenue, at Second Street, East Village. Running time: 1 hour 8 minutes.