Jonas Mekas caught Judith Malina and Julian Beck’s production of Kenneth H. Brown’s play The Brig at the Living Theatre on its closing night and was so overwhelmed that the next night he filmed the whole performance straight through with three 16mm Auricon cameras, having made no extensive blocking or shooting strategy. The approach of total, immediate and punishing physical immersion happens to perfectly suit Brown’s depiction of everyday brutality inside a Marine Corps military prison, while Mekas had certain theoretical interests of his own. “One of the ideas that I was pursuing—or getting out of my system—was the application of the so-called cinéma vérité techniques to a stage event,” Mekas later wrote in The Village Voice. “In a sense, The Brig became an essay in film criticism… My approach wasn’t too kind to Kenneth Brown’s play: I was a parasite sucking on his blood.”