Scenes from the Life of Raimund Abraham (2013) is a radical instance of cinéma vérité. Formally, it is not a great Mekas movie. It doesn’t have the beauty, eloquence, and coherence of Walden (1966) or Out-Takes from the Life of a Happy Man (2012), although it pulls together a penultimate and a final scene to make you weep and laugh and weep again over the irony that this puny digital artifact most likely will outlive everyone depicted in it, and has already outlived the architect who is its subject, Raimund Abraham. And in doing so, it will have realized its purpose: to carry lens-based sketches of the past into the future.

If you know nothing about Abraham—a Viennese avant-garde architect best known as a theoretician, who also realized one of New York’s most extraordinary buildings, the Austrian Cultural Forum (25 feet wide by 280 feet tall, built on a sliver of land at 11 East Fifty-Second Street and resembling, according to Abraham, “a guillotine”)—you can turn to Google. What you will not find there is the intimate life of the man—how he behaved with his friends, how he cooked them dinners (meat, meat, and more meat, for instance, an entire lamb skinned, basted, and set to pan-roast), what he talked about, how he explained his practice to others and to himself, the tour he gave a few friends of the interior of his great building (at least forty-five minutes of this epic six-hour movie portrait), and his unmistakable joy in having accomplished it. “Maybe the most important moment of my life,” he says at the opening.

Abraham and Mekas were close friends. Perhaps Mekas has film and video footage of Abraham that he hasn’t included in this portrait or in his previous movies. But since the hand of Mekas the archivist rather than Mekas the artist is at work here, I doubt that much was discarded. As a result, many of the images—shot on consumer video and, later, on digital cameras—leave a lot to be desired. And the same goes for the sound.