MacDonald:
When you were first starting to shoot here, did you feel that you were primarily a recorder of displaced persons and their struggle, or were you already thinking about becoming a filmmaker of another sort?
Mekas:
The very first script that we wrote when we arrived in late 1949, and which was called
Lost Lost Lost Lost
(that is, four
Lost's
as opposed to the three of the 1975 version), was for a documentary on the life of displaced persons here. We wanted to bring some facts to people's attention. It did not have to do so much with the fact that we were displaced persons, or that there were displaced persons. It had more to do with the fact that the Baltic republicsEstonia, Latvia, Lithuaniawere sacrificed by the West to the Soviet Union at Yalta just before the end of the war and ended up as occupied countries to which we could not return. We were taking a stand for the three Baltic countries that the West had betrayed. Our script was an angry outcry. We sent it to [Robert] Flaherty, thinking he could help us produce it, but he wrote back that though he liked the script and found it full of passion, he could not help us. This was at a time when he couldn't find money to produce even his own films.
We did start shooting nevertheless. Actually, two or three shots at the beginning of
Lost Lost Lost
are from the footage we shot for that film. A slow-motion shot of a soldier (actually, Adolfas) and one or two others (a family reading a newspaper, a skating rink, a tree in Central Park) were meant for that film. But my brother was drafted and so we abandoned the project. When he came back from the army a year or so later, things had changed.
MacDonald:
During all the intervening time you were recording other material?
Mekas:
Yes, I was collecting, documenting, without a clear plan or
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purpose, the activities of displaced personsmainly Lithuanians. I shot footage of New York immigrant communities, and I did some weekend traveling to record communities in Chicago, Toronto, Philadelphia, Boston. I worked in Brooklyn factories and spent all my money on film.
MacDonald:
A lot of the footage that ended up in the first reel of
Lost Lost Lost
is compositionally and texturally very beautiful. When you were shooting originally, were you thinking about the camera as a potential poetic instrument?
Mekas:
The intention was to capture the situations very directly, with the simple means that we had at our disposal. All the indoor footage was taken with just one or two flood lamps. We made no attempt to light the "scenes" "correctly" or "artistically." Sometimes we were at meetingsactually, most of the timewhere we couldn't interfere, or we were too shy to interfere.
During the first weeks after our arrival here, we had read Pudovkin and Eisenstein, so in the back of our minds there was probably something else, a different ambition, but I don't think that that footage reveals much. In Germany we had bought a still camera and had taken a lot of stills. Maybe that affected how we saw and the look of some of the footage. We also looked at a lot of still photography. In 1953 or so I began working at a place called Graphic Studios, a commercial photography studio, where I stayed for five or six years. The studio was run by Lenard Perskie, from whom I learned a great deal. All the great photographers used to drop in, and some artists, like Alexander Archipenko.
In 1950 we began attending Cinema 16 screenings. By this I mean absolutely every screening of the so-called experimental films. It became my Sunday church, my university. We also attended every screening of the Theodore Huff Society, which was run at that time by the young Bill Everson. He showed mostly early Hollywood and European films that were unavailable commercially. I think it's still going on, but I haven't been there for years. It's one of the noble, dedicated undertakings of William Everson, who has performed a great educational role for nearly three decades.
MacDonald:
I asked the question about your using the camera as a poetic device because by the second reel there are shots in which it's clear that more is happening than documentation. I'm thinking of the beautiful sequence of the woman pruning trees, and the shot of Adolfas in front of the merry-go-round.
Mekas:
That shot of Adolfas was intended for our first "poetic" film:
A Silent Journey
. We never finished it and some of the footage appears in reel three of
Lost Lost Lost
the film within the film about the car crash.
MacDonald:
Were you collecting sound at this time too?
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Mekas:
We were collecting sound, but between 1950 and 1955 this amounted to very little. After 1955 I collected more and more sounds from the situations I filmed.
MacDonald:
The early reels are punctuated by images of typed pages. Were you writing a record of your feelings during that time?
Mekas:
Those pages are from my written diaries which I kept regularly from the time I left Lithuania [1944] until maybe 1960. Later I got too involved in other activitiesthe Film-makers' Cooperative,
Film Culture,
the Cinematheque, et ceteraand the written diaries became more and more infrequent.
MacDonald:
Did you know English when you arrived here?
Mekas:
I could read. I remember reading Hemingway's
A Farewell to Arms
on the boat as we came over. Hemingway is one of the easiest writers to read because of the simplicity and directness of his language. He is still one of my favorite writers. So I could read and communicate, but writing took another few years. To write in an acquired language is more difficult than to read, as you know, and I am still learning. Until the mid fifties I kept all my notes in Lithuanian. For another two to three years there is a slow dissolve: on some days my notes were in Lithuanian and on other days in English. By 1957 all the diaries and notes are in English.
My poetry remains in Lithuanian. I have triedmostly fooling aroundto write ''poetry" in English, but I do not believe that one can write poetry in any language but the one in which one grew up as a child. One can never master all the nuances of words and groupings of words that are necessary for poetry. Certain kinds of prose can be written, though, as Nabokov has shown.
My brother mastered English much faster than I because he found himself in the army with no Lithuanians around. Of course, I am not talking about our accents. The Eastern European pronunciation requires a completely different mouth muscle structure than that of the English language. And it takes a lot of time for the mouth muscles to rearrange themselves.
MacDonald:
When you came to put
Lost Lost Lost
together in its present form, did you then go back to the journals and film pages with that film in mind or had those pages been filmed much earlier?