Mekas:
I filmed the pages during the editing. When I felt that some aspect of that period was missing from the images, I would go through the audio tapes and the written diaries. They often contained what my footage did not.
Also, as it developed into its final form,
Lost Lost Lost
became autobiographicaclass="underline" I became the center. The immigrant community is there, but it's shown through my eyes. Not unconsciously, but con-
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sciously, formally. When I originally filmed that footage, I did not make myself the center. I tried to film in a way that would make the community central. I thought of myself only as the recording eye. My attitude was still that of an old-fashioned documentary filmmaker of the forties or fifties and so I purposely kept the personal element out as much as I could. By the time of the editing, in 1975, however, I was preoccupied by the autobiographical. The written diaries allowed me to add a personal dimension to an otherwise routine, documentary recording.
MacDonald:
Your detachment from the Lithuanian community in reels one and two seems to go beyond the documentarian's "objective" stance.
Mekas:
I was already detached from the Lithuanian communitynot from Lithuania, but from the immigrant community, which had written us off probably as early as 1948 or even earlier, when we were still in Germany, in the DP camps. The nationaliststhere were many military people among the displaced personsthought we were Communists and that we should be thrown out of the displaced persons camp. The main reason for that, I think, was that we always hated the army. We were very antimilitaristic. We always laughed and made jokes about the military. Another thing that seemed to separate us from the Lithuanian community was that we did not follow the accepted literary styles of that time. We were publishing a literary magazine in Lithuanian, which was, as far as they were concerned, an extreme, modernist manifestation. So we were outcasts. That was one of the reasons why we moved out of Brooklyn into Manhattan. I was recording the Lithuanian community, but I was already seeing it as an outsider. I was still sympathetic to its plight, but my strongest interests already were film and literature. We'd finish our work in a factory in Long Island City at five
P.M.
and without washing our faces, we'd rush to the subway to catch the five-thirty screening at the Museum of Modern Art. To the other Lithuanians we were totally crazy.
MacDonald:
You begin
Lost Lost Lost
with your buying the camera, which does end up recording the Lithuanian community, but the camera is also suggestive of an interest that has come
between
you and that community.
Mekas:
Yes, recording the community was part of mastering new tools. It was practice. If one has a camera and wants to master it, then one begins to film in the street or in the apartment. We figured, if we were going to film the streets, why not collect some useful material about the lives of the Lithuanian immigrants. We had several scripts that called for documentary material. One of them required footage from many countries. My brother took a lot of footage for that film in Europe, while he was in the army.
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But, basically, at that time our dream was Hollywood. Fictional, theatrical filmnot documentary. We thought in terms of making movies for everybody. In those days if one thought about making films for neighborhood theaters, one thought in terms of Hollywood. We dreamed we would earn some money, and borrow some from friends, and would be able to make our films, our "Hollywood" films. Very soon we discovered that nobody wanted to lend us any money. So we began to send our scripts to Hollywood. I remember sending one to Fred Zinnemann and another to Stanley Kramer. We got them back; I don't know whether they were ever read. Now one can see that our first scripts were not Hollywood scripts at all; they were avant-garde scripts. But we naively thought we could get backing for the films we were dreaming of.
Luckily, just around that time, in New York, there were some people, like Morris Engel and Sidney Meyers, who were beginning to make a different kind of cinema, who began breaking away from Hollywood. We saw
The Little Fugitive
[1953] and it made us aware of other possibilities. Before we arrived here, we were completely unaware of anything other than commercial film. As we were entering adolescence, when we might have become interested in such things, the war came, and the occupations by the Soviets, then the Germans, then the Soviets again. There was no information, no possibility at all for us to become aware of the other kind of cinema. The Russians came with their official cinema; then the Germans with theirs. After the war the United States army came with Tarzan and melodrama. Our film education was very slow. In late 1947, and in 1948, when we were studying at the University of Mainz, we were excited by
Beauty and the Beast
[1946] and a few other French films. But that's about it.
MacDonald:
Is there some reason why you included almost no explicit information about your film interest in those first two reelsother than the obvious fact of your making the footage we're seeing? When I originally saw reel three and the intertitle,
"FILM CULTURE IS ROLLING ON LAFAYETTE STREET,"
I was surprised: it seemed to come out of nowhere.
Mekas:
I have no real explanation for that. I figure, the professional life, even if it's a filmmaker's, is not photogenic. There are certain crafts, professions, that are photogenicto mesuch as, for instance, bread making, farming, fishing, street works, cutting wood, coal mining, et cetera. Technological crafts and professions are not photogenic. Another reason is that until 1960 or so, no filmmaker was really filming his or her own life. Whatever one was filming was always outside of one's lifein my case, the Lithuanian community or New York streets. The diaristic, autobiographical preoccupations did not really exist. The personal lives of the whole first wave of American experimental filmmakers
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are not recorded on film. There is a little bit of Dwinell Grant, fooling in front of the camera. Francis Lee has footage of himself and some of his friends. But the personal had not yet become a concern. As a result, in
Lost Lost Lost
you do not see much of my own life until later. One didn't go to parties with the camera. If I had taken my Bolex to any of Maya Deren's parties and started filming, they would have laughed. Serious filmmaking was still scripted filmmaking.
MacDonald:
Who were the first people you ran into who were using film in more personal ways?
Mekas:
My first contacts with the New York film-viewing community began very early. The second or third evening after I arrived here, I went to a screening of
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
[1920] and Epstein's
The Fall of the House of Usher
[1928], sponsored by the New York Film Society, run at that time by Rudolf Arnheim. Then we went to Cinema 16, but we did not meet any filmmakers there: we were just two shabby DPs watching films. When I heard that Hans Richter was in New York, running the film department at City College, I wrote him a letter saying that I had no money, but would like to attend some classes. He wrote back, "Sure, come!" So I did and I met Hans Richter. I did not take any of his classesactually, he did not teach any classes that winterbut I met many people: Shirley Clarke, Gideon Bachmann, Frank Kuenstler (the poet), and others. I continued seeing Gideon, and we decidedit was his ideato start our own film group. It was called The Film Group. Beginning in 1951 we had screenings once a month, sometimes more often. We rented films, mostly experimental, avant-garde films. I wrote many of the program notes. Through those screenings we met other people interested in filmmaking. Another person very active during those years (between 1950 and 1955) was Perry Miller, who has lately made several important documentaries