Gertrude Stein, When This You See, Remember Me
[1970]. She was running an international festival of films on art, a very big event, at Hunter College. She held at least three of these events, in 1952, 1953, and, I think, 1954. I saw Alain Resnais's early films there, and some films by local filmmakers. I remember a pattern film by John Arvonio, who filmed reflections in the rain in Times Square. Nobody knows that film anymore. I don't know if it still exists. Also, no one seems to hear any longer of Wheaton Galentine or Joe Slavin, or Peter Hollander, who distributed early films by Jordan Belson and others through a distribution center called Kinesis.
We undertook two or three documentary film projects with Gideon Bachmann. One was about modern architecture in a community not far outside of New York called Usonia. I shot two or three rolls on the Frank Lloyd Wright buildings there. I think Gideon has that footage; I don't. In 1953 I ran a short film series at the Gallery East, on First Street and
Page 87
Avenue B, a gallery run by Joel Baxter and Louis Brigante. In 1954 my brother and I started our own film society called Film Forum. George Capsis was the third member. We had screenings for two years. At one of our first showsa Jordan Belson show, with Belson presentwe clashed with the projectionists' union. They came and cut off the electricity. When we wanted to continue, they threatened to beat us up, so we had to stop the screening.
MacDonald:
The color in the first two reels of
Lost Lost Lost
is gorgeous.
Mekas:
Much of it is time's effect on the early Kodachrome. I didn't like it in the original color. As it began aging, I liked it much more and decided to use it. I remember having a similar experience with Gregory Markopoulos's trilogy,
Psyche, Charmides, Lysis
[all 1948]. It seemed to me to become more and more wonderful as time went on. When some people looked at it later, they said, "It's horrible, what's happened to the color." But I found the later color superior to the original.
MacDonald:
That process will continue.
Mekas:
Yes. Even though I have a master now, on Ektachrome, the Ektachrome itself changes rapidly. The print stocks keep changing. And, of course, the color changed in the transfer from the original Kodachrome into the Ektachrome master. So there is no such thing as original color anymore. Every stage is original, in a way.
MacDonald:
It seems to me that your varied use of intertitles has always been a strong formal element in your films.
Mekas:
I was always faced with the problem of how to structure, how to formalize the personal material, which seems just to run on and on. It's so close to me that I have to use abstract devices, numbers, or descriptive intertitles, to make it more distant, easier for me to deal with, to make the footage seem more as if someone elsemaybe Lumièrewere recording it.
MacDonald:
You mentioned that you feel that you can't be a poet in English, and yet both in the spoken narrative passages (in
Lost Lost Lost
especially, but also as early as
Walden
) and also in the printed intertitles, your spoken or visual phrasing evokes several American poetsWilliam Carlos Williams, for example, and Walt Whitman.
Mekas:
But those passages are not poetry. They are poetic, yes, which is a different thing. By the way, I wanted to make a documentary about William Carlos Williams. In 1954 or 1955 I made some notes, visited Williams in Paterson, and discussed the film with him. I wanted to make a film about his life there in Paterson. He was supposed to prepare some notes about what he wanted to have in the film. I lost my notes; probably his estate would know if his still exist, if, that is, he made any. I took LeRoi Jones with me. He may remember more about that trip.
Page 88
MacDonald:
Had you read Whitman by this time?
Mekas:
I had read Whitman in German translation in 1946 or 1947. Later I read some in English. By 1950 I had read it all. I had even translated some of his poems, or rather, had tried to translate them into Lithuanian. During those periods Whitman
was
important to me, along with Sandburg and Auden. Later I gravitated toward other preferences. I haven't read Sandburg for decades, but there's a lot in him that is very appealing.
MacDonald: Lost Lost Lost
seems to be divided not only into six reels but into three pairs of two reels, each of which has the same general organization: the first tends to be about personal and family life, the second about the political context of that personal and family life.
Mekas:
That footage is largely in chronological order, though I took some liberties here and there. I worked with it as one huge piece. I kept looking at it, eliminating bits and dividing it up in one way and another. I didn't plan on six reels originally, in fact I had seven or eight at one point, but figured that that was too much to view in one sitting. I considered three hours the maximum for a single sitting.
MacDonald:
When the unfinished film-within-the-film that you show at the beginning of reel three was originally made, did you conceive of it as a sort of parable of your own experience as a displaced person?
Mekas:
No. That film was very much influenced by my viewing experimental films at Cinema 16. I wanted to make my first consciously "poetic" little film. At that point I thought it was totally invented and outside of me. All I wanted was that it be very, very simple, just one moment from somebody's life, a memory.
MacDonald:
In that passage, as it appears in
Lost Lost Lost,
you seem to be developing a parallel between yourself and the protagonist. Both of you go to the woods to walk off the pain of your losses.
Mekas:
Now, from the perspective of years, I can see that connection.
MacDonald:
In reel three you begin to develop the more gestural camera style with which many people identify you. In later reels the gestural camera becomes increasingly evident, so that the film as a whole seems, in part, about the emergence of that style.