Mekas:
It's more complicated than that. My first major work in Lithuanian, which to some of my Lithuanian friends is still the best thing I've done, was a cycle of twenty-odd idylls I wrote in 1946. I used long lines and an epic pace to portray my childhood in the village. I described the people in the village and their various activities during the four seasons, as factually and prosaically as I could. I avoided what was accepted as poetic Lithuanian language. My aim at that timeI talk about this in my written diarieswas to achieve "a documentary poetry." When I began filming, that interest did not leave me, but it was pushed aside as I got
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caught up in the documentary film traditions. I was reading John Grierson and Paul Rotha and looking at the British and American documentary films of the thirties and forties. I feel now that their influence detoured me from my own inclination. Later, I had to shake this influence in order to return to the approach with which I began.
Now that I am transcribing all my written diaries, I notice that already in the forties there are pages and pages of observations of what I've seen through windows, what I've heard in the streeta series of disconnected, collaged impressions. If one compares my camera work with those pages, one sees that they are almost identical. I only changed my tools.
MacDonald:
I had assumed that your gestural camera represented the development of an American film style, growing out of your progressive acculturation.
In reels two and three of
Lost Lost Lost,
you seem very lonely, and yet you were obviously very busy with many people.
Mekas:
When I read my written diaries, I see that I was very, very lonely during those early years, more so than, say, the average Italian immigrant. There's an established Italian community here which one can become part of. It's lonely, but not that lonely. Italian immigrants know they can go back to Italy if things don't work out. Once we left what Lithuanian community there was in New York, and moved to Orchard Street, we were very much alone. One of the reasons why I went to City College for a few months was to meet new people. I could not stand just walking the streets by myself. My brother was in the army. For two years I had no friends, nobody. If I had been a communicative, friendly person, it might have been different. But I was never that kind of person. I was always very closed and extremely shy. Actually, I still am, but I have learned techniques to cover it. At thirteen or fourteen I was so shy that when finally, for some reason, I began speaking to peopleother than members of my familyeverybody was amazed: "He speaks! He speaks! Really, he speaks!" This shyness did not disappear all at once. Even though we started publishing
Film Culture
and went to film screenings, we'd go home and be alone. We were still thinking about Lithuania. Our mother was there, our father, and all our brothers. Until Stalin died we could not even correspond.
I did a lot of walking in this new country, but as yet I had no memories from it. It takes years and years to build and collect new memories. After a while the streets begin to talk back to you and you are not a stranger any longer, but this takes years. That experience is not pleasant to go through and so it's not always reflected in my footage, though it's in the diaries. I put it into the film later, by means of my "narration," or, more correctly, my "talking."
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Jonas Mekas walking New York streets in
Lost Lost Lost
(1976).
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MacDonald:
Some of it comes through in the mood of those images.
Mekas:
Some, yes.
MacDonald:
I showed Menken's
Notebook
[1963] recently, and noticed not only a feeling similar to the one in your work, but a similar use of tiny passages of text as a means of contextualizing and distancing personal footage.
Mekas:
Oh, yes. I liked what she did and I thought it worked. She helped me make up my mind about how to structure my films. Besides, Marie Menken was Lithuanian. Her mother and father were Lithuanian immigrants, and she still spoke some Lithuanian. We used to get together and sing Lithuanian folk songs. When she'd sing them, she'd go back to the old country completely. So there might also be some similarities in our sensibilities because of that. But definitely Marie Menken helped me to be at peace enough to leave much of the original material just as it was.
And John Cage. From him I learned that chance is one of the great editors. You shoot something one day, forget it, shoot something the next day and forget the details of that. . . . When you finally string it all together, you discover all sorts of connections. I thought at first that I should do more editing and not rely on chance. But I came to realize that, of course, there is no chance: whenever you film, you make certain decisions, even when you don't know that you do. The most essential, the most important editing takes place during the shooting as a result of these decisions.
Before 1960 I tried to edit the material from 1949 to 1955. But I practically destroyed it by tampering with it too much. Later, in 1960 or 1961, I spent a long time putting it
back
to the way it was originally. After that I was afraid to touch it, and I didn't touch it until 1975.
MacDonald:
It's in the fifth reel of
Lost Lost Lost
that you seem, for the first time, to be back in touch with rural life and with the land.
Mekas:
Yes, that's where the "lost lost lost" ends. I'm beginning to feel at home again. By reel six one cannot say that I feel lost anymore; paradise has been regained through cinema.
MacDonald:
It's the paradise of having a place where you can work and struggle for something that you care about?
Mekas:
When you enter a whole world where you feel at home. A world for which you care. Or, a world which takes you over, possesses you, obsesses you, and pushes all the other worlds into the shadow. Still, I don't think that I'll ever be able, really and completely, to detach myself from what I really am, somewhere very deep: a Lithuanian.
MacDonald:
Reel five is exhilarating in its use of light and texture. And you take some chances by allowing yourself to be very vulnerable: you allow yourself to look foolish.
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Mekas:
I realized I was taking chances. I have to give credit here againone is always taking lessonsto Gregory Markopoulos. Gregory had taken chances that I thought wouldn't work, but he always managed to pull through. I don't know how familiar you are with Markopoulos's work; it's practically impossible to see these dayshe doesn't show it in America. I learned from Gregory that what seems embarrassingly personal soon after a film is made, later comes to be part of the content, and not embarrassing at all.