Another lesson came from Dostoyevsky, from a statement of his that I read when I was fifteen or sixteen and which I have never forgotten. A young writer complained to Dostoyevsky that his own writing was too subjective, too personal, and that he would give anything to learn to write more objectively. Dostoyevsky repliedthis is my memory; I may have adapted it totally to my own purpose; it's not a quotation"The main problem of the writer is not how to escape subjectivity, but rather how to be subjective, how really to write from one's self, to be oneself in language, form, and content. I challenge you to be subjective!" It is very difficult to be openly subjective. One has to keep it within formal limits, of course; one must not wallow in subjectivity. Perhaps I come very close to that sometimes. . . .
MacDonald:
Did the fact that 1976 was the American Bicentennial year have any impact on the making of
Lost Lost Lost?
It does tell a quintessentially American story.
Mekas: Lost Lost Lost
was completed because the New York State Council on the Arts (maybe because of the Bicentennial) decided to give four very special twenty-thousand-dollar grants. Harry Smith got one too. Suddenly I had enough money and I said, "This is my chance."
It's amazing, when one thinks about it: everybody saysand it's quite truethat this country is made of immigrants, that America is a melting pot. But it's not reflected very often in American literature. There is no major work that really documents the immigrant experience. Sinclair's
The Jungle
is the closest we have that I know of.
Lost Lost Lost
is a record of certain immigrant realities that have been largely ignored in art.
MacDonald: Guns of the Trees
[1961] is probably the closest of your films to a recognizably commercial narrative. What was the background of that project?
Mekas:
First I wrote a sketchy, poetic script that consisted of thirty sequences. I wanted to improvise around those sketches, and that's what we set out to do. "We" means Adolfas and me. We had agreed to assist each other on our own productions: first I'd make a film, and he'd help; next he'd make a film, and I'd help. He helped me on
Guns,
and I helped him on
Hallelujah the Hills
[1963]. The only thing that went wrong, and
Page 93
really very badly wrong was that at that time we had a friend, Edouard de Laurot, who wanted very much to be involved in the film as well. From solidarity and friendship, we decided to invite him to work with us. He was a brilliant person, but very self-centered and very dictatorial. Edouard's position was that absolutely every movement, every word, every thing that appeared in the film should be totally controlled and politically meaningful. I tended, even at that time, to be much more open; I was interested in improvisation, chance, accidents. I was too inexperienced and unsure of myself to push through with my own shy vision. So often I did things Edouard's way. It came to the point, finally, that we had to part, to end the friendship. This was an important lesson for me: it was clear that I had to work alone in the future. I was never happy with that film.
MacDonald:
How did you come to make
The Brig
[1964]?
Mekas:
I wanted to make a film in which sound was about as important as the image. I was attracted by the sounds of
The Brig
the stamping and running and shouting. It was a staged reality that was very much like life itself. I thought I could go into it the way a news cameraman would go into a situation in real life. Cinéma vérité was very much in the air at that time. People connected truth to cinema verité camera technique; style produced an illusion of truth. I made the film, in a sense, as a critique of cinema verité.
At that time the most widely used newsreel camera was the single system Auricon. You could record the sound in the camera during the shooting on magnetic sound-striped film stock. I rented three cameras and shot the film in one session, in ten-minute takes. Two days earlier, when I went to see the play on stage, the idea of making the film shot through my mind so fast that I decided not to see the play through to the end. That way, when I filmed I would not know what was coming next: the opposite of the usual situation in which the filmmaker studies and maps the action in an attempt to catch the essence of the play. I went to Julian Beck and told him that I wanted to film the play. He said this would be impossible since it was being closed the next day. The police had ordered it closed on the pretext that the taxes had not been paid. I decided that I wanted to do it anyway; I only needed a day to collect the equipment. We concocted a plan to sneak into the building after the play had been closed and begin shooting.
It was so sudden, an obsession. The cast got into the building at night, through the coal chute. So did we, my little crewEd Emshwiller, Louis Brigante, with our equipment. Shooting was very intense. I had to film and watch the play at the same time. Most of the time I did not even look through the camera. I'd finish with one camera, grab the next one, and continue. I'd have to yell out to the actors to stop while I changed cameras. Ed and Louis loaded the cameras while I shot.
Page 94
From Mekas's
The Brig
(1964).
MacDonald:
Did you assume that people who saw the film would not know the play?
Mekas:
No. Some of the people who later saw the film had seen the play. Some people who were not familiar with the play were actually fooled by the ''amateur" style. They thought that the United States army had permitted me to go into a real brig and make the film. This was the case with some Italian newspapers.
MacDonald:
The credits say that you shot the film and Adolfas edited it. How much was edited out? Was the play just an hour long?
Mekas:
The editing involved was technical work. When I would run out of film and grab another camera, the actors would stop and overlap a little bit. I liked the film with the overlaps, and actually the first screening included them. The Living Theater liked it that way too. But David and Barbara Stone, who were at that point beginning to get involved in distribution, agreed to distribute it, and for distribution's sake, we decided to eliminate the overlappings. My brother took care of this. He had just come back from Chicago, where he did the editing and salvaging of
Goldstein
. Also, though I shot the sound on film, I had a separate tape recorder running independently, for safety's sake. We decided to intensify the sound in certain places by merging the two soundtracks. My brother did that. Also, one camera was always slowing down towards
Page 95
the end of a roll, so we had to replace those parts of sound with the separate recording, or resplice it practically frame by frame. There was a lot of that kind of subtle technical work, which my brother does very well.