Page 102
various governments, is totally rotten. This civilization cannot be revolutionized, changed: it has to be
replaced
.
MacDonald:
The titles of
Walden
and your other films have evolved.
Mekas:
Yes.
Walden
was originally titled
Diaries, Notes & Sketches
(
also known as Walden
). But now, since I have many other reels of diary material, there is a confusionat least for the labs. When I was using the title
Diaries, Notes & Sketches: Lost Lost Lost,
they kept writing on the cans
Diaries, Notes & Sketches
and skipping the rest. I had no choice but to rethink the titles. All of my film diaries are
Diaries, Notes & Sketches,
but now I call the individual parts only by their specific names:
Walden, Lost Lost Lost, In Between, Notes for Jerome,
et cetera.
MacDonald:
How does what we see in
In Between
relate to
Walden
in terms of time period?
Mekas:
The
In Between
material is from "in between"
Lost Lost Lost
and
Walden
.
MacDonald:
I had thought of the title as a reference to your situation of being partially rooted here, but still Lithuanian . . .
Mekas:
Yes, that may be true. It's amazing how much one can hide, unconsciously.
MacDonald: Walden
is very involved with traveling, whereas in
In Between
there's more home life. And there's a sense of a relationship with a woman.
Mekas:
I did not want to make
Walden
too long, and there was a certain pace established there. Several of the sequences in
In Between
are much slower. They're not single framed. I did not want to put that material into
Walden
. After finishing
Walden,
I still thought that I would like to use that footage so I collected it and put it into
In Between
.
I made several versions of
In Between,
one of which I put into distribution, then reedited. It was a difficult film to structure because of the Salvador Dali footage, which was very different from the other material. I decided finally to separate that part; I put Dali in his place, so to speak, and I used numbering to break it up a bit. It's now one of my favorite films.
MacDonald:
You mentioned last time that there was a tremendous amount of material collected in the fifties, only a small portion of which was used in
Lost Lost Lost
. Is the same thing true for the sixties?
Mekas:
Maybe a little bit less. In
Lost Lost Lost
I used about one-seventh of the footage I had; in
Walden
and
In Between
I used perhaps a third.
Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania
was shot about one-to-one. I used everything in the film.
MacDonald:
You still have the unused material?
Mekas:
I have it all. I may go back some day and make something else with some of it. Some material is not at all bad. But so far it hasn't
Page 103
belonged anywhere. Much of what was not used in the early reels of
Lost Lost Lost
is not so interesting, though it's material of historical importance about immigrant life. It should not be destroyed, though it's slowly rotting away . . .
MacDonald:
My first experience with
Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania
was at Hampshire College in 1973. After the screening some guy in the back row screamed at you, "Why can't you leave anything alone!" At the time it was sort of jolting. I'd watched the same film and to me it seemed quite lovely, but it had produced this violent response from this other person. Was that unusual?
Mekas:
Until ten years ago, that was a very common reaction to single-frame shooting and to short takes, to the use of overexposures or underexposures, and in general to the work of independent filmmakers. There is less and less of that now, since people have gotten used to this type of film language.
MacDonald: Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania
is the earliest edited film in which you seem primarily involved with time, in which your return to the past is one of the major themes. There are mentions of the past in
Walden,
but not a direct concentrated involvement with it. Was it that you were going to be able to go back to Lithuania, so the whole issue became more frontal for you?
Mekas:
You may be correct. I don't know. It's complicated. The official reaction in the Soviet Union, and all the republics there, is to have no contact with any refugee, exile, DP who left during the war, unless that person is potentially useful to them. I had written already for
Isskustvo Kino,
a film journal in Moscow. Some Soviets had seen
The Brig
in Venice, and the editor of
Pravda,
who saw it in New York, wrote a glowing review. The film was invited to the Moscow Film Festival and presented there as an important antimilitary, anticapitalist work. They sent correspondents from Moscow to interview me here, and interviewed my mother in Lithuania. Suddenly I felt I had enough clout to apply for a visa to visit Lithuania. Since I had been invited to the Moscow Film Festival, I thought I would ask to be permitted to go to Lithuania also, to visit my mother.
For over a decade I had not been allowed even to correspond with my mother. I had written some poems against Stalin, so I was a criminal. My brothers were thrown into jail because of me, and my father died earlier than he would have, because of that. My mother's house was watched for years by the secret police. They hoped that one day I'd come home and they'd get me. My mother told me that in 1971. There was not a night, during my visit home, when I wasn't prepared to jump out the window, to run from the police if they decided to come after me. And this in 1971, many years after Stalin's death.
Page 104
The Lithuanian government, that part which deals with the arts, saw that I had been favorably received by Moscow, from
Pravda
to
Literaturnaya Gazeta
. So they figured it was okay for them to permit me not only to visit my mother, but, as it turned out, to publish my collected poems. Until then I did not exist for them, officially, that is. Actually, they had mocked me in some articles in the official party paper. They had presented me as an example of a sick and corrupt mind, printing some paragraphs from my writings with words omitted, sentences turned around. That was around 1965. But once Moscow became favorable to me, Lithuania immediately followed suit. Suddenly I could film whatever I wanted. Usually visitors are not permitted to go into villages; they stay around their hotels. I was offered an official film crew to do whatever I wanted, but I said, ''I will be using my Bolex; I don't want any film crews." They found it strange, but they gave in. They had their own crews around much of the time, making their own film about me and my motherin Cinemascope. They sent me a print, which I have.