A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers

During the first weeks after our arrival here, we had read Pudovkin and Eisenstein, so in the back of our minds there was probably something else, a different ambition, but I don't think that that footage reveals much. In Germany we had bought a still camera and had taken a lot of stills. Maybe that affected how we saw and the look of some of the footage. We also looked at a lot of still photography. In 1953 or so I began working at a place called Graphic Studios, a commercial photography studio, where I stayed for five or six years. The studio was run by Lenard Perskie, from whom I learned a great deal. All the great photographers used to drop in, and some artists, like Alexander Archipenko.

In 1950 we began attending Cinema 16 screenings. By this I mean absolutely every screening of the so-called experimental films. It became my Sunday church, my university. We also attended every screening of the Theodore Huff Society, which was run at that time by the young Bill Everson. He showed mostly early Hollywood and European films that were unavailable commercially. I think it's still going on, but I haven't been there for years. It's one of the noble, dedicated undertakings of William Everson, who has performed a great educational role for nearly three decades.

MacDonald:

I asked the question about your using the camera as a poetic device because by the second reel there are shots in which it's clear that more is happening than documentation. I'm thinking of the beautiful sequence of the woman pruning trees, and the shot of Adolfas in front of the merry-go-round.

Mekas:

That shot of Adolfas was intended for our first "poetic" film:

A Silent Journey

. We never finished it and some of the footage appears in reel three of

Lost Lost Lost

the film within the film about the car crash.

MacDonald:

Were you collecting sound at this time too?

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Mekas:

We were collecting sound, but between 1950 and 1955 this amounted to very little. After 1955 I collected more and more sounds from the situations I filmed.

MacDonald:

The early reels are punctuated by images of typed pages. Were you writing a record of your feelings during that time?

Mekas:

Those pages are from my written diaries which I kept regularly from the time I left Lithuania [1944] until maybe 1960. Later I got too involved in other activitiesthe Film-makers' Cooperative,

Film Culture,

the Cinematheque, et ceteraand the written diaries became more and more infrequent.

MacDonald:

Did you know English when you arrived here?

Mekas:

I could read. I remember reading Hemingway's

A Farewell to Arms

on the boat as we came over. Hemingway is one of the easiest writers to read because of the simplicity and directness of his language. He is still one of my favorite writers. So I could read and communicate, but writing took another few years. To write in an acquired language is more difficult than to read, as you know, and I am still learning. Until the mid fifties I kept all my notes in Lithuanian. For another two to three years there is a slow dissolve: on some days my notes were in Lithuanian and on other days in English. By 1957 all the diaries and notes are in English.

My poetry remains in Lithuanian. I have triedmostly fooling aroundto write ''poetry" in English, but I do not believe that one can write poetry in any language but the one in which one grew up as a child. One can never master all the nuances of words and groupings of words that are necessary for poetry. Certain kinds of prose can be written, though, as Nabokov has shown.

My brother mastered English much faster than I because he found himself in the army with no Lithuanians around. Of course, I am not talking about our accents. The Eastern European pronunciation requires a completely different mouth muscle structure than that of the English language. And it takes a lot of time for the mouth muscles to rearrange themselves.

MacDonald:

When you came to put

Lost Lost Lost

together in its present form, did you then go back to the journals and film pages with that film in mind or had those pages been filmed much earlier?

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 autobiographical: I became the center. The immigrant community is there, but it's shown through my eyes. Not unconsciously, but con-

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