A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers

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.

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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.

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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