A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers

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

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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.

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