Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania [1972]

 Jonas Mekas’ poetic and profoundly personal 2^nd feature-length diary, made 4 years after the sprawling and absorbing Walden, formed a vital companion piece to his spellbinding next diary – and possibly his greatest masterpiece – Lost, Lost, Lost. In the latter, he’d powerfully evoked his finding a new habitat and home as an émigré and displaced person. This, conversely, chronicled his brief trip back to his erstwhile home which he was compelled to leave forever many years back. After over 2 ½ decades of leaving Lithuania with his brother Adolfas – they’d left in 1944 and emigrated to the US in 1949 – they were finally able to visit the village of Semeniškiai, the place of their birth and formative years. It began with a short preface that comprised of footage shot on his first Bolex during his initial years in America. The central segment, titled “One Hundred Glimpses of Lithuania”, was a syncopated montage – a simultaneously playful and evocative collage shaped through varying film speeds, exposures, colour palettes and camera motions – which took us into that agrarian, impoverished and sparsely populated village, the rickety house where they lived, their aged mother who likes to cook outdoors, their gregarious relatives who frequently drop by, and the villagers who love dancing and drinking. The high-spiritedness transitioned into bitter melancholy in the epilogue that captured their visit to an establishment in Elmshorn – a town on the outskirts of Hamburg – which’d served as a labour camp during WW2 and where they were interred for nearly a year. Mekas, incidentally, interlaced the film with oblique social/political observations, while cheekily remarking, “You would like to know something about the social reality… but what do I know about it?”.

Director: Jonas Mekas

Genre: Documentary/Diary Film/Essay Film/Experimental Film

Language: English

Country: US

Walden: Diaries, Notes and Sketches [1968]

 Jonas Mekas – towering godfather of American underground cinema and pioneer of diary films – made a momentous feature-length debut, composed of ecstatically shot “haikus” or short reels, with Walden. At once epic, pulsating, freewheeling, elegiac and intimate, he made this 3-hour kaleidoscopic work by stitching together a dazzling blend of encounters, moments, happenings, portraits, events and experiences, that he shot from 1964 to 1968 using 16mm Bolex camera – his comrade of 50 years from 1950, when he purchased his first Bolex upon arrival in the US as a displaced person, through to 2000 when he finally switched to digital – via an intensely subjective lens. With its title borrowed from Thoreau and imbued with Cartesian spirit – “I make home movies, therefore I live” – it was particularly remarkable in its capturing of a vital period in New York’s trailblazing art and culture circuit, as we see gatherings featuring Allen Ginsberg, the Velvet Underground’s first performance, fellow avant-garde filmmaker Stan Brakhage at his getaway mountain cabin, Carl Theodor Dreyer’s visit to the city, John Lennon and Yoko Ono carrying out their radical 1969 “bed-in”, etc. Mekas alternated these with moments embodying 1960s zeitgeist – e.g. street protests by a feminist group and African-American construction labourers spotlighted as “back power” – as well as kinetic bursts of “pure cinema” – observational shots of streets and Central Park, an ecstatic montage on a circus, etc. – and even some anachronistic wedding sequences. These protean images – possessing different colour tones, frequently overlapping and often at accelerated speeds – were accompanied by an eclectic audio track which ranged from jazz riffs to throbbing percussive sounds that he mixed by playing his vinyl records and radio, and occasionally also his lilting, chirpy voiceovers.

Director: Jonas Mekas

Genre: Documentary/Diary Film/Essay Film/Experimental Film

Language: English

Country: US