Read the essay in the Berlin-based film journal Cargo.
“My very first need was I should document the life of immigrants,” Mekas relates in a film recorded in 1992 on the occasion of an exhibition in Turin. Newly arrived in New York, struggling to get by and increasingly aware that he would not be returning to Lithuania any time soon, he was disgusted by popular American movies like Fred Zinneman’s THE SEARCH, which depicted immigrants and displaced persons, but which he found “naïve and ridiculous and did not really show how it is.” He decided to “show them how it really is.” For more than twenty years, however, Mekas was unable to revisit the material he shot during that early period.
Originally, he and Adolfas had conceived the film as an outcry against the fact that the West had sacrificed the Baltic Republics to the USSR at Yalta. While LOST, LOST, LOST, the work he eventually made from the footage, documents everyday life among exiled Lithuanians, it eludes interpretation and moves through multiple narrative dimensions. We hear Mekas in voiceover, punctuated by pages of his written diaries from the time and intertitles that include an announcement of an émigré’s first paycheck; images of big-hearted Ginkas in a white apron standing in front of his candy store on Grand Street; the baptism of the infant Paulius Landsbergis; a committee meeting for an independent Lithuania; the arrival in Washington of Povilas Žadeikis, ambassador to the formerly independent Lithuania. When Mekas decided that the only hope for the country resided in the people who still lived there, he and Adolfas moved to Manhattan and threw themselves into a new mission: to make up for the “decade of cultural life of this civilization” that they’d missed, to «catch up immediately with everything.” For two years, Mekas recalls in the Turin film, he and his brother attended every new film screening, every theater performance, every opera in New York, and the rest, of course, is film history and the birth of the avant-garde New American Cinema. But then Mekas suddenly breaks down in tears and covers his face with both hands. Minutes pass before he is able to collect himself. He finishes his beer, raises the bottle to the camera, and smiles. When he realizes that the cameraman has not stopped filming, he takes off his microphone and gets up from the couch.
What was he remembering at that moment?
Read the essay in the Berlin-based film journal Cargo.
andrea scrima 