Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania (1972) YTS

Reviewed by R T 9 / 10

Jonas Mekas was the pioneer of the diary

Jonas Mekas was the pioneer of the diary film, and this is a three part diary of his memories of being an exile in America and his realization of his adaptation to his new home, a trip 20 something years later to visit his previous home in Lithuania, and a journey to Vienna to visit his friend Peter Kubelka. The first part is fairly conventional 'home video' compared to very herky jerky 2nd part that features a ton of extremely rapid cutting, which was quite beautiful and spontaneous. The extremely unstable 2nd part had a strange effect on me, as the gushing stream of images exhausted my senses to such a state that I floated through the rest of the film in a semi-conscious state, not fully aware what I saw was part of the film or a figment of my imagination. rough draft for As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty: It's difficult for me to write intelligently about a work of this magnitude and power, so here are some incoherent, random thoughts: Like Walden, this film comprises mostly of footage from social gatherings, travels, picnics, daily rituals and activities arranged not in chronological order but by chance as Mekas as he says in the beginning. He describes this film as about nothing, and calls it "a masterpiece of nothing". In a way this claim is justified in that the achronological silent footage taken by his Bolex does not present more than a limited impression of the filmmaker. Yet later in the film Mekas tells the viewer to read the film carefully, claiming that 'he is in every frame'. Thus he is quite deceptive in how he chooses to present himself. More than anything the occasionally poetic voiceovers subtlety hints at an unpleasant past and wounds that he still bears, which is even suggested by the "occasionally ... brief glimpses of beauty" in the title(he equates happiness to beauty). These moments of anguish are overcome by the moments of "ecstasy" of living in NY with his friends and family. Likewise the essence of Mekas' images is stated by the title of another film "Autobiography of a Man Who Carried His Memories in His Eyes". He maintains that he films not reality but his memories, thus merely his point of view of events in his life. This subjectivity is further underscored by an intertitle that mocks the idyllic and perfect picture of domestic life portrayed by the film, perhaps because Mekas cannot capture moments of domestic strife or simply that the significance of these images can only grasped by him, although he later says that the images do not contain any hidden meaning. The many incarnations of his persona: as a family man, filmmaker, poet, film critic, champion of the avant garde, and the self-effacing, boyan-playing fool that are on display in his work gives me a fascinating portrait of the man (not to mention my brief real life encounter), similarly the film's images, sped up, pixilated, superimposed, in conjunction to the intertitles and voiceovers likewise presents many versions of Mekas during the different stages of filmmaking through the conception of the images to their retroactive organization decades later.

Reviewed by R T 6 / 10

Jonas Mekas' personal home movies of his return

Jonas Mekas' personal home movies of his return to his homeland.

Reviewed by chaos-rampant

Artificial intrusions in life

This is too distanced to connect to me. Here's the gist. Mekas returns to his homeland of Lithuania after so long, visits his old mother and old friends from school. Some things have changed, others have stayed the same, the way it always is. He follows his old mother around trying to capture, from his end, an ordinary day: the sitting and walking, the work. Primarily, the problem is that for Mekas the images are intimate and familiar, emotionally charged, had to be since he is revisiting childhood here. But this is conveyed in a casual, almost indifferent way, a New York artist's way which is what Mekas was at this point. We experience this all in the same desultory way, from a filmic distance.We only see him once in the film before the camera, and that is a cold image where he simply feeds logs to a fire where his mother cooks pancakes. Maybe there's a Lithuanian element here that I'm not able to reach. So I don't get the deep experience of the return, I get a diaristic snapshot of Lithuanian life. I don't see the returning son here, only the formal filmmaker. It's cold, without embrace.Mekas had a famous falling out with Cassavetes in the early days, for reasons of narrative form in Shadows. I can only imagine the warmth and ragged truth of the film Cassavetes, a Greek, would have made about his return to the place of childhood.This is interestingly reflected in the film here. Mekas is returning with his camera, looking to capture a slice of remembered life and contrasts. What happens all through the film is that people in spite of his efforts awkwardly arrange themselves to be filmed: they sing around the camera, his cousin's family poses for a photo. The very presence of the artificial eye creates artifice, disrupts the living flow.Cool tidbit: we see at one point Wittgenstein's house in Vienna, the one designed by him. It's an ugly, cold, square thing, fittingly for a logician. Austrians are thinkers, taxonomists in the big dance of things, and Mekas, if nothing else, wants to film outside the logical box. The film ends with images of Vienna in flames, a fruit market burning, because, Mekas muses, the city doesn't want it, it wants to clear room for something modern.

Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania

1972

Action / Documentary

Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania

1972

Action / Documentary

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Jonas Mekas was the pioneer of the diary

Jonas Mekas' personal home movies of his return

Artificial intrusions in life

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