Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania (1972) / Jonas Mekas (1922-2019)

My viewing of Mekas's films has been a bit of a spotty patchwork. Of the confirmed masterworks, I have only just seen Reminiscences in full a few days ago, although I have seen large portions of it over the years. The same goes for Mekas's two key diary films, Walden and Lost Lost Lost. I have zipped around in them, sampling them in portions, but for some reason haven't yet sat down and watched them front to back. This is certainly not because I am somehow averse to long films. But I felt, a decade or more ago when I was spending time with these films, that something about Mekas's style invited this kind of piecemeal appreciation. 

Mekas always claimed he was not so much a filmmaker as a "filmer," and that his films were thematic edits of a lifelong project. One could see overlaps within the individual films, both in time and in the material itself. Reminiscences, which has become his most canonical standalone classic, is unique in this regard because the material is so focused on a particular place and time. It has even been referred to as an essay film, which speaks to the coherence that others have found within this portion of the diary.

The film has a strategic arc, showing Mekas as being a "DP," or displaced person, and moving through New York to show others from various compromised locales in Europe, all who have had to make their way in the New World. While many of them look quite happy and jovial, Mekas's voiceover is mournful and filled with regret. Then, during the numbered "glimpses of Lithuania," Mekas is back home, visiting his family and, by all appearances, whole again. His first act upon returning to his mother's house is to drink water from the well, water "that tastes sweeter than any wine." We see Mekas and his relatives, eating, drinking, singing and dancing, and aside from his blue shirt among the white clothes, Jonas fits right in.

In the third part of Reminiscences, Mekas is in Vienna (the place he was headed before he was captured by the Nazis), seeing art and architecture with Peter Kubelka, visiting with performance artist Hermann Nitsch, and traveling with the Jacobs family. The message is clear: Mekas has found an alternate family in the art world, a group of people whose commitment to aesthetic values can ease the loss of his original family and the traditions of Lithuanian life. In her analysis of Reminiscences, Catherine Russell calls this a kind of modernist master-trope, with art filling the void that urban life produces in its subjects. But I'm not so sure. Mekas, who lived in New York for over 60 years and never lost his accent, seemed as close to representing a transnational subject as you could ask for, living between cultures and carrying that distance on his very person.

Mekas's contributions to the American and international film avant-garde were, of course, incalculable: his columns for the Village Voice, his advocacy for the New American Cinema, his founding of the Film-Makers Cinematheque and Anthology Film Archives, and his tireless defense of films that were new, strange, and in some cases in violation of draconian censorship laws that he himself helped to end. He was a giant in Lithuanian literature, and his name has become synonymous with the diary film form. (For a comprehensive obituary, I humbly refer you to J. Hoberman.) What we have left of him is enormous: films he saved, institutions he sustained with his very lifeblood, and a massive body of his own creative work. 

I would not be surprised if some of today's audiences found aspects of Mekas's films off-putting, and not just because they are organized by happenstance rather than plot. As Hoberman says, there was a right-wing streak in Mekas, and Russell certainly uses Mekas's work as a conservative foil against which to evaluate other, more progressive artists. Mekas, like Theodor Adorno, was decidedly of the Old World, a man of classical values and for whom poetry was a balm against the sullied world of politics. He wanted to create a self-enclosed nation of artists and thinkers, and this can seem quietist, if not elitist. 

But I would suggest that we all build our small worlds in the face of daily tyranny, if only to survive. We find our friends and loved ones, and clutch them to our bosom. Do we make an ideology out of this survival tactic? Probably not, but neither do most of us leave behind, as Mekas did, a record of loves and friendships, of wonders and surprises and the things that pull us out of bed each day. Watching Mekas's diaries is like occupying someone else's stolen moments of joy, and this, I would contend, is both educational and inspirational, especially now.

Thank you, Jonas.