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Displaced and
Dispossessed:Jonas Mekas and his Search for the Pastoral homeland.
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Identifying avant-garde filmmaker Jonas Mekas within a
particularly Romantic strain of the pastoral tradition was first
posited by P. Adams Sitney in his groundbreaking work, Visionary
Film.
Mekas [sic] Diaries Notes and Sketches (1964-69) [later renamed as
Walden] and Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania(1971) [sic] are
exercises in romantic autobiography. Mekas constantly weaves together
celebrations of the present moment [...] with elegiac and iconic
allusions to a presence that is forever absent to the camera lens: the
vision of nature and of his childhood.1
Sitney has since gone on to connect Mekass work with the 19th
century American Transcendentalists texts of Ralph Waldo
Emerson.2 It is true that Mekass gestural, fragmented and
ecstatic cinematographic style perfectly equates to Emersons
privileging of the visual and his description of himself as a
transparent eyeball.3 Also the multiple and rich connections
between Mekass Walden and its literary namesake written by
Emersons great disciple Henry David Thoreau have been
thoroughly explored by both David E. James and Scott MacDonald.4
However, the pastoral genre extends much further and wider than
the romanticism of Blake and Wordsworth or their aforementioned
American counterparts, and it will be the contention of this
1P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde 1943-1978 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979)
p. 3602
See P. Adams Sitney, Eyes Upside Down: Visionary Filmmakers and the Heritage of Emerson (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2008).3
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature (London: Penguin Books, 2008) p. 54
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paper that much insight can be gained from placing Mekass work
within the wider context of the issues and debates which have
been at the center of the pastoral tradition since ancient
times.
Jonas Mekas begins his third long form diary film Lost,
Lost, Lost, (1976) by quoting Homer. O Sing Ulysses. Tell the
story of the man who never wanted to leave his home. Jonas
Mekas is a man who never wanted to leave his home, and his
series of 16mm diary films, beginning with Walden (1969), are
above all else aching laments over a theme which has preoccupied
the pastoral from its very inception: paradise lost. Paradise in
Mekass case was the tiny village of Semeniskiai in Lithuania
where he spent his childhood on the family farm looking after
livestock and working the fields.5 This rural and pre-
industrialized setting is Mekass equivalent to Virgils
Arcadia, Shakespeares Forest of Arden and Prousts Combray. It
is the disappearance of this Eden that all pastoral artists have
mourned and consequently attempted to recreate in their work.
Leo Marx has written that the pastoral has never been a
mere simple wish-image of bucolic pleasure, but has always
5David E. James, Introduction, in David E. James (ed), To Free the Cinema: Jonas Mekas and the New York
Underground(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992) p. 4
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been inextricably linked to politics.6In analyzing Virgils
first eclogue, The Dispossessed, Marx notes that No sooner
does Virgil sketch in the ideal landscape than he discloses an
alien world encroaching from without.7 The poem is in the form
of a dialogue between two shepherds, Meliboeus, whose land has
been expropriated by the Roman authority, and Tityrus, whose
land was also at one point in jeopardy but has now been spared.
Meliboeus, forced into exile by an unsympathetic government
bureaucracy, faces the prospect of unending anxiety,
deprivation, and struggle8, while Tityrus is able to continue
spending his time sprawled in the shade practis[ing] country
songs on a light shepherds pipe.9
Beginning with the Nazi occupation of Lithuania in 1942,
unending anxiety, deprivation, and struggle must have been
experiences with which Jonas Mekas became intimately familiar.
Presumably unhappy with an alien worlds encroachment on his
home, Mekas began to work for an anti-Nazi underground
newspaper. When Mekas discovered that the typewriter he had been
using to write his anti-Nazi articles had gone missing, he knew
it would only be a matter of time before the Nazis would find it
6Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2000) p. 217
Ibid.8
Ibid.9
Virgil, The Pastoral Poems: a Translation of the Eclogues by E.V. Rieu (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books,
1949) as cited in Marx, 2000, p. 20
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and trace it back to him. Mekas was forced to leave his idyllic
home in order to avoid arrest. In Reminiscences of a Journey to
Lithuania (1972), he recounts how his uncle had urged him and
his brother Adolfas to Go West, see the world, and then come
back. Taking this advice they, with forged papers, boarded a
train for Vienna. The train never reached its intended
destination. Instead the Germans had the train re-routed to a
forced labor camp close to Hamburg, where the brothers were
subsequently interned.10 At the end of World War II, Europe was
partitioned and Lithuania placed into Communist hands. Mekas was
left permanently exiled from his homeland and from the
immersion of nature he had experienced there as a child and
adolescent.11
I have to bid goodbye to the home fields and the
ploughlands that I love. Exile for me... says Meliboeus in the
opening lines of Virgils eclogue. Later in the poem he
agonizingly wonders, Ah, will the day come, after many years,
when I shall see a place that I can call my home ...?12 These
lines are uncannily echoed in the words to a Lithuanian folk
song which Mekas relates to us in Reminiscences. Oh mother, how
I long to see you again/I hope the long gray road will lead me
10James, Introduction, 1992, p. 5
11Scott MacDonald, The Garden in the Machine: A Field Guide to Independent Films About Place (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2001) p. 23412
Virgil, as cited in Marx, 2000, pp. 20-1
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home again. Resolving oneself to the impossibility of returning
to the lost homeland is one of the major themes shared by the
two diary films (Walden and Reminiscences) under examination in
this essay. Negotiating a middle ground between what is forever
lost and what one is forced to accept in lieu of that fact has
always been at the heart of the pastoral tradition and few
artists have explored it with as much insight and poignancy as
Jonas Mekas.
1969s Walden, comprised of footage Mekas shot on his 16mm
Bolex camera during the years of 1964-68, is probably the most
joyous of the three films under discussion. Mekass style [in
the film] is aggressively personal: he refuses to hold the
camera still, preferring an openly gestural style, and he often
single-frames in a wildly erratic manner as he films ....13 It
is this ecstatic and erratic style which animates the people,
places and objects of the film. The images are suffused with
life because the camera that records them is so obviously an
extension of the human hand which holds it. The soundtrack too
at times goes to great lengths to convey an almost euphoric
bliss. Over images taken at his brother Adolfass wedding,
Mekas, accompanying himself on the accordion, sings, They tell
me I should always be searching/But I only celebrate what I
see/I am searching for nothing, I am happy/I am searching for
13MacDonald, 2001, p. 234
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nothing, I am happy/I am searching for nothing, I am happy.
Earlier in the film we have seen Mekas alone in his one room
apartment in the Chelsea Hotel playing his accordion. Taking
this and the words of the song he later sings it is not hard to
equate Mekas with Virgils Tityrus, the archetypal pastoral
shepherd, playing away on his pipe. However during his final
refrain, Mekas cuts to a shot of a framed photograph of his
father, Povilas, dead since the early 50s. He then cuts to a
matching portrait of his mother, Elizbieta, alive in Lithuania
but completely separated from her sons by what Marx would call
an incursion of history.14 Both stare out from behind the glass
of their respective frames, wearing those expressionless faces
that people of a certain generation often adopted when having
their picture taken. By showing us their portraits during the
wedding sequence, traditionally a time for family unity, Mekas
is making a point of their absence, and of the distance which
now separates the brothers from their real home. The placement
of these images right at the moment when Mekas is most
emphatically proclaiming his happiness would seem to undermine
that bald assertion. Are we to take his declaration to not be
searching for anything at face value? Mekas indeed it would seem
is searching for something. Though he pretends to be Tityrus, he
has more in common with Meliboeus. He is searching for the home
14Marx, 2000, p. 21
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he has lost, and despite what Mekas may sing to us, Walden is
the story of that search.
Walden is also a great conjuring act. Here before our eyes
New York City is transfigured into a pastoral Arcadia, or more
specifically the Lithuania of Mekass youth. Mekass own
comments are highly revealing on this point.
I thought I was keeping a quite objective diary of my life in New York.
But my friends who saw the first edition of Diaries, Notes & Sketches
(Walden), said to me: But this is not myNew York! My New York is
different. In your New York Id like to live. But my New York is bleak,
depressing ... Its then that I began to see that, really, I was not
keeping an objective notebook [...] that they [the diaries] contained
everything that New York didnt have [...] In truth, I am filming my
childhood, not New York. Its a fantasy New Yorkfiction.15
What exactly are the images Mekas returns to again and again in
this fantasy version of New York City? A young bare-legged
blonde girl, bathed in sunlight, races through the green
environs of Central Park. Children dance and play in mounds of
autumn leaves. There are winter scenes of children with sleighs
or engaged in snowball fights and city streets covered in snow.
A young girl in red, another of Mekass woodland nymphs who
grace the film throughout, caresses the green grass of Central
Park with her bare feet and intently studies a tiny flower.
There are many shots of trees in blossom and branches gently
15Jonas Mekas, The Diary Film (A Lecture on Reminiscneces of a Journey to Lithuania) in P. Adams Sitney (ed),
The Avant Garde Film: A Reader of Theory and Criticism (New York: New York Univeristy Press, 1978) p. 191
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quivering in the breeze. We see no images of ghettos, violence,
exasperation, inequality or any of the other negative tropes
one has come to identify with the city. 16 This is not to say the
urban is totally effaced.
The undeniable urbanity of New York City is seamlessly
integrated into Mekass overall pastoral design of the film.
Whether it be frame by frame shots taken from a moving train of
the sun rising over the smoke stacks of Newark, images of a coal
worker unloading a truck on 41st Street or the Empire State
building bathed in the blue evening light of sunset, the city is
an essential part of Mekass fantasy. In his subconscious
efforts to discover those images of nature hiding the city,
Mekas also discovered a new beauty in the juxtaposition of those
traditional scenes of pastoral bliss with the seemingly
incongruous urban spaces which surrounded them. Of course this
urban pastoralist vision was hardly a new thing. Wordsworth was
one of the masters of the form.
The city now doth, like a garment, wear
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare
Ships, towers, domes, theatres and temples lie
Open unto the fields and to the sky;
All bright and glistening in the smokeless air.
16Alfredo Leonardi, Occhio mio dio: il New American Cinema (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1971) cited in Pip Chodorov and
Christian Lebrat (eds), The Walden Book(Paris: Editions Paris Experimental, 2009) p. 127
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Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendor, valley, rock or hill;
Neer saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!17
This Wordsworthian ability to infuse the city (and its
associative technology and modernity) with the tranquility of
the countryside, or more broadly to simply merge the two into a
harmonious whole, is something that all of the great
pastoralists have inherited. We see it in Mark Twains beautiful
description of a steamboat slipping along in the dark, and now
and then she would belch a whole world of sparks up out of her
chimbleys, and they would rain down in the river and look awful
pretty..., or in Proust when the smell emanating from a bush of
Hawthorns in the Bois du Boulogne (a natural refuge for
Parisians much like Central Park is for the denizens of New
York) can transport the narrator back to his idyllic days
traversing the Meseglise and Guermantes ways.18 According to Marx
the shepherd of pastoral tradition seeks a resolution of the
conflict between the opposed worlds of nature and art. Art in
this case being the civilizing and cultivating forces of modern
life which, when taken to extremes, threatens the perfection of
17Excerpt from William Wordsworth, Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802, The Complete
Poetical Works. (London: Macmillan and Co., 1888; Bartleby.com, 1999.)
http://www.bartleby.com/145/ww206.htmlAccessed January 1, 2011.18
Mark Twain, Complete Text of Huckleberry Finn, Spark Notes.
http://pd.sparknotes.com/lit/huckfinn/section21.html. Accessed on January 2, 2011; Marcel Proust, In Search of
Lost Time Vol. 1 (London: Everymans Library 2001) p. 135
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the natural world.19However, whether we understand art in
Marxs terms or in its more familiar meaning, the statement
aptly applies to Mekas who, by creating films with his Bolex
camera (itself a machine and thusly representative of the modern
age) has tried to negotiate a resolution between the rural and
the city, the past of his childhood in Lithuania and his present
day life in New York.
In Walden Mekas attempts to transfigure with his camera his
adopted home into something reminiscent of the home he left
behind. In Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania (1972) his
camera no longer has to search for figurative images; he is able
to film Lithuania itself. Of course the Lithuania that he and
his brother Adolfas return to in 1971 is not the one they left
behind in the early 40s. This is the bitter irony which
suffuses the film: even when you can physically return there is
no such thing as truly going home. Part of the alchemy of Walden
was a result of Mekass fragmented style. Handheld shots of
varying exposures and durations, refusing all of the norms of
traditional filmmaking, help to create the mosaic and
transformative nature of the film. In Reminiscences Mekas
attempted to modify his approach.
The basis of Walden is the single frame. There is a lot of density
there. And when I was going to Lithuania I thought I would bring back
19Marx, 2000, p. 22
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material in the same style. But, somehow, when I was there, I just
couldnt work in the style of Walden, there [sic]. The longer I stayed
in Lithuania the more it changed me, and it pulled me into a completely
different style. There were feelings, states, faces that I couldnt
treat too abstractly. Certain realities can be presented in cinema only
through the duration of images.20
The face in particular that Mekas seems most interested in
scrutinizing in duration is that of his mother, Elzbieta. For
instance in the scenes of her cooking on the outdoor stove,
Mekass usual rapid fire cutting is slowed to a more
contemplative pace. Using a tripod to film, Mekas even enters
the scene himself. One senses his desire to create a fixed
lasting record of this rare moment between mother and son. What
is also being recorded in this moment is Mekass past. His
mother still cooks in the traditional way with the same
primitive tools she used when Mekas was a boy. Its one of the
genuine moments in the film where Mekas has magically caught
time suspended.
When looking at the film overall, however, the great
stylistic shift that Mekas indicates is not as pronounced as he
seems to think. Some of this is due to technical issues Mekas
had while filming. The untested Bolex he took with him was
incapable of maintaining a constant film speed or consistent
exposures. Thus much of the footage seems characteristic of
20Mekas, 1978, p. 194
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Mekass previous disregard for the norms of filmmaking. Mekas,
with his typical aplomb, decided to acceptthe cameras faults
and incorporate them as part of the stylistics of the film.21
This must have influenced the very structure of the film, for
the middle section (where all the Lithuanian scenes take place)
is entitled 100 Glimpses of Lithuania August 1971 (however, in
fact, there are only 91). Glimpses being the key word.
The images in this section of the film are of increased speed, the
editing is choppy, the camera handheld; the lighting intensity, focus
and camera angle vary wildly. The overall effect is one of euphoria,
urgency, confusion and fragmentation ....22
The fragment is essential to Mekass cinema. Even when he
consciously attempts to avoid its use, he seemingly cannot
escape it. Much like, one could say, the fragmentation and loss
of a life lived in exile.23 Sitney suggests that the fragmented
pieces of film which make up Mekass work act as glimpses of
the world and triggers to memory.24 In Reminiscences he is still
trying to remember. ...the truth is, I didnt see the real life
there. I was always looking for what was left of the memories of
what was, what has been long ago. I missed the reality of today,
or I saw it through a veil.25 Much of what he films in
21Mekas, 1978, p. 195
22Jon Davies, Experimental Exilic Documentaries, 2003, Kersplebedeb,
www.kersplebedeb.com/mystuff/video/review/exile.html, Accessed December 15, 2010.23
Ibid.24
Sitney, 2008, p. 9725
Mekas, 1978, p. 196
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Lithuania is play acting. Whether it is an older brother
pretending to whip Mekas as he pulls a cart, or the brothers
picking up scythes, long since abandoned for the automated
reaper, to cut the crops like they once did a lifetime ago, or
lining all of the brothers and sisters up against the wall to
record their height, as if they were still growing children, his
Lithuania is just as much a fantasy world as his New York.
Naturally, in the 100 Glimpses section of the film Mekas
celebrates nature with a pastoralists zeal. The taste of fresh
water from the family well, the smell of fresh hay with which
one makes their bed, the sight of full grown tress which were
only seedlings the last time Mekas was home, all of these
pastoral elements are given righteous homage. However, the film
is not dedicated solely to these things. The trip to Lithuania,
the whole raison dtre for the film, is only one section of it.
Granted it is the longest section, but its real power is only
ascertained by its placement between the two other parts of the
film, the early 1950s footage of New York in section one and
the trip to Vienna to visit Peter Kubelka, made directly after
Mekass trip to Lithuania, which is the focus of section three.
Again we are reminded of Marxs contention that true pastoral
works are much more than mere hymns to the bucolic joys of life.
It the exploration of the impossibility of recapturing the past
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glories of the Golden Age (and every pastoralist has his or her
own version of that) which is an essential part of their design.
Mekas may be incapable of recapturing the past, but there
is no forgetting it despite his own occasional protestations to
the contrary. That early fall in 1957 or 58 we went to the
Catskills, Mekas tells us at the beginning of Reminiscences,
and we see black and white images of Adolfas and another
companion traipsing through a wooded pathway. The autumn
landscape seems to act as a balm for Mekas as he confesses that
in that moment he was temporarily able to forget the last ten
years of war, of hunger, of Brooklyn. For the first time he
tells us he was even able to forget his home. Once again, as in
Walden, we are assured of something which does not quite ring
true. How are we to believe that Mekas would be capable of
forgetting his past in a location which clearly resembles the
natural world of that past? Also there is a double irony to his
confession as the very scenes we are watching were shot some
thirteen years before the recorded narration to which we are
listening. We are seeing the past at the very moment Mekas
claims to be forgetting it. What we see in Mekas is not
forgetting but recreating. As Marcel Proust sat in his cork
lined room and page after page, detail by detail, created
Combray to stand in for the Illiers of his childhood, Mekas has
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taken all of these self described fragments of Paradise26,
whether they be of young Bibbe Hansen frolicking in Central Park
or the Mekas brothers playing farmer on their first trip home in
twenty-five years, and created a fictional stand-in for the Eden
he was so unduly cast out.
Go West, his uncle had told him. See the world and then
come back. The lesson of Jonas Mekass life and the thematic
obsession of his entire filmic output has been that there is no
coming back. It is in the third and final section of
Reminiscences that we see Mekas coming to grips with this
reality and his conscious efforts to make meaning out of his
life in the present.
At the end of The Dispossessed Tityrus urges Meliboeus to
delay his journey into exile and to sleep here as my guest for
this one night, with green leaves for you bed.27 As Marx
comments, it is hardly that satisfying of a resolution. It may
succeed aesthetically, but it must have offered little comfort
to those real life victims of the ravaged countryside on whom
Virgil based his story.28 Virgil must have been well aware of
the dark undercurrent that still remained unresolved at the end
of his poem.
26A phrase he uses in a later diary film, Paradise Not Yet Lost a/k/a Oonas Third Year (1979)
27Virgil, as cited in Marx, 2000, p. 30
28Marx, 2000, pp. 30-1
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Is Mekass conclusion of Reminiscences any more satisfying
than Virgils? Yes and no. The final section is a collection of
ebullient images of Mekas and four of his artistic/intellectual
friends as they converge in Vienna for a cultural holiday. The
friends visit Wittgensteins home, tour a monastery, inspect a
grand library, and indulge in the basic pleasures of life (food,
drink, song). Amongst all this social revelry Mekas seems to
find peace. He tells us in the voice over, I begin to believe
again in the indestructibility of the human spirit. It is
important to understand that the friends on this trip, Kubleka,
Hermann Nitsch, Annette Michelson and Ken Jacobs are all
artistic compatriots of Mekass as well as friends. The two
categories are actually impossible to separate in Mekass life.
The resolution Mekas seeks for the loneliness of the exile is
found within the artistic community of the underground cinema.
He and Adolfas did not make it to Vienna back in 1942, but here
he is now in 1971 surrounded by some of the great minds of the
avant-garde cinema. This importance placed on art and on
filmmaking is explored throughout Walden as well. In that film
Mekas combines his pastoral scenes with an equal number
depicting the rise of the New American cinema, of which he was
at the forefront, and of course at times he is able to combine
the two as is seen in the extended sequence where Mekas visits
Stan Brakhage at his home in Colorado. So, on the surface,
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Reminiscences finds the same kind of triumphal tone that many of
the classic pastoral romances contained. Mekas at play with his
friends in Vienna seems somewhat equivalent to the familial
happiness shared by the characters at the end of Shakespeares
As You Like It or The Tempest. However, the joyful tone is not
sustained. At the very end of the film Mekas and company are
returning to Vienna by train. Smoke from a nearby fire can be
seen in the sky. They learn that a fruit market is burning down;
the most beautiful in the city says Kubleka. He then claims the
city set fire to it intentionally in order to make way for a new
modernized market. We only see the smoke from the train so the
claim can for us appears to have little veracity, but we are
left unsure as to how Mekas wants us to interpret it. Regardless
of the facts, the image of an old fruit market in flames, which,
one imagines, was selling the kind of produce that might have
come from a farm very much like the one Mekas grew up on, leaves
the viewer with an uneasy feeling. We cannot help but now view
his respite in Vienna as little more than temporary, similar to
the bittersweet one Meliboeus enjoys at the end of Virgils
eclogue.
In Reel 4 of Walden during the bucolic episode in Colorado
with the family of Stan Brakhage, a very curious moment occurs.
Shots of little rabbit pellets in the snow are accompanied with
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an enthusiastic inter-tile which reads simply: I FIND RABBIT
SHIT! To an uninitiated audience in 1969, the relevance of this
moment would have been completely missed. Only to those who saw
Lost Lost Lost seven years later would the reference begin to
make sense. During a section of that film sub-titled Rabbitshit
Haikus (comprised of footage Mekas had shot in Vermont during
the winter of 62) Mekas tells a story.
Do you know the story of the man who could not live anymore without
knowing whats at the end of the road, and what he found there when he
reached it? He found a pile, a small pile of rabbit shit, at the end of
the road. And back home he went. And when people used to ask him, Hey
where does this road lead to? He used to answer: Nowhere, the road
leads nowhere, and there is nothing but a pile of rabbit shit at the
end of the road. So he told them. But nobody believed him.29
Is Mekas directing this cautionary tale at himself? It would
seem to be a warning to those who grow up dreaming that life
will be better in some faraway place. According to his own words
though, Mekas was never such an ambitious dreamer.
No no no
I never sleep well.
Ill never sleep well.
Because I never wanted to leave my home.
Because I never wanted to be here.30
29Transcript from Sitney, 2008, p. 94.
30From Mekass diary dated February 15, 1948, originally published in I Had Nowhere to Go. (New York: Black
Thistle Press, 1991) cited in Chodorov and Lebrat, 2009, p.54
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The story must have a crucial importance for Mekas as a version
of it, virtually word for word with the one in Lost, appears in
a journal entry of his dated August 1947.31 Perhaps it is best
read as a lament for those foolish enough to believe there is
somewhere else other than home. Nothing is at the end of the
road much travelled; the journey has no destination. Of course
to find an assured rebuttal to this bleak assessment one only
needs to look at the films themselves. Mekass films are
abundant with beauty in all its forms. Whether it is the
breathtaking time lapse sequence on the shore of Cassis or when
Mekas captures the sunrise over Manhattan and the Harlem River,
or simply a quiet field just before sunset on Timothy Learys
Millbrook Estate, surely one must think that the journey was
worth something after all.
A great poet not only asserts but exemplifies the possibility of
harmony. When he assimilates new and seemingly artificial facts into
the texture of a poem he provides an example for all men. What he
achieves in art they can achieve in life.32
The great challenge of Mekass life and his art, which for
him are one in the same thing, is to create harmony out of the
discord that has been his life in exile. Using the poetic tools
of his Bolex and a flatbed editing table, Mekas has attempted to
immortalize the life he was forced to leave while finding and
31Mekas, 1991, cited in Chodorov and Lebrat, 2009, p. 104
32Mark, 2000, p. 242
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celebrating the beauty in the life he actually lives, wherever
and whenever it happens to appear. Like all great pastoralist he
has shown how the past can only ever be fitfully and
artificially bridged with the humble tools of the poet.
Nevertheless that Eden, or Arcadia or Walden, or Semenskai,
whatever its name might be, still exists not in natural facts
or in social institutions or in anything out there, but in
consciousness. It is a product of imaginative perception, of the
analogy perceiving, metaphor-making, mythopoeic power of the
human mind. 33
Word Count: 5,138
33Marx, 2000, p. 264
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