MUBI: Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania

The Jonas Mekas Visual Arts Center in Vilnius is named in his honor, but there was a time when the icon of avant-garde cinema was not so welcome in Lithuania. He and his brother had fled likely arrest by the Germans during WWII, but their émigré status made them suspect in their native land. However, Mekas was able to return to his home village in 1972 for a family reunion he duly documented in Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania, the second in a twofer of Lithuanian-related films programmed by MUBI.

In some ways, Reminiscences is a perfectly representative Mekas film, but it can also be considered an outlier. It is not, strictly speaking, one of his “diary” films, but it is acutely personal. It features his rather idiosyncratic (and sporadic) narration, which also makes more of an exception within his oeuvre.

Although he briefly touches on his time in Williamsburg (which is like a foreign country) and Vienna, the core of Reminiscences consists of “100 Glimpses of Lithuania.” Instead of a smooth narrative structure, they provide and series of telling images and episodes, much like the fragmented memory of an exile.

Viewers watching Reminiscences who know Mekas by reputation might be struck by how easily “Mr. Anthology Film Archives,” the living dean of living experimental filmmakers, re-acclimated himself to life in rural Semeniškiai village. In 1972, his mother still did the cooking outside, over an open fire. Yet, Mekas is clearly nostalgic for his old home.

Inducted into the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry, Reminiscences is sort of the thin edge of the wedge for avant-garde film. Even if Mekas and “Saint” Peter Kubelka (who joins Mekas in the final ten minutes) mean nothing to you, the film serves as a time capsule of early 1970s life in rural Lithuania, including the collective farms. Mekas has an eye for both significant and mundane details that together really paint a full, immersive picture.

It is hard to imagine the Semeniškiai Mekas visits could remain frozen in time all these years. In most ways that is probably a good thing (starting with the country’s political independence from their Soviet oppressors), but the hearty peasants performing traditional dances most likely also represent a rarity today. Mekas edits it all together with a rather sly sense of humor. His aesthetic is an acquired taste, but if you only see one of his films, this is the one to choose. Recommended for viewers receptive to the intimate and the experimental, Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania starts its 30-day MUBI rotation this Monday (Christmas Eve).

NYFF ’16: I Had Nowhere to Go

As an early booster-theoretician of underground cinema, Jonas Mekas flipped for Andy Warhol, especially his outré provocations, such as screening reel after reel of film leader. It is therefore easy to imagine his enthusiasm for the unconventional approach of Scottish video installation artist Douglas Gordon’s avant-garde documentary. Essentially combining the visual aesthetic of Derek Jarman’s Blue with books-on-tape, Gordon’s I Had Nowhere to Go screens as part of the new Explorations section of the 54th New York Film Festival.

The screen will be blank throughout most of the film, allowing Mekas’s Lithuanian-accented voice conjure up ghosts from the Twentieth Century. Occasionally Gordon throws us a visual bone, like a traditional talking head shot of still razor sharp and energetic ninety-three-year-old (which makes sense) or footage of someone chopping vegetables (representing a total audio-visual disconnect).

Unfortunately, like so many citizens of the Baltic states, Mekas led an eventful life even before he became a New Yorker. He was indeed caught between the rival socialist armies of Germany and the Soviet Union. In fact, probably the film’s best story comes in the first five minutes when Mekas recounts how he took his first photograph ever during the Soviet invasion, only to have the film confiscated by a lieutenant. (Mekas readily admits this was rather sporting of the officer, considering he could have very easily taken both his camera and his life.)

Trying his best to evade both German and Russian forces, Mekas and his family existed hand-to-mouth as refugees before they finally reached Brooklyn. While the migrant experience might be intended to shoehorn in a kneejerk sense of topicality, it also reminds us there was a wide gulf in the values of those fleeing the Soviets and National Socialists and the oppressors they left behind. However, the film is probably most effective when Mekas explores the ways in which his buried Lithuanianness would unexpectedly reassert itself.

Let’s be honest, Mekas is probably the foremost “video diarist” in cinema history. If you set out to make a short-pants-to-elder-statesman documentary of his life, there should be no shortage of images. Opting for no almost no images instead comes off like an over-intellectualized strategy that comes perilously close to being a cop-out. Hearing Mekas read passages from his eponymous 1991 memoir has value, but you could get the full story and lose little in terms of the storytelling experience by listening to an audiobook recording. (If Mr. Mekas is looking for an audio publisher, he is welcomed to reach out to me here.)

If you were there for the Warhol screenings Mekas organized back in the day, IHNTG might resonate for you on a personal level, even though it never covers any of his work as a filmmaker, champion, and preservationist of the American Avant-garde film movement. However, as a work of cinema analyzed formalistically, is frustratingly anemic. Only recommended for hardcore Mekas fans, I Had Nowhere to Go screens this Thursday (10/13) and Friday (10/14) as part of this year’s NYFF.

Tribeca ’10: Visionaries

Famous for his montage films often seen on the Academy Award broadcasts, probably no filmmaker has codified the glamorous image of Hollywood’s golden years more than Chuck Workman. Yet those films portrayed a selective vision of cinema history. Now the rebels get the Workman treatment in his documentary, Visionaries: Jonas Mekas and the (Mostly) American Avant-Garde Cinema, which premiered at the 2010 Tribeca Film Festival.

Call it avant-garde, experimental, counter-cultural, underground, non-narrative, or non-representational, but for less adventurous movie goers, they are just pretty weird. Visionaries may not change any hearts or minds, but it provides easy to digest introductions to several avant-garde filmmakers, including Stan Brakhage, Maya Deren, Kenneth Anger, Peter Kubelka, and Robert Downey (Sr.). However, Visionaries places the Lithuanian born Jonas Mekas first among equals, celebrating his work both as a filmmaker and as an impresario for avant-garde film. Fittingly, Visionaries will open theatrically next month at the Anthology Film Archives, which was founded as a permanent home for Mekas’s traveling exhibitions of experimental cinema.

Workman certainly includes plenty of clips from his subjects’ films, some of which are quite strange, but he also interviews many filmmakers and scholars. Fortunately though, they mostly avoid academic jargon, making Visionaries a good primer on the history such extremely independent filmmaking. There are even some sequences that might intrigue new viewers, like an all too brief clip from Shirley Clarke’s Bridges-Go-Round, featuring its very cool jazz soundtrack composed by Teo Macero.

Throughout Visionaries, Workman presents the directors and their films with scrupulous respect. However, occasional soundbites might confirm uncharitable suspicions among skeptical audiences, like footage of Andy Warhol telling an interviewer he started using a lot of film leader because Mekas would get excited about anything, even leader.

Regardless of how one feels about the avant-garde it is cool to see them get their due in Visionaries. Surprisingly accessible and refreshingly almost entirely free of political statements, it is an entertaining look an under-documented movement in film history. Following its Tribeca debut, Visionaries will screen at AFA on June 4th, 5th, and 6th.