Essay: Jan-Christopher Horak Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania

Essay: Jan-Christopher Horak Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania Jan-Christopher Horak, Ph.D. Editor, The Moving Image Professor, UCLA Critical Studies [email protected] 323 960-4805 I have tried. I have done everything to be just like everybody else. I have tried to be down to earth. Digging my hands deep into the sand pile on Sixth Avenue. Touching the ground in Central Park with my bare feet. But I remain a stranger here. There is a distance between me and every building, every street, every face. -- Jonas Mekas, December 1951 Jonas Mekas wrote these lines in his diary a little more than two years after coming to the United States. A stranger in a strange land, a displaced person, cast adrift in an alien culture. As in all of his work, whether his film diaries or autobiography, Mekas describes his acclimatization in physical terms, the tactileness of nature his measuring stick. Others have written about Mekas’ Romantic leanings. But as I read these lines, I also imagine that at the very moment Mekas is writing down these thoughts in his tiny room in Brooklyn, I’m lying in a large basket on Ellis Island, another displaced person, but too young to know it. Like my twin brother gurgling across from me in the same basket, I’m not concerned with the masses of mostly Eastern Europeans lining up to talk to officers of the INS in that cold hall on Ellis Island on December 14, 1951. I hear foreign tongues, but only the soothing words of my mother are of interest to me. I’m unconcerned where my next bottle of milk will come from in this new land. I don’t remember the months of waiting in a Munich DP camp. At eight months old I weighed just barely ten pounds, due to malnutrition. My descriptions are the product of stories passed down from my parents and snapshots I’ve seen of the family, in Gander, on the unpressurized DC-3 Flying Tiger, at Idlewild, my own DP Card. Only much later will I learn what it means to be a displaced person. Only much later, when I emigrate back to Europe as a teenager, will I really understand the negative force of dislocation, the alienation of what we term culture shock. I first met Jonas Mekas in October 1972, when he presented a screening of his new film, Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania, to an audience at the university I was attending. Mekas had just shown the film at the New York Film Festival, where it was warmly received; the cineastes I hung out with certainly felt privileged to see it literally a few weeks after that initial premiere. Personally, I was mightily impressed with the man, whose work I had been reading religiously in The Village Voice. At that time, I was a senior history major who had taken several film courses and was just applying to graduate schools in film, while trying to decide whether I would rather work as a film critic for Time or The Village Voice. I published a review of Reminiscences in the college newspaper, which I will quote in a minute, not because 2 it is particularly brilliant--after all I was just learning about film--but rather because I hope to accomplish two things in my talk today. First, I would like to review the reception of this film in relation to what was eventually seen as Mekas’ creation of a new autobiographical film form; that reception has clearly become richer with each passing year, beginning with the naive, film industry centric reviews at the time of its premiere to the layered and complex readings of Mekas’ film work, published by P. Adams Sitney, and later David James in his anthology, To Free the Cinema. Secondly, and that is why I begin with my own review of thirty years ago, by discussing Reminiscences in relation to my own history, I would like to theorize my own position as viewer, in order to make some observations about the positionality of the subject in biographical or autobiographical films. It seems to me that while the artist and the object have been privileged in critical discourses surrounding avant-garde film and its historiography, it is often wrongly assumed that modernism eludes subject positioning altogether, because the mechanisms of identification so well defined in relation to classical Hollywood narrative are completely subverted in avant-garde film practice. Certainly, while audience identification is not a primary concern of the film avant-garde, and indeed analytic and formalist distancing devices are a raison d’etre of a self-reflexive cinema, naming itself avant-garde, many avant-garde films do solicit and elicit emotional responses. Like other filmmakers of the American avant-garde, Mekas straddles seemingly contradictory aesthetic notions, romantic in impulse and modernist in execution. Finally, I have come to believe that the aesthetic experience of avant-garde cinema is necessarily imbricated by the subjectivity of the viewer, whether at the level of content or through the formalist play of supposedly semantically empty images, allowing an audience to engage in a kind of reverie that enriches reception. When narrative is involved, even narrative fragments, the subject exists both within and without the text. When Mekas’s Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania opened in October 1972, the mainstream press, as was to be expected, failed to understand the film, because they judged it by the standards of Hollywood film product, rather than as a work of the avant-garde. My own take as a twenty-one year old was that the film was only a failure if judged by the standards of Hollywood film criticism, given its jerky and nervous camera, its over- and under-exposed images, and its rapid editing; I deemed it successful as a consciously constructed work of art. I understood that Mekas’ narration and utilization of folk and classical music took the film out of the realm of purely formal experiment and into a highly personal form of cinema. In particular, I was struck by Mekas’ attachment to the natural environment of his native Lithuania: “The shots are loving, because, coming from peasant stock, Mekas’ roots were totally entrenched in the land. All the more traumatic was his exile because he was exiled not only from his homeland, but from the land, the soil.” I specifically comment on the scenes taking place in Vienna, which are marked by a sense of stability and permanence symbolized by Peter Kubelka (a lifelong resident of Vienna), the monastery with its centuries old library, etc. However, even that sense of permanence, in contrast to the transitory nature of the exile experience, is ironically undercut by the final scene of the fire, destroying Vienna’s old fruit market. A couple more years would pass before any one understood the significance of what Mekas was doing in regards to what would be later called diary cinema. True, he had already released his earlier diary film, Diaries, Notebooks, and Sketches (1969), but I do not think even Mekas understood that he was in the process of creating a new 3 film form, which would ultimately secure him a place in film history as a filmmaker, and not just as a critic, polemicist, exhibitor, and archivist of the avant-garde. In Visionary Film, P. Adams Sitney was the first critic to place Mekas’ ground- breaking autobiographical cinema into a high art cultural context, arguing that his films are visual equivalents to the British Romantic poetry and autobiography of Wordsworth’s Prelude or Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria. Sitney discovers a master narrative in Mekas’ diary films that reworked the Romantic myth of innocence lost, including the failed quest for its recovery, and the ultimate integration of the subject into a new community of artists; Sitney’s narrative has indeed informed all subsequent readings. The conflict between his lost childhood and present circumstances is resolved for Sitney in Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania by “celebrating the present with renewed vigor,” namely in community with his fellow artists and fellow-travelers in the American film avant-garde. In Allegories of Cinema. American Film in the Sixties, David James embellishes on Sitney’s thesis of the quest of the Romantic artist, but also identifies the creation of an alternative film practice, to say nothing of the birth of the “New American Cinema” as a constituent element of that Romantic myth. Including out of focus footage, under-exposed footage, mistakes, repetitions, etc. allows Mekas to make the process of filmmaking transparent, an impetus which is of course at the heart of the modernist project. James remarks on the similarity of this aesthetic to Jack “Kerouac’s insistence on responsiveness to the present moment of composition” but is also aware of the fact that in Mekas’ avant-garde practice the Romantic reconciliation with nature is imbedded in the process of editing and post-production, which usually occurred years later. In his subsequent work, To Free the Cinema. Jonas Mekas & the New York Underground, David James therefore makes a distinction between film diary and the diary films. The former is Jonas Mekas’ personal record of his life, begun only months after his arrival in the United States and continuing up to the present. Shot on 16mm and left unedited for longer or shorter periods of time Mekas’ diary films, on the other hand, are those edited works he began producing at irregular intervals after 1968. While Mekas states that his diary films are uncut and therefore reflect life as he lived it, this is in fact only true in an aesthetic sense in that they reflect their own moment of production.

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