the British zone, then in the American zone. There was nothing to do and a lot of time. What we could do was read, write, and go to movies. Movies were shown in the camps free, by the American army. Whatever money we could get we spent on books, or we went into town and saw the postwar German productions. Later, when we went to study at the University of Mainz, which was in the French zonewe commuted from Wiesbadenwe saw a lot of French films.
The movies that really got us interested in film were not the French
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productions, but the postwar, neorealistic German films. They are not known herefilms by Helmut Kautner, Josef V. Baky, Wolfgang Liebeneiner, and others. The only way they could make films after the war in Germany was by shooting on actual locations. The war had ended, but the realities were still all around. Though the stories were fictional and melodramatic, their visual texture was drab reality, the same as in the postwar Italian films.
Then we started reading the literature on film, and we began writing scripts. What caused us to write our first script was a filmI do not remember the title or who made it, but it was about displaced persons. We thought it was so melodramatic and had so little understanding of what life in postwar Europe was like that we got very mad and decided we should make a film. My brother wrote a script. Nothing ever was done with it. We had no means, we had no contacts, we were two zeroes.
When you were first starting to shoot here, did you feel that you were primarily a recorder of displaced persons and their struggle, or were you already thinking about becoming a filmmaker of another sort?
The very first script that we wrote when we arrived in late 1949, and which was called
(that is, four
as opposed to the three of the 1975 version), was for a documentary on the life of displaced persons here. We wanted to bring some facts to people's attention. It did not have to do so much with the fact that we were displaced persons, or that there were displaced persons. It had more to do with the fact that the Baltic republicsEstonia, Latvia, Lithuaniawere sacrificed by the West to the Soviet Union at Yalta just before the end of the war and ended up as occupied countries to which we could not return. We were taking a stand for the three Baltic countries that the West had betrayed. Our script was an angry outcry. We sent it to [Robert] Flaherty, thinking he could help us produce it, but he wrote back that though he liked the script and found it full of passion, he could not help us. This was at a time when he couldn't find money to produce even his own films.
We did start shooting nevertheless. Actually, two or three shots at the beginning of
are from the footage we shot for that film. A slow-motion shot of a soldier (actually, Adolfas) and one or two others (a family reading a newspaper, a skating rink, a tree in Central Park) were meant for that film. But my brother was drafted and so we abandoned the project. When he came back from the army a year or so later, things had changed.
During all the intervening time you were recording other material?
Yes, I was collecting, documenting, without a clear plan or
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purpose, the activities of displaced personsmainly Lithuanians. I shot footage of New York immigrant communities, and I did some weekend traveling to record communities in Chicago, Toronto, Philadelphia, Boston. I worked in Brooklyn factories and spent all my money on film.
A lot of the footage that ended up in the first reel of
is compositionally and texturally very beautiful. When you were shooting originally, were you thinking about the camera as a potential poetic instrument?
The intention was to capture the situations very directly, with the simple means that we had at our disposal. All the indoor footage was taken with just one or two flood lamps. We made no attempt to light the 'scenes' 'correctly' or 'artistically.' Sometimes we were at meetingsactually, most of the timewhere we couldn't interfere, or we were too shy to interfere.
During the first weeks after our arrival here, we had read Pudovkin and Eisenstein, so in the back of our minds there was probably something else, a different ambition, but I don't think that that footage reveals much. In Germany we had bought a still camera and had taken a lot of stills. Maybe that affected how we saw and the look of some of the footage. We also looked at a lot of still photography. In 1953 or so I began working at a place called Graphic Studios, a commercial photography studio, where I stayed for five or six years. The studio was run by Lenard Perskie, from whom I learned a great deal. All the great photographers used to drop in, and some artists, like Alexander Archipenko.
In 1950 we began attending Cinema 16 screenings. By this I mean absolutely every screening of the so-called experimental films. It became my Sunday church, my university. We also attended every screening of the Theodore Huff Society, which was run at that time by the young Bill Everson. He showed mostly early Hollywood and European films that were unavailable commercially. I think it's still going on, but I haven't been there for years. It's one of the noble, dedicated undertakings of William Everson, who has performed a great educational role for nearly three decades.
I asked the question about your using the camera as a poetic device because by the second reel there are shots in which it's clear that more is happening than documentation. I'm thinking of the beautiful sequence of the woman pruning trees, and the shot of Adolfas in front of the merry-go-round.
That shot of Adolfas was intended for our first 'poetic' film:
