. We never finished it and some of the footage appears in reel three of
the film within the film about the car crash.
Were you collecting sound at this time too?
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We were collecting sound, but between 1950 and 1955 this amounted to very little. After 1955 I collected more and more sounds from the situations I filmed.
The early reels are punctuated by images of typed pages. Were you writing a record of your feelings during that time?
Those pages are from my written diaries which I kept regularly from the time I left Lithuania [1944] until maybe 1960. Later I got too involved in other activitiesthe Film-makers' Cooperative,
the Cinematheque, et ceteraand the written diaries became more and more infrequent.
Did you know English when you arrived here?
I could read. I remember reading Hemingway's
on the boat as we came over. Hemingway is one of the easiest writers to read because of the simplicity and directness of his language. He is still one of my favorite writers. So I could read and communicate, but writing took another few years. To write in an acquired language is more difficult than to read, as you know, and I am still learning. Until the mid fifties I kept all my notes in Lithuanian. For another two to three years there is a slow dissolve: on some days my notes were in Lithuanian and on other days in English. By 1957 all the diaries and notes are in English.
My poetry remains in Lithuanian. I have triedmostly fooling aroundto write ''poetry' in English, but I do not believe that one can write poetry in any language but the one in which one grew up as a child. One can never master all the nuances of words and groupings of words that are necessary for poetry. Certain kinds of prose can be written, though, as Nabokov has shown.
My brother mastered English much faster than I because he found himself in the army with no Lithuanians around. Of course, I am not talking about our accents. The Eastern European pronunciation requires a completely different mouth muscle structure than that of the English language. And it takes a lot of time for the mouth muscles to rearrange themselves.
When you came to put
together in its present form, did you then go back to the journals and film pages with that film in mind or had those pages been filmed much earlier?
I filmed the pages during the editing. When I felt that some aspect of that period was missing from the images, I would go through the audio tapes and the written diaries. They often contained what my footage did not.
Also, as it developed into its final form,
became autobiographical: I became the center. The immigrant community is there, but it's shown through my eyes. Not unconsciously, but con-
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sciously, formally. When I originally filmed that footage, I did not make myself the center. I tried to film in a way that would make the community central. I thought of myself only as the recording eye. My attitude was still that of an old-fashioned documentary filmmaker of the forties or fifties and so I purposely kept the personal element out as much as I could. By the time of the editing, in 1975, however, I was preoccupied by the autobiographical. The written diaries allowed me to add a personal dimension to an otherwise routine, documentary recording.
Your detachment from the Lithuanian community in reels one and two seems to go beyond the documentarian's 'objective' stance.
I was already detached from the Lithuanian communitynot from Lithuania, but from the immigrant community, which had written us off probably as early as 1948 or even earlier, when we were still in Germany, in the DP camps. The nationaliststhere were many military people among the displaced personsthought we were Communists and that we should be thrown out of the displaced persons camp. The main reason for that, I think, was that we always hated the army. We were very antimilitaristic. We always laughed and made jokes about the military. Another thing that seemed to separate us from the Lithuanian community was that we did not follow the accepted literary styles of that time. We were publishing a literary magazine in Lithuanian, which was, as far as they were concerned, an extreme, modernist manifestation. So we were outcasts. That was one of the reasons why we moved out of Brooklyn into Manhattan. I was recording the Lithuanian community, but I was already seeing it as an outsider. I was still sympathetic to its plight, but my strongest interests already were film and literature. We'd finish our work in a factory in Long Island City at five
P.M.
and without washing our faces, we'd rush to the subway to catch the five-thirty screening at the Museum of Modern Art. To the other Lithuanians we were totally crazy.
You begin
