A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers

The titles of

Walden

and your other films have evolved.

Mekas:

Yes.

Walden

was originally titled

Diaries, Notes & Sketches

(

also known as Walden

). But now, since I have many other reels of diary material, there is a confusionat least for the labs. When I was using the title

Diaries, Notes & Sketches: Lost Lost Lost,

they kept writing on the cans

Diaries, Notes & Sketches

and skipping the rest. I had no choice but to rethink the titles. All of my film diaries are

Diaries, Notes & Sketches,

but now I call the individual parts only by their specific names:

Walden, Lost Lost Lost, In Between, Notes for Jerome,

et cetera.

MacDonald:

How does what we see in

In Between

relate to

Walden

in terms of time period?

Mekas:

The

In Between

material is from 'in between'

Lost Lost Lost

and

Walden

.

MacDonald:

I had thought of the title as a reference to your situation of being partially rooted here, but still Lithuanian . . .

Mekas:

Yes, that may be true. It's amazing how much one can hide, unconsciously.

MacDonald: Walden

is very involved with traveling, whereas in

In Between

there's more home life. And there's a sense of a relationship with a woman.

Mekas:

I did not want to make

Walden

too long, and there was a certain pace established there. Several of the sequences in

In Between

are much slower. They're not single framed. I did not want to put that material into

Walden

. After finishing

Walden,

I still thought that I would like to use that footage so I collected it and put it into

In Between

.

I made several versions of

In Between,

one of which I put into distribution, then reedited. It was a difficult film to structure because of the Salvador Dali footage, which was very different from the other material. I decided finally to separate that part; I put Dali in his place, so to speak, and I used numbering to break it up a bit. It's now one of my favorite films.

MacDonald:

You mentioned last time that there was a tremendous amount of material collected in the fifties, only a small portion of which was used in

Lost Lost Lost

. Is the same thing true for the sixties?

Mekas:

Maybe a little bit less. In

Lost Lost Lost

I used about one-seventh of the footage I had; in

Walden

and

In Between

I used perhaps a third.

Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania

was shot about one-to-one. I used everything in the film.

MacDonald:

You still have the unused material?

Mekas:

I have it all. I may go back some day and make something else with some of it. Some material is not at all bad. But so far it hasn't

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belonged anywhere. Much of what was not used in the early reels of