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to make and show a film like this to the world! Why didn't you show the factories? Why didn't you show the progress?' I said, 'In this film I'm interested only in my mother and my childhood memories, that's all. This is my past.' But he couldn't understand it. He thought it was outrageous and an insult. Even a bottle of vodka didn't improve his mood. The star of
[1972], Donatas Banionis, saw the film with him and he thought it was great. The two of them almost got into a fist fight. Only another bottle of vodka and a few songs calmed things down.
Did you have a time restriction? How long were you allowed to stay in Lithuania?
There was no limit. They said, 'Why don't you stay here forever?' And so did my mother; she was already looking for a wife for me there. But I had to come back.
At one point during the second half of the film, you say, 'the morning of the fourth day.' It comes as a shock because it seems as if we've been there a very long time. By the way, an intertitle at the beginning promises '100 GLIMPSES OF LITHUANIA.' Why do you stop after the ninety-first section?
Only ninety-one? I thought I went up to ninety-four or ninety-six. Anyway, I decided to take pity on the audience, to give them only ninety-one. On the other hand, what is '100'? It's just an idea; the film shows 100 glimpses in a loose sense.
There's also one missing, number seventy-one.
I did not like that segment. I cut it out, never replaced it with other footage, and never corrected the number. Too much work involved. I figured most people wouldn't notice. Maybe eventually I'll put something there.
The time structure of that film is very complex. The first part opens with the end of your period of uprootedness. Then it goes back to the earliest part of your American experience. In the second part a similar thing happens: by visiting Lithuania, you're simultaneously moving forward in terms of your personal development, and going back to the time, or at least the place, where you were before the 1950 material. In the third part your life with your American cultural familyKen and Flo Jacobs, Annette Michelsoncontinues, and you visit Kremsmuenster, a centuries-old center for the maintenance of culture.
That developed organically. It's not that I sat and thought about time or about the past. I went directly to Austria from Lithuania; that's the way the footage was shot also. Originally I thought I would just use the Lithuanian material, but as I thought more about it, I liked the way the Austrian material complicated everything. Then I decided to complicate it further, give it more angles, more directions, by adding the Brooklyn section. Later I added some Hamburg footage. It just devel-
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Elzbieta Mekas, mother of Jonas and Adolfas Mekas, in
(1972).
oped as I worked on it. Time became very integral, time and culture. Culture, as represented by Kubelka, Jacobs, Annette, [Hermann] Nitsch, had become my home. It was clear already at that time that there was no going back to Lithuania for me.
Your mother is spectacular in that film.
She's still in very good shape. She's ninety-six now [Elzbieta Mekas died on January 12, 1983, at the age of ninety-seven].
has a very different kind of organization than the other films. It's more involved with a specific place, Jerome Hill's environment in Cassis. Was that material made intermittently during this period?
The whole film is about forty-five minutes long. Thirty-eight minutes or so are from the 1966 trip. There's also about three minutes from the trip the following year. Ten years later, in 1977, I made another visit. I used about two minutes of that footage.
There's a very different use of intertitles. Sometimes they're repeated and become motifs.
In all the other diary volumes most of the titles are used very factually to describe what will be coming up. In this film many of the titles are not descriptive. They make statements which are not connected with any image. I was experimenting with a different use of titles.
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