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adolescence. I was collecting diaries and letters of girls of that age, and making many notes. I wanted to make a filmactually, a series of three or four films, one of a girl fifteen, one of a woman and a man twenty-five; then forty-five; then sixty-five. I never progressed beyond the notes. But on several occasions I took some shots with three or four girls whom I thought I would use in that film. I always filmed them in the park. Some of the young women were friends of friends. I don't even know some of their names. But that's the reason for the repeated shots or sequences of young women in the park.
MacDonald:
During the making of
Walden
did you try different types of music with different imagery?
Mekas:
By then I was carrying my Nagra or my Sony and picking up sounds from the situations I filmed. There is a long stretch where I did not have any sounds, so I had John Cale play some background music. It's very insistent, constant sound that goes on for fifteen or twenty minutes. There is no climax; it's continuous, with some small variations.
MacDonald:
It works very intricately with the imagery. There are all sorts of subtle connections. Even within the slight variations, a slight motion in the sound may be matched by a parallel motion in the imagery.
Mekas:
I should reveal a secret: that John Cale sound is tampered with. I doubled the speed. It didn't work as it was. I tried different sounds for different parts. I made many different attempts. Sometimes I had two or three televisions going simultaneously, plus phonograph records and a radio. As I was editing, I was listening and trying to hit on chance connections. The tape recorder was always ready so I could immediately record what might come up.
MacDonald: Walden
begins with the sound of the subway.
Mekas:
There's a lot of subway and street noise in
Walden
. It's a general background in which all the other sounds are planted.
MacDonald:
The opening subway sound goes on for a very long time and suggests a rush through time. Then it stops abruptly and the doors open, just as you're waking up and as spring is waking out of winter.
Mekas:
I like that noise. It has continued through all the volumes of my film diaries. Also, that was a period when I did a lot of walking, and the street noise was always present.
MacDonald:
I assume that, as was true in
Lost Lost Lost,
the material is more or less chronological, though not completely.
Mekas:
Yes. I had to shift some parts for simple structural reasons. I did not want two long stretches like Notes on the Circus and Trip to Millbrook right next to each other. That would be too much; it would throw the structure out of balance. There had to be some separations. I shifted those longer passages around, but in most cases I didn't touch the shorter scenes; they are in chronological order.