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Elzbieta Mekas, mother of Jonas and Adolfas Mekas, in
Reminiscences
of a Journey to Lithuania
(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.
MacDonald:
Your mother is spectacular in that film.
Mekas:
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].
MacDonald: Notes for Jerome
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?
Mekas:
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.
MacDonald:
There's a very different use of intertitles. Sometimes they're repeated and become motifs.
Mekas:
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.