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productions, but the postwar, neorealistic German films. They are not known herefilms by Helmut Käutner, Josef V. Baky, Wolfgang Liebeneiner, and others. The only way they could make films after the war in Germany was by shooting on actual locations. The war had ended, but the realities were still all around. Though the stories were fictional and melodramatic, their visual texture was drab reality, the same as in the postwar Italian films.
Then we started reading the literature on film, and we began writing scripts. What caused us to write our first script was a filmI do not remember the title or who made it, but it was about displaced persons. We thought it was so melodramatic and had so little understanding of what life in postwar Europe was like that we got very mad and decided we should make a film. My brother wrote a script. Nothing ever was done with it. We had no means, we had no contacts, we were two zeroes.
MacDonald:
When you were first starting to shoot here, did you feel that you were primarily a recorder of displaced persons and their struggle, or were you already thinking about becoming a filmmaker of another sort?
Mekas:
The very first script that we wrote when we arrived in late 1949, and which was called
Lost Lost Lost Lost
(that is, four
Lost's
as opposed to the three of the 1975 version), was for a documentary on the life of displaced persons here. We wanted to bring some facts to people's attention. It did not have to do so much with the fact that we were displaced persons, or that there were displaced persons. It had more to do with the fact that the Baltic republicsEstonia, Latvia, Lithuaniawere sacrificed by the West to the Soviet Union at Yalta just before the end of the war and ended up as occupied countries to which we could not return. We were taking a stand for the three Baltic countries that the West had betrayed. Our script was an angry outcry. We sent it to [Robert] Flaherty, thinking he could help us produce it, but he wrote back that though he liked the script and found it full of passion, he could not help us. This was at a time when he couldn't find money to produce even his own films.
We did start shooting nevertheless. Actually, two or three shots at the beginning of
Lost Lost Lost
are from the footage we shot for that film. A slow-motion shot of a soldier (actually, Adolfas) and one or two others (a family reading a newspaper, a skating rink, a tree in Central Park) were meant for that film. But my brother was drafted and so we abandoned the project. When he came back from the army a year or so later, things had changed.
MacDonald:
During all the intervening time you were recording other material?
Mekas:
Yes, I was collecting, documenting, without a clear plan or