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purpose, the activities of displaced personsmainly Lithuanians. I shot footage of New York immigrant communities, and I did some weekend traveling to record communities in Chicago, Toronto, Philadelphia, Boston. I worked in Brooklyn factories and spent all my money on film.
MacDonald:
A lot of the footage that ended up in the first reel of
Lost Lost Lost
is compositionally and texturally very beautiful. When you were shooting originally, were you thinking about the camera as a potential poetic instrument?
Mekas:
The intention was to capture the situations very directly, with the simple means that we had at our disposal. All the indoor footage was taken with just one or two flood lamps. We made no attempt to light the "scenes" "correctly" or "artistically." Sometimes we were at meetingsactually, most of the timewhere we couldn't interfere, or we were too shy to interfere.
During the first weeks after our arrival here, we had read Pudovkin and Eisenstein, so in the back of our minds there was probably something else, a different ambition, but I don't think that that footage reveals much. In Germany we had bought a still camera and had taken a lot of stills. Maybe that affected how we saw and the look of some of the footage. We also looked at a lot of still photography. In 1953 or so I began working at a place called Graphic Studios, a commercial photography studio, where I stayed for five or six years. The studio was run by Lenard Perskie, from whom I learned a great deal. All the great photographers used to drop in, and some artists, like Alexander Archipenko.
In 1950 we began attending Cinema 16 screenings. By this I mean absolutely every screening of the so-called experimental films. It became my Sunday church, my university. We also attended every screening of the Theodore Huff Society, which was run at that time by the young Bill Everson. He showed mostly early Hollywood and European films that were unavailable commercially. I think it's still going on, but I haven't been there for years. It's one of the noble, dedicated undertakings of William Everson, who has performed a great educational role for nearly three decades.
MacDonald:
I asked the question about your using the camera as a poetic device because by the second reel there are shots in which it's clear that more is happening than documentation. I'm thinking of the beautiful sequence of the woman pruning trees, and the shot of Adolfas in front of the merry-go-round.
Mekas:
That shot of Adolfas was intended for our first "poetic" film:
A Silent Journey
. We never finished it and some of the footage appears in reel three of
Lost Lost Lost
the film within the film about the car crash.
MacDonald:
Were you collecting sound at this time too?