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But, basically, at that time our dream was Hollywood. Fictional, theatrical filmnot documentary. We thought in terms of making movies for everybody. In those days if one thought about making films for neighborhood theaters, one thought in terms of Hollywood. We dreamed we would earn some money, and borrow some from friends, and would be able to make our films, our "Hollywood" films. Very soon we discovered that nobody wanted to lend us any money. So we began to send our scripts to Hollywood. I remember sending one to Fred Zinnemann and another to Stanley Kramer. We got them back; I don't know whether they were ever read. Now one can see that our first scripts were not Hollywood scripts at all; they were avant-garde scripts. But we naively thought we could get backing for the films we were dreaming of.
Luckily, just around that time, in New York, there were some people, like Morris Engel and Sidney Meyers, who were beginning to make a different kind of cinema, who began breaking away from Hollywood. We saw
The Little Fugitive
[1953] and it made us aware of other possibilities. Before we arrived here, we were completely unaware of anything other than commercial film. As we were entering adolescence, when we might have become interested in such things, the war came, and the occupations by the Soviets, then the Germans, then the Soviets again. There was no information, no possibility at all for us to become aware of the other kind of cinema. The Russians came with their official cinema; then the Germans with theirs. After the war the United States army came with Tarzan and melodrama. Our film education was very slow. In late 1947, and in 1948, when we were studying at the University of Mainz, we were excited by
Beauty and the Beast
[1946] and a few other French films. But that's about it.
MacDonald:
Is there some reason why you included almost no explicit information about your film interest in those first two reelsother than the obvious fact of your making the footage we're seeing? When I originally saw reel three and the intertitle,
"FILM CULTURE IS ROLLING ON LAFAYETTE STREET,"
I was surprised: it seemed to come out of nowhere.
Mekas:
I have no real explanation for that. I figure, the professional life, even if it's a filmmaker's, is not photogenic. There are certain crafts, professions, that are photogenicto mesuch as, for instance, bread making, farming, fishing, street works, cutting wood, coal mining, et cetera. Technological crafts and professions are not photogenic. Another reason is that until 1960 or so, no filmmaker was really filming his or her own life. Whatever one was filming was always outside of one's lifein my case, the Lithuanian community or New York streets. The diaristic, autobiographical preoccupations did not really exist. The personal lives of the whole first wave of American experimental filmmakers