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MacDonald:
Some of it comes through in the mood of those images.
Mekas:
Some, yes.
MacDonald:
I showed Menken's
Notebook
[1963] recently, and noticed not only a feeling similar to the one in your work, but a similar use of tiny passages of text as a means of contextualizing and distancing personal footage.
Mekas:
Oh, yes. I liked what she did and I thought it worked. She helped me make up my mind about how to structure my films. Besides, Marie Menken was Lithuanian. Her mother and father were Lithuanian immigrants, and she still spoke some Lithuanian. We used to get together and sing Lithuanian folk songs. When she'd sing them, she'd go back to the old country completely. So there might also be some similarities in our sensibilities because of that. But definitely Marie Menken helped me to be at peace enough to leave much of the original material just as it was.
And John Cage. From him I learned that chance is one of the great editors. You shoot something one day, forget it, shoot something the next day and forget the details of that. . . . When you finally string it all together, you discover all sorts of connections. I thought at first that I should do more editing and not rely on chance. But I came to realize that, of course, there is no chance: whenever you film, you make certain decisions, even when you don't know that you do. The most essential, the most important editing takes place during the shooting as a result of these decisions.
Before 1960 I tried to edit the material from 1949 to 1955. But I practically destroyed it by tampering with it too much. Later, in 1960 or 1961, I spent a long time putting it
back
to the way it was originally. After that I was afraid to touch it, and I didn't touch it until 1975.
MacDonald:
It's in the fifth reel of
Lost Lost Lost
that you seem, for the first time, to be back in touch with rural life and with the land.
Mekas:
Yes, that's where the "lost lost lost" ends. I'm beginning to feel at home again. By reel six one cannot say that I feel lost anymore; paradise has been regained through cinema.
MacDonald:
It's the paradise of having a place where you can work and struggle for something that you care about?
Mekas:
When you enter a whole world where you feel at home. A world for which you care. Or, a world which takes you over, possesses you, obsesses you, and pushes all the other worlds into the shadow. Still, I don't think that I'll ever be able, really and completely, to detach myself from what I really am, somewhere very deep: a Lithuanian.
MacDonald:
Reel five is exhilarating in its use of light and texture. And you take some chances by allowing yourself to be very vulnerable: you allow yourself to look foolish.