Displaced and Dispossessed

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    Displaced and

    Dispossessed:Jonas Mekas and his Search for the Pastoral homeland.

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    Identifying avant-garde filmmaker Jonas Mekas within a

    particularly Romantic strain of the pastoral tradition was first

    posited by P. Adams Sitney in his groundbreaking work, Visionary

    Film.

    Mekas [sic] Diaries Notes and Sketches (1964-69) [later renamed as

    Walden] and Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania(1971) [sic] are

    exercises in romantic autobiography. Mekas constantly weaves together

    celebrations of the present moment [...] with elegiac and iconic

    allusions to a presence that is forever absent to the camera lens: the

    vision of nature and of his childhood.1

    Sitney has since gone on to connect Mekass work with the 19th

    century American Transcendentalists texts of Ralph Waldo

    Emerson.2 It is true that Mekass gestural, fragmented and

    ecstatic cinematographic style perfectly equates to Emersons

    privileging of the visual and his description of himself as a

    transparent eyeball.3 Also the multiple and rich connections

    between Mekass Walden and its literary namesake written by

    Emersons great disciple Henry David Thoreau have been

    thoroughly explored by both David E. James and Scott MacDonald.4

    However, the pastoral genre extends much further and wider than

    the romanticism of Blake and Wordsworth or their aforementioned

    American counterparts, and it will be the contention of this

    1P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde 1943-1978 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979)

    p. 3602

    See P. Adams Sitney, Eyes Upside Down: Visionary Filmmakers and the Heritage of Emerson (New York: Oxford

    University Press, 2008).3

    Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature (London: Penguin Books, 2008) p. 54

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    paper that much insight can be gained from placing Mekass work

    within the wider context of the issues and debates which have

    been at the center of the pastoral tradition since ancient

    times.

    Jonas Mekas begins his third long form diary film Lost,

    Lost, Lost, (1976) by quoting Homer. O Sing Ulysses. Tell the

    story of the man who never wanted to leave his home. Jonas

    Mekas is a man who never wanted to leave his home, and his

    series of 16mm diary films, beginning with Walden (1969), are

    above all else aching laments over a theme which has preoccupied

    the pastoral from its very inception: paradise lost. Paradise in

    Mekass case was the tiny village of Semeniskiai in Lithuania

    where he spent his childhood on the family farm looking after

    livestock and working the fields.5 This rural and pre-

    industrialized setting is Mekass equivalent to Virgils

    Arcadia, Shakespeares Forest of Arden and Prousts Combray. It

    is the disappearance of this Eden that all pastoral artists have

    mourned and consequently attempted to recreate in their work.

    Leo Marx has written that the pastoral has never been a

    mere simple wish-image of bucolic pleasure, but has always

    5David E. James, Introduction, in David E. James (ed), To Free the Cinema: Jonas Mekas and the New York

    Underground(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992) p. 4

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    been inextricably linked to politics.6In analyzing Virgils

    first eclogue, The Dispossessed, Marx notes that No sooner

    does Virgil sketch in the ideal landscape than he discloses an

    alien world encroaching from without.7 The poem is in the form

    of a dialogue between two shepherds, Meliboeus, whose land has

    been expropriated by the Roman authority, and Tityrus, whose

    land was also at one point in jeopardy but has now been spared.

    Meliboeus, forced into exile by an unsympathetic government

    bureaucracy, faces the prospect of unending anxiety,

    deprivation, and struggle8, while Tityrus is able to continue

    spending his time sprawled in the shade practis[ing] country

    songs on a light shepherds pipe.9

    Beginning with the Nazi occupation of Lithuania in 1942,

    unending anxiety, deprivation, and struggle must have been

    experiences with which Jonas Mekas became intimately familiar.

    Presumably unhappy with an alien worlds encroachment on his

    home, Mekas began to work for an anti-Nazi underground

    newspaper. When Mekas discovered that the typewriter he had been

    using to write his anti-Nazi articles had gone missing, he knew

    it would only be a matter of time before the Nazis would find it

    6Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford University

    Press, 2000) p. 217

    Ibid.8

    Ibid.9

    Virgil, The Pastoral Poems: a Translation of the Eclogues by E.V. Rieu (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books,

    1949) as cited in Marx, 2000, p. 20

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    and trace it back to him. Mekas was forced to leave his idyllic

    home in order to avoid arrest. In Reminiscences of a Journey to

    Lithuania (1972), he recounts how his uncle had urged him and

    his brother Adolfas to Go West, see the world, and then come

    back. Taking this advice they, with forged papers, boarded a

    train for Vienna. The train never reached its intended

    destination. Instead the Germans had the train re-routed to a

    forced labor camp close to Hamburg, where the brothers were

    subsequently interned.10 At the end of World War II, Europe was

    partitioned and Lithuania placed into Communist hands. Mekas was

    left permanently exiled from his homeland and from the

    immersion of nature he had experienced there as a child and

    adolescent.11

    I have to bid goodbye to the home fields and the

    ploughlands that I love. Exile for me... says Meliboeus in the

    opening lines of Virgils eclogue. Later in the poem he

    agonizingly wonders, Ah, will the day come, after many years,

    when I shall see a place that I can call my home ...?12 These

    lines are uncannily echoed in the words to a Lithuanian folk

    song which Mekas relates to us in Reminiscences. Oh mother, how

    I long to see you again/I hope the long gray road will lead me

    10James, Introduction, 1992, p. 5

    11Scott MacDonald, The Garden in the Machine: A Field Guide to Independent Films About Place (Berkeley:

    University of California Press, 2001) p. 23412

    Virgil, as cited in Marx, 2000, pp. 20-1

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    home again. Resolving oneself to the impossibility of returning

    to the lost homeland is one of the major themes shared by the

    two diary films (Walden and Reminiscences) under examination in

    this essay. Negotiating a middle ground between what is forever

    lost and what one is forced to accept in lieu of that fact has

    always been at the heart of the pastoral tradition and few

    artists have explored it with as much insight and poignancy as

    Jonas Mekas.

    1969s Walden, comprised of footage Mekas shot on his 16mm

    Bolex camera during the years of 1964-68, is probably the most

    joyous of the three films under discussion. Mekass style [in

    the film] is aggressively personal: he refuses to hold the

    camera still, preferring an openly gestural style, and he often

    single-frames in a wildly erratic manner as he films ....13 It

    is this ecstatic and erratic style which animates the people,

    places and objects of the film. The images are suffused with

    life because the camera that records them is so obviously an

    extension of the human hand which holds it. The soundtrack too

    at times goes to great lengths to convey an almost euphoric

    bliss. Over images taken at his brother Adolfass wedding,

    Mekas, accompanying himself on the accordion, sings, They tell

    me I should always be searching/But I only celebrate what I

    see/I am searching for nothing, I am happy/I am searching for

    13MacDonald, 2001, p. 234

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    nothing, I am happy/I am searching for nothing, I am happy.

    Earlier in the film we have seen Mekas alone in his one room

    apartment in the Chelsea Hotel playing his accordion. Taking

    this and the words of the song he later sings it is not hard to

    equate Mekas with Virgils Tityrus, the archetypal pastoral

    shepherd, playing away on his pipe. However during his final

    refrain, Mekas cuts to a shot of a framed photograph of his

    father, Povilas, dead since the early 50s. He then cuts to a

    matching portrait of his mother, Elizbieta, alive in Lithuania

    but completely separated from her sons by what Marx would call

    an incursion of history.14 Both stare out from behind the glass

    of their respective frames, wearing those expressionless faces

    that people of a certain generation often adopted when having

    their picture taken. By showing us their portraits during the

    wedding sequence, traditionally a time for family unity, Mekas

    is making a point of their absence, and of the distance which

    now separates the brothers from their real home. The placement

    of these images right at the moment when Mekas is most

    emphatically proclaiming his happiness would seem to undermine

    that bald assertion. Are we to take his declaration to not be

    searching for anything at face value? Mekas indeed it would seem

    is searching for something. Though he pretends to be Tityrus, he

    has more in common with Meliboeus. He is searching for the home

    14Marx, 2000, p. 21

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    he has lost, and despite what Mekas may sing to us, Walden is

    the story of that search.

    Walden is also a great conjuring act. Here before our eyes

    New York City is transfigured into a pastoral Arcadia, or more

    specifically the Lithuania of Mekass youth. Mekass own

    comments are highly revealing on this point.

    I thought I was keeping a quite objective diary of my life in New York.

    But my friends who saw the first edition of Diaries, Notes & Sketches

    (Walden), said to me: But this is not myNew York! My New York is

    different. In your New York Id like to live. But my New York is bleak,

    depressing ... Its then that I began to see that, really, I was not

    keeping an objective notebook [...] that they [the diaries] contained

    everything that New York didnt have [...] In truth, I am filming my

    childhood, not New York. Its a fantasy New Yorkfiction.15

    What exactly are the images Mekas returns to again and again in

    this fantasy version of New York City? A young bare-legged

    blonde girl, bathed in sunlight, races through the green

    environs of Central Park. Children dance and play in mounds of

    autumn leaves. There are winter scenes of children with sleighs

    or engaged in snowball fights and city streets covered in snow.

    A young girl in red, another of Mekass woodland nymphs who

    grace the film throughout, caresses the green grass of Central

    Park with her bare feet and intently studies a tiny flower.

    There are many shots of trees in blossom and branches gently

    15Jonas Mekas, The Diary Film (A Lecture on Reminiscneces of a Journey to Lithuania) in P. Adams Sitney (ed),

    The Avant Garde Film: A Reader of Theory and Criticism (New York: New York Univeristy Press, 1978) p. 191

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    quivering in the breeze. We see no images of ghettos, violence,

    exasperation, inequality or any of the other negative tropes

    one has come to identify with the city. 16 This is not to say the

    urban is totally effaced.

    The undeniable urbanity of New York City is seamlessly

    integrated into Mekass overall pastoral design of the film.

    Whether it be frame by frame shots taken from a moving train of

    the sun rising over the smoke stacks of Newark, images of a coal

    worker unloading a truck on 41st Street or the Empire State

    building bathed in the blue evening light of sunset, the city is

    an essential part of Mekass fantasy. In his subconscious

    efforts to discover those images of nature hiding the city,

    Mekas also discovered a new beauty in the juxtaposition of those

    traditional scenes of pastoral bliss with the seemingly

    incongruous urban spaces which surrounded them. Of course this

    urban pastoralist vision was hardly a new thing. Wordsworth was

    one of the masters of the form.

    The city now doth, like a garment, wear

    The beauty of the morning; silent, bare

    Ships, towers, domes, theatres and temples lie

    Open unto the fields and to the sky;

    All bright and glistening in the smokeless air.

    16Alfredo Leonardi, Occhio mio dio: il New American Cinema (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1971) cited in Pip Chodorov and

    Christian Lebrat (eds), The Walden Book(Paris: Editions Paris Experimental, 2009) p. 127

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    Never did sun more beautifully steep

    In his first splendor, valley, rock or hill;

    Neer saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!17

    This Wordsworthian ability to infuse the city (and its

    associative technology and modernity) with the tranquility of

    the countryside, or more broadly to simply merge the two into a

    harmonious whole, is something that all of the great

    pastoralists have inherited. We see it in Mark Twains beautiful

    description of a steamboat slipping along in the dark, and now

    and then she would belch a whole world of sparks up out of her

    chimbleys, and they would rain down in the river and look awful

    pretty..., or in Proust when the smell emanating from a bush of

    Hawthorns in the Bois du Boulogne (a natural refuge for

    Parisians much like Central Park is for the denizens of New

    York) can transport the narrator back to his idyllic days

    traversing the Meseglise and Guermantes ways.18 According to Marx

    the shepherd of pastoral tradition seeks a resolution of the

    conflict between the opposed worlds of nature and art. Art in

    this case being the civilizing and cultivating forces of modern

    life which, when taken to extremes, threatens the perfection of

    17Excerpt from William Wordsworth, Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802, The Complete

    Poetical Works. (London: Macmillan and Co., 1888; Bartleby.com, 1999.)

    http://www.bartleby.com/145/ww206.htmlAccessed January 1, 2011.18

    Mark Twain, Complete Text of Huckleberry Finn, Spark Notes.

    http://pd.sparknotes.com/lit/huckfinn/section21.html. Accessed on January 2, 2011; Marcel Proust, In Search of

    Lost Time Vol. 1 (London: Everymans Library 2001) p. 135

    http://www.bartleby.com/145/ww206.htmlhttp://www.bartleby.com/145/ww206.htmlhttp://www.bartleby.com/145/ww206.html
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    the natural world.19However, whether we understand art in

    Marxs terms or in its more familiar meaning, the statement

    aptly applies to Mekas who, by creating films with his Bolex

    camera (itself a machine and thusly representative of the modern

    age) has tried to negotiate a resolution between the rural and

    the city, the past of his childhood in Lithuania and his present

    day life in New York.

    In Walden Mekas attempts to transfigure with his camera his

    adopted home into something reminiscent of the home he left

    behind. In Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania (1972) his

    camera no longer has to search for figurative images; he is able

    to film Lithuania itself. Of course the Lithuania that he and

    his brother Adolfas return to in 1971 is not the one they left

    behind in the early 40s. This is the bitter irony which

    suffuses the film: even when you can physically return there is

    no such thing as truly going home. Part of the alchemy of Walden

    was a result of Mekass fragmented style. Handheld shots of

    varying exposures and durations, refusing all of the norms of

    traditional filmmaking, help to create the mosaic and

    transformative nature of the film. In Reminiscences Mekas

    attempted to modify his approach.

    The basis of Walden is the single frame. There is a lot of density

    there. And when I was going to Lithuania I thought I would bring back

    19Marx, 2000, p. 22

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    material in the same style. But, somehow, when I was there, I just

    couldnt work in the style of Walden, there [sic]. The longer I stayed

    in Lithuania the more it changed me, and it pulled me into a completely

    different style. There were feelings, states, faces that I couldnt

    treat too abstractly. Certain realities can be presented in cinema only

    through the duration of images.20

    The face in particular that Mekas seems most interested in

    scrutinizing in duration is that of his mother, Elzbieta. For

    instance in the scenes of her cooking on the outdoor stove,

    Mekass usual rapid fire cutting is slowed to a more

    contemplative pace. Using a tripod to film, Mekas even enters

    the scene himself. One senses his desire to create a fixed

    lasting record of this rare moment between mother and son. What

    is also being recorded in this moment is Mekass past. His

    mother still cooks in the traditional way with the same

    primitive tools she used when Mekas was a boy. Its one of the

    genuine moments in the film where Mekas has magically caught

    time suspended.

    When looking at the film overall, however, the great

    stylistic shift that Mekas indicates is not as pronounced as he

    seems to think. Some of this is due to technical issues Mekas

    had while filming. The untested Bolex he took with him was

    incapable of maintaining a constant film speed or consistent

    exposures. Thus much of the footage seems characteristic of

    20Mekas, 1978, p. 194

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    Mekass previous disregard for the norms of filmmaking. Mekas,

    with his typical aplomb, decided to acceptthe cameras faults

    and incorporate them as part of the stylistics of the film.21

    This must have influenced the very structure of the film, for

    the middle section (where all the Lithuanian scenes take place)

    is entitled 100 Glimpses of Lithuania August 1971 (however, in

    fact, there are only 91). Glimpses being the key word.

    The images in this section of the film are of increased speed, the

    editing is choppy, the camera handheld; the lighting intensity, focus

    and camera angle vary wildly. The overall effect is one of euphoria,

    urgency, confusion and fragmentation ....22

    The fragment is essential to Mekass cinema. Even when he

    consciously attempts to avoid its use, he seemingly cannot

    escape it. Much like, one could say, the fragmentation and loss

    of a life lived in exile.23 Sitney suggests that the fragmented

    pieces of film which make up Mekass work act as glimpses of

    the world and triggers to memory.24 In Reminiscences he is still

    trying to remember. ...the truth is, I didnt see the real life

    there. I was always looking for what was left of the memories of

    what was, what has been long ago. I missed the reality of today,

    or I saw it through a veil.25 Much of what he films in

    21Mekas, 1978, p. 195

    22Jon Davies, Experimental Exilic Documentaries, 2003, Kersplebedeb,

    www.kersplebedeb.com/mystuff/video/review/exile.html, Accessed December 15, 2010.23

    Ibid.24

    Sitney, 2008, p. 9725

    Mekas, 1978, p. 196

    http://www.kersplebedeb.com/mystuff/video/review/exile.htmlhttp://www.kersplebedeb.com/mystuff/video/review/exile.htmlhttp://www.kersplebedeb.com/mystuff/video/review/exile.html
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    Lithuania is play acting. Whether it is an older brother

    pretending to whip Mekas as he pulls a cart, or the brothers

    picking up scythes, long since abandoned for the automated

    reaper, to cut the crops like they once did a lifetime ago, or

    lining all of the brothers and sisters up against the wall to

    record their height, as if they were still growing children, his

    Lithuania is just as much a fantasy world as his New York.

    Naturally, in the 100 Glimpses section of the film Mekas

    celebrates nature with a pastoralists zeal. The taste of fresh

    water from the family well, the smell of fresh hay with which

    one makes their bed, the sight of full grown tress which were

    only seedlings the last time Mekas was home, all of these

    pastoral elements are given righteous homage. However, the film

    is not dedicated solely to these things. The trip to Lithuania,

    the whole raison dtre for the film, is only one section of it.

    Granted it is the longest section, but its real power is only

    ascertained by its placement between the two other parts of the

    film, the early 1950s footage of New York in section one and

    the trip to Vienna to visit Peter Kubelka, made directly after

    Mekass trip to Lithuania, which is the focus of section three.

    Again we are reminded of Marxs contention that true pastoral

    works are much more than mere hymns to the bucolic joys of life.

    It the exploration of the impossibility of recapturing the past

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    glories of the Golden Age (and every pastoralist has his or her

    own version of that) which is an essential part of their design.

    Mekas may be incapable of recapturing the past, but there

    is no forgetting it despite his own occasional protestations to

    the contrary. That early fall in 1957 or 58 we went to the

    Catskills, Mekas tells us at the beginning of Reminiscences,

    and we see black and white images of Adolfas and another

    companion traipsing through a wooded pathway. The autumn

    landscape seems to act as a balm for Mekas as he confesses that

    in that moment he was temporarily able to forget the last ten

    years of war, of hunger, of Brooklyn. For the first time he

    tells us he was even able to forget his home. Once again, as in

    Walden, we are assured of something which does not quite ring

    true. How are we to believe that Mekas would be capable of

    forgetting his past in a location which clearly resembles the

    natural world of that past? Also there is a double irony to his

    confession as the very scenes we are watching were shot some

    thirteen years before the recorded narration to which we are

    listening. We are seeing the past at the very moment Mekas

    claims to be forgetting it. What we see in Mekas is not

    forgetting but recreating. As Marcel Proust sat in his cork

    lined room and page after page, detail by detail, created

    Combray to stand in for the Illiers of his childhood, Mekas has

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    taken all of these self described fragments of Paradise26,

    whether they be of young Bibbe Hansen frolicking in Central Park

    or the Mekas brothers playing farmer on their first trip home in

    twenty-five years, and created a fictional stand-in for the Eden

    he was so unduly cast out.

    Go West, his uncle had told him. See the world and then

    come back. The lesson of Jonas Mekass life and the thematic

    obsession of his entire filmic output has been that there is no

    coming back. It is in the third and final section of

    Reminiscences that we see Mekas coming to grips with this

    reality and his conscious efforts to make meaning out of his

    life in the present.

    At the end of The Dispossessed Tityrus urges Meliboeus to

    delay his journey into exile and to sleep here as my guest for

    this one night, with green leaves for you bed.27 As Marx

    comments, it is hardly that satisfying of a resolution. It may

    succeed aesthetically, but it must have offered little comfort

    to those real life victims of the ravaged countryside on whom

    Virgil based his story.28 Virgil must have been well aware of

    the dark undercurrent that still remained unresolved at the end

    of his poem.

    26A phrase he uses in a later diary film, Paradise Not Yet Lost a/k/a Oonas Third Year (1979)

    27Virgil, as cited in Marx, 2000, p. 30

    28Marx, 2000, pp. 30-1

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    Is Mekass conclusion of Reminiscences any more satisfying

    than Virgils? Yes and no. The final section is a collection of

    ebullient images of Mekas and four of his artistic/intellectual

    friends as they converge in Vienna for a cultural holiday. The

    friends visit Wittgensteins home, tour a monastery, inspect a

    grand library, and indulge in the basic pleasures of life (food,

    drink, song). Amongst all this social revelry Mekas seems to

    find peace. He tells us in the voice over, I begin to believe

    again in the indestructibility of the human spirit. It is

    important to understand that the friends on this trip, Kubleka,

    Hermann Nitsch, Annette Michelson and Ken Jacobs are all

    artistic compatriots of Mekass as well as friends. The two

    categories are actually impossible to separate in Mekass life.

    The resolution Mekas seeks for the loneliness of the exile is

    found within the artistic community of the underground cinema.

    He and Adolfas did not make it to Vienna back in 1942, but here

    he is now in 1971 surrounded by some of the great minds of the

    avant-garde cinema. This importance placed on art and on

    filmmaking is explored throughout Walden as well. In that film

    Mekas combines his pastoral scenes with an equal number

    depicting the rise of the New American cinema, of which he was

    at the forefront, and of course at times he is able to combine

    the two as is seen in the extended sequence where Mekas visits

    Stan Brakhage at his home in Colorado. So, on the surface,

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    Reminiscences finds the same kind of triumphal tone that many of

    the classic pastoral romances contained. Mekas at play with his

    friends in Vienna seems somewhat equivalent to the familial

    happiness shared by the characters at the end of Shakespeares

    As You Like It or The Tempest. However, the joyful tone is not

    sustained. At the very end of the film Mekas and company are

    returning to Vienna by train. Smoke from a nearby fire can be

    seen in the sky. They learn that a fruit market is burning down;

    the most beautiful in the city says Kubleka. He then claims the

    city set fire to it intentionally in order to make way for a new

    modernized market. We only see the smoke from the train so the

    claim can for us appears to have little veracity, but we are

    left unsure as to how Mekas wants us to interpret it. Regardless

    of the facts, the image of an old fruit market in flames, which,

    one imagines, was selling the kind of produce that might have

    come from a farm very much like the one Mekas grew up on, leaves

    the viewer with an uneasy feeling. We cannot help but now view

    his respite in Vienna as little more than temporary, similar to

    the bittersweet one Meliboeus enjoys at the end of Virgils

    eclogue.

    In Reel 4 of Walden during the bucolic episode in Colorado

    with the family of Stan Brakhage, a very curious moment occurs.

    Shots of little rabbit pellets in the snow are accompanied with

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    an enthusiastic inter-tile which reads simply: I FIND RABBIT

    SHIT! To an uninitiated audience in 1969, the relevance of this

    moment would have been completely missed. Only to those who saw

    Lost Lost Lost seven years later would the reference begin to

    make sense. During a section of that film sub-titled Rabbitshit

    Haikus (comprised of footage Mekas had shot in Vermont during

    the winter of 62) Mekas tells a story.

    Do you know the story of the man who could not live anymore without

    knowing whats at the end of the road, and what he found there when he

    reached it? He found a pile, a small pile of rabbit shit, at the end of

    the road. And back home he went. And when people used to ask him, Hey

    where does this road lead to? He used to answer: Nowhere, the road

    leads nowhere, and there is nothing but a pile of rabbit shit at the

    end of the road. So he told them. But nobody believed him.29

    Is Mekas directing this cautionary tale at himself? It would

    seem to be a warning to those who grow up dreaming that life

    will be better in some faraway place. According to his own words

    though, Mekas was never such an ambitious dreamer.

    No no no

    I never sleep well.

    Ill never sleep well.

    Because I never wanted to leave my home.

    Because I never wanted to be here.30

    29Transcript from Sitney, 2008, p. 94.

    30From Mekass diary dated February 15, 1948, originally published in I Had Nowhere to Go. (New York: Black

    Thistle Press, 1991) cited in Chodorov and Lebrat, 2009, p.54

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    The story must have a crucial importance for Mekas as a version

    of it, virtually word for word with the one in Lost, appears in

    a journal entry of his dated August 1947.31 Perhaps it is best

    read as a lament for those foolish enough to believe there is

    somewhere else other than home. Nothing is at the end of the

    road much travelled; the journey has no destination. Of course

    to find an assured rebuttal to this bleak assessment one only

    needs to look at the films themselves. Mekass films are

    abundant with beauty in all its forms. Whether it is the

    breathtaking time lapse sequence on the shore of Cassis or when

    Mekas captures the sunrise over Manhattan and the Harlem River,

    or simply a quiet field just before sunset on Timothy Learys

    Millbrook Estate, surely one must think that the journey was

    worth something after all.

    A great poet not only asserts but exemplifies the possibility of

    harmony. When he assimilates new and seemingly artificial facts into

    the texture of a poem he provides an example for all men. What he

    achieves in art they can achieve in life.32

    The great challenge of Mekass life and his art, which for

    him are one in the same thing, is to create harmony out of the

    discord that has been his life in exile. Using the poetic tools

    of his Bolex and a flatbed editing table, Mekas has attempted to

    immortalize the life he was forced to leave while finding and

    31Mekas, 1991, cited in Chodorov and Lebrat, 2009, p. 104

    32Mark, 2000, p. 242

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    celebrating the beauty in the life he actually lives, wherever

    and whenever it happens to appear. Like all great pastoralist he

    has shown how the past can only ever be fitfully and

    artificially bridged with the humble tools of the poet.

    Nevertheless that Eden, or Arcadia or Walden, or Semenskai,

    whatever its name might be, still exists not in natural facts

    or in social institutions or in anything out there, but in

    consciousness. It is a product of imaginative perception, of the

    analogy perceiving, metaphor-making, mythopoeic power of the

    human mind. 33

    Word Count: 5,138

    33Marx, 2000, p. 264

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    Davies, Jon. "Experimental Exilic Documentaries ." 2003 . Kersplebedeb. Accessed 15 December 2010

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    Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Nature . London : Penguin Books , 2008 .

    James, David E. To Free the Cinema: Jonas Mekas & The New York Underground. Ed. David E. James.

    Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992.

    MacDonald, Scott. The Garden in the Machine . Berkeley : University of California Press, 2001.

    Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden . New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

    Mekas, Jonas. "The Diary Film (A Lecture on Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania)." Avant Garde

    Film: A Reader Theory and Criticism. Ed. P. Adams Sitney. New York: New York University Press, 1978.

    190-98.

    Sitney, P. Adams. Eyes Upside Down: Visionary Filmmakers and the Heritage of Emerson. New York :

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    . Film Culture Reader . Ed. P. Adams Sitney. New York : Cooper Sqaure , 2000.

    . Visionary Film: The American Avant Garde. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979.

    Thoreau, Henry David. Walden . London : Everyman's Library , 1992.