Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania

Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania

85 Minutes

Jonas Mekas’ Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania doesn’t seem like much at first, a spattering of hazy home movies flickering in dull colors, sometimes sped up, sometimes manipulated, always somewhat out of context. These are other people’s memories and to see them on screen is to feel a little confused, if not uncomfortable. Yet for Mekas, who’s been creating experimental film since the early ’50s, the everyday is a jumping-off point for bigger things, and the power of Reminiscences lies mostly in what is left unsaid, the way it omits the real story and traps these memories within a pressing vacuum of negative space.

The film begins in 1951 with Mekas in exile, capturing his surrounding with a newly brought Bolex camera. In 1944, he and his brother had left home for Vienna, intending to start their university studies. Instead they ended up in a Nazi labor camp, a derailing that led them a displaced persons facility after the war and eventually to the United States. These scenes are hazy and dull-toned, a defect of the camera that Mekas utilizes, distancing the viewer, pressing these memories forcefully into the past, as he mingles with neighbors and attends communal gatherings with other DPs, as they call themselves.

In a second section we see the two brothers return home in 1971 to the family farm, which has now been enveloped as part of a socialist collective. This detail hints at the specter of post-war Soviet rule, presumably the cause for their years of exile, although the specifics of this are never brought up. Finally, at the suggestion of a friend, they make the long-delayed trip to Vienna, which comprises a third section. All of this is captured on non-professional equipment, grainy and full of wobbly movement, with Mekas’s thoughts on the footage usually functioning as the only audio.

The issue of Mekas’s long stretch away from home is barely discussed, but hovers significantly over these events. It’s one of the first things he mentions, recalling in a measured, weary voice-over his feelings when, surrounded by new friends on a trip to the Catskills, he briefly forgets his homesickness. The definition of home is a concern here, an appropriate topic for a man who can claim equally to have two, but other issues loom larger, namely the unspoken gulfs that separate these sections of exile and homecoming.

Alain Resnais’ Night and Fog posits that the Holocaust can never really be summed up or accurately represented – as an atrocity its bounds are simply too huge to be encompassed by any sort of narrative. Mekas takes on this inapproachability by cutting out the issue entirely, letting us judge its size by the space it leaves behind. He does the same for the Soviet occupation of his country, a choice which leaves the second two sections, in which the director watches his elderly mother cook and revisits the fields he worked as a child, as tiny idylls floating in a sea of misfortune. Through this sly misdirection, Mekas’s status as a displaced person slowly comes into focus.

Reminiscences represents the home movie recontexualized; scenes of ordinary, everyday action that ultimately suggest what has been lost, not only for the director but those victims who never got to have a homecoming. It’s a big film hiding inside of a small one, as the humdrum comfort of these peaceful scenes, singing songs and milking cows, clashes with the unspoken reality of time spent away.

by Jesse Cataldo

A new 35mm preservation print will screen at Anthology Film Archives in New York from 08/7-08/13.