reminiscences of a journey to lithuania (d.jonas mekas)

Mr Amato urged me to accompany him to watch a film by Mekas, a name I have often come across without ever sitting down to watch a film of his. The film takes places in three sections. Mekas in New York, post war, seeking to come to terms with exile. Mekas’ return voyage in 1971 to Lithuania. And, as a coda, a short section on the visit to Vienna which followed the Lithuania trip.

The filmmaking style is informal, homemade. Mekas went everywhere with his camera and filmed everything. His elderly mother, a trip to the Catskills, the dance after the meeting of the collectivist farm. In many ways it seems prophetic of the current era, where everyone documents everything, and lives are captured and mapped out as they are lived. Or at least, a curated version of a life. The images are grainy, beautiful, jagged. It is an assemblage, an act of editing, pulling together the loose strings of the journey to form a tapestry. It is also a cine pobre, stepsister to the Poor Theatre or Arte Povera. Mekas reveals you don’t need a team and lights and gaffers to be a filmmaker, and as such the film reveals how cinema is capable of becoming an egalitarian art form. The other side of that coin is one no-one foresaw in 1972: everyone in the whole wide world is a filmmaker now. What Mekas reveals in the film is the need to both edit and curate. Images acquire another kind of weight/ humour/ magic, when juxtaposed with other images. There’s a difference between a visual information soup and a visual poem. 

frost (w&d sharunas bartas, w anna cohen-yanay)

I’d never heard of Bartas. My friend, Flamia, who knows a thing or two, when we met with him in 36 after the screening, said that he’d seen four or five films of the Lithuanian director. It’s curious the way that even prominent European directors with powerful international reputations remain ‘undiscovered’ in the UK. In a week that has seen a homicide, presumably the result of Russian military aggression, on British shores, Bartas’ film ought to be compulsory viewing. That it isn’t is no less surprising than to see the pictures of the House of Commons where a handful of MPs were present to listen to a statement on the murder of Dawn Sturgess. The insularity of the UK has only deepened with the advent of Brexit, and will continue to do so, both politically and culturally. 

The narrative of Frost is straightforward. Two young Lithuanians, Inga and Roka, agree to drive a truck containing humanitarian aid to Ukraine. They have no idea what they’re getting themselves into. It’s a road movie to the furthest edges of Europe, to a bloody, fatal frontier where Putin’s wars are being waged. The set-up is perfunctory, even simplistic, as Roka is persuaded to take on the trip, and he persuades Inga to go with him. We don’t really know what their relationship is; they would appear to be a couple but they might just be friends. There’s a growing realisation that they’re out of their depth. They reach the Ukraine and hang out with some journalists. The war is out there, but for the time being they’re using the trip to work out their own personal psycho-drama. Then, as they approach the Crimean border, things start to become more and more edgy. 

Bartas glories in the road movie. Each step of the journey is a step closer to the characters’ destiny. There’s no need to rush: the pace is stately. They’re not driving a BMW, they’re driving a transit van. The scenery, increasingly wintery, goes by in a succession of blurred images. The viewer is on the journey with the characters, going further and further towards some kind of edge. The tension is gradually ratcheted up until they arrive at the desolate border, where the buildings have been hollowed out and death lurks on the other side of the street. The film maintains an understated tone. At one point a convoy of armoured vehicles drive past, followed by a slightly ragged military column. Nothing terrible happens, there’s no shooting, no fighting, just the unmistakable evidence of the latent threat, which, the film makes clear, is a threat not merely to the protagonists, but to all of Europe. The possible implications are made clear. After Crimea, Lithuania could be next. And then who knows. This could seem like doom-mongering, were it not for the fact that the film so clearly captures the reality of what’s happening right now, at the edges of the European project. 

Not for the first time, the aesthetic power of a film is amplified by the urgency of its political content. Frost takes the viewer far further towards a kind of Euro-Apocalypse Now than any news report.