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. 

the brig (d. mekas, judith malina, w. kenneth h brown)

The Brig is a film as claustrophobic as its setting. A military prison the size of a large postage stamp where ten prisoners and their guards cohabit. The prisoners are reduced to numbers and the guards have no qualms in dishing out corporal punishment, part of a process of breaking the prisoners down into malleable subservients, suitable to be reintegrated into the US marines. The film feels as though it must have influenced Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, but it also feels astonishingly balletic, as though it has been choreographed by Pina Bausch. The ten prisoners and as many guards move around the space with a rhythmic ferocity which contains a perverse beauty.

The Brig is a slightly disingenuous film, which was awarded the prize for best documentary at Venice, but is actually a brilliantly filmed account of a stage play by the Living Theatre, originally directed by Judith Malina. Mekas filmed the play during a special performance staged for his camera. Many have commented at the brilliance of the movie in capturing the cruelties of a military penal system and in this it is unflinching, but clearly credit here should go to Malina, the writer, Kenneth H. Brown and the actors themselves. However, what has made this such an iconic film and marks it apart from other filmed versions of stage plays, is the brilliance of the composition and the camera work. The camera is right in there, and we experience the play in a way the theatre audience never could. At one point the cameraman’s shadow appears on a wall. Whether this was deliberate or not, it is testament to its sly infiltration, and the brilliance of the filmed version of a devastating play.