Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania

On the day after he arrived in New York in 1949, Lithuanian Jonas Mekas spotted a Bolex camera in a shop window. Although it had never occurred to him to make movies, he purchased the camera on the spot: the euphoria of his arrival in America, together with the pain of exile, made him feel the need to express his feelings. The Bolex camera was the means at hand. The result is a life’s project: to record the passage of time in home movies. Mekas’ cinematic dairy adds up to over thirteen hours of edited material. It amounts to an elegy to remembrance and oblivion. Mekas’ technique is unique. After filming (often years later), Mekas adds a narrative, recalling those times, always experienced and filmed in the past. Each image is thus transformed into a fragment of memory. In 1971 Mekas returned to Lithuania after 25 years. This film, consisting of two parts – the United States in 1950 and Lithuania in 1971 - is the record of his reunion with relatives and his childhood village, with the rivers of his youth, the flowers, the roads – the colors of his native land. REMINISCENCES OF A JOURNEY TO LITHUANIA - like the rest of Jonas Mekas’ project - stands as a response to the statement by Elias Canetti that humankind will only be helpless when it no longer possesses experience or memory. Mekas is the great documentarian of memory. João Moreira Salles