Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania

Film work

Alternative titleErinnerungen an eine Reise nach Litauen

Series titleAsynchron. Dokumentar- und Experimentalfilme zum Holocaust ( )

DirectorJonas Mekas → show biography
BiographyBorn in Seminiskiai, Lithuania in 1922, Jonas Mekas today lives and works in New York. The theft of the typewriter, with which Jonas Mekas – like his brother Adolfas an active member of the resistance – wrote illegal documents, made the siblings emigrate to Vienna, in fear of being discovered. In the same year the were apprehended and placed inside a German prison camp. An illegal hideout in Schleswig-Holstein and a DP-camp during the post-war period were the further stages of their oddysee. Until 1949, Jonas Mekas remains in Germany, a.o. Studying Philosophy in Mainz. In 1949 he emigrates to New York. Early documentary films on Brooklyn are produced in the beginning of the 50's. In 1955 he founds the magazine Film Culture, which becomes the mouthpiece of the American film Avant-garde. In 1960 he is involved in the foundation of the New American Cinema Group and in 1962 he proclaims the New York Film-Maker's Cooperative. In 1970 he and P. Adams Sitney found the Anthology Film Archive in New York. Today, Jonas Mekas is still active internationally as head of the archive, as well as filmmaker, writer and lecturer at American and European Universities. His work in the Anthology Film Archives, his films and his weekly column in the magazine The Village Voice have made him one of the most prominent representative of independent cinema in the USA and all around the world. “The great achievement of the American Avant-garde film is the internalization of the film image: The emergence of a group of films, whose technique did not aim at using the film image for the objective representation of external events, but for the investigation of appearances of the inner shapes and visions of the filmmakers. Jonas Mekas is possibly best known as the big advocate of American Avant-garde cinema. Over decades, his work as a writer and organizer has made many aware of the accomplishments of this extraordinary cinematographic movement, who would not have gotten to know these films otherwise. But he is also a filmmaker himself, and in fact he ranges among the best artists of the movement he stands up for.“ (Fred Camper) For further information on Jonas Mekas. visit http://jonasmekasfilms.com/diary/

CountryUSA

Year1971

LanguageEnglish

Forum participation year1972

Forumskatalog PDFPDF

Synopsis

In 1971 Jonas and Adolfas Mekas were invited to the Film Festival Moskau by the Sowjet Ministry of Culture and took the opportunity to visit their family in Brisen in Lithuania. With support of the NDR (a German public television station) they shot a film about their journey and the past. The film begins in New York, the city in which they live today, and shows the places where they spent their first years after the migration. The second part was shot in Lithuania. Here they meet family and friends and encounter the by now transformed world of their childhood and adolescence. Finally, the film leads to Vienna, where the brothers, who had been members of a resistance group, wanted to travel to on the run from the German occupation forces, and to Elmshorn, near Hamburg, where they ended up working as forced laborers in a camp until they managed to escape. An illegal hideout in Schleswig-Holstein was the next station, as well as a DP-camp, until their oddyssey finally ended in America in 1949.

Copies→ 16mm, original language version