Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania (1972) User Reviews

Dear Diary

[madsagittarian · 9/10 · 29 January 2003]

(Potential spoilers below.)

For preserving the history of independent, underground, experimental (insert your word here) cinema, Jonas Mekas remains one of the most important figures to the art. Because that it is his premier vocation, his own career as a filmmaker is secondary. His filming style -"diary cinema"- is necessitated by his life. Most of his filmography consists of works which are collections of the snippets of footage he has managed to shoot over the years.

REMINISCES... is a wonderful semi-autobiography using footage of Jonas and his brother Adolphus (who coincidentally, made a similar film at the same time) during their arrival in America in 1950, as well as valuable documentation of the Lithuanian American community during this period.

The brothers finally decide to journey home to see their mother for the first time in years. What unveils is a totally charming celebration of "the good life", as the Mekas family still adheres to their simple "old world" values of doing day-to-day things. By the same token, the film itself is totally charming in its simplicity-- for example, the soundtrack is very minimal, and unobtrusive.

The film ends with a fire in a Lithuanian city which they visit. This is a subtle reminder of the fact that they cannot completely go home again, except in the movies. Therefore their three-decade collection of footage is a moving preservation of their history.

Truly Inspirational

[jackbcd · 9/10 · 7 November 2021]

I am sitting here thinking of what this film did to make me so very drawn to it. Perhaps it gives enough time for you to think about what Jonas thinks of. Think about all the people you've met and all the places you've been, and where they are now. Think about all your past decisions, choices, and actions and how you might be different without them. This is a question I seldom think to myself and I think that is the reason why this feels special. It isn't made for you to be reflective of Jonas' life entirely, but rather your own. It gives you time to think of the aspects of life that are given to you from a different point of view and translate it to your own. It almost feels like a car ride driving past all your memories, good and bad, and just lets them pass on until the next ones come along.

Jonas does not loathe his past, he finds the happier memories amongst the sad, yet you can hear his pain in the way he speaks. Riding through his own recollections of running from the war, running for his life, and running away from the people he once called friends, all the joyful things he recalls from his childhood fade into the dreadful, and the way he manages to blend them together is why I was so drawn to this.

Artificial intrusions in life

[chaos-rampant · 29 July 2013]

This is too distanced to connect to me. Here's the gist. Mekas returns to his homeland of Lithuania after so long, visits his old mother and old friends from school. Some things have changed, others have stayed the same, the way it always is. He follows his old mother around trying to capture, from his end, an ordinary day: the sitting and walking, the work.

Primarily, the problem is that for Mekas the images are intimate and familiar, emotionally charged, had to be since he is revisiting childhood here. But this is conveyed in a casual, almost indifferent way, a New York artist's way which is what Mekas was at this point. We experience this all in the same desultory way, from a filmic distance.

We only see him once in the film before the camera, and that is a cold image where he simply feeds logs to a fire where his mother cooks pancakes. Maybe there's a Lithuanian element here that I'm not able to reach. So I don't get the deep experience of the return, I get a diaristic snapshot of Lithuanian life. I don't see the returning son here, only the formal filmmaker. It's cold, without embrace.

Mekas had a famous falling out with Cassavetes in the early days, for reasons of narrative form in Shadows. I can only imagine the warmth and ragged truth of the film Cassavetes, a Greek, would have made about his return to the place of childhood.

This is interestingly reflected in the film here. Mekas is returning with his camera, looking to capture a slice of remembered life and contrasts. What happens all through the film is that people in spite of his efforts awkwardly arrange themselves to be filmed: they sing around the camera, his cousin's family poses for a photo. The very presence of the artificial eye creates artifice, disrupts the living flow.

Cool tidbit: we see at one point Wittgenstein's house in Vienna, the one designed by him. It's an ugly, cold, square thing, fittingly for a logician. Austrians are thinkers, taxonomists in the big dance of things, and Mekas, if nothing else, wants to film outside the logical box. The film ends with images of Vienna in flames, a fruit market burning, because, Mekas muses, the city doesn't want it, it wants to clear room for something modern.

Essential watch for lithuanians

[xelacrypt · 10/10 · 15 January 2021]

Although for the foreign viewer this film can appear somewhat too personal and hence narrow in scope, I see Mekas capturing the emotion of coming home to the countryside and the general zeitgeist of Lithuania of the 70ies as he did with Williamsburg.It hgave me the same emotion as seeing some marbling from overripe berries from past summers at the bottom of an old woven basket. Uogos uogos uogos

the gratest movie created about Lithuania

[pauleliux · 7 November 2002]

I have seen a few movies about lithuania, but i think this one is the best. Before watching this film, I thought it would be boring and not interesting, but I was very suprised. The director of this film knows how to do his work and does it excelent. So everyone, who has this movie, is a lucky person :) thank you for your consideration!

Early 'Film Diary'

[Tornado_Sam · 12 July 2020]

While Lithuanian filmmaker Jonas Mekas is known by many as the 'godfather of American avant-garde cinema', much of his work was focused on a particular, independent genre: the film diary. Throughout the filmmaker's lengthy career, most of his feature-length movies were made in this style: a collection of memories presented nostalgically through the eyes of Mekas himself, reminiscing about the things that are no more. Far from normal documentaries, these films show life as it really was, being made entirely from amateur home movie footage, raw and unedited in any drastic way. It paints a great picture of life as it once was, and just by watching them the viewer appreciates seeing a former society, and enjoys the small things about their own life much more.

"Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania", unlike later ones, is focused on a more single topic: the director's return to his home country Lithuania years and years after immigrating to the United States. The hour and eighteen minute film is focused entirely on showing the characteristics of a rural lifestyle in the Lithuanian countryside, and does so in an amazingly interesting way. For being called the 'godfather of American avant-garde cinema', the film is relatively straightforward in presenting its documentations. While the visual aspect is entirely home movie footage (no doubt Kodachrome), the manner in which it becomes a story is the narration by Mekas, which gives the viewer insight as to the significance of the scenes. Albeit muffled and hard to understand at times, the anecdotes, comments, etc. shared by the filmmaker are interesting to hear and give the film more cohesion. The addition of music (such as folk tunes) to the images further brings it all together and helps give the film that feeling of nostalgia.

Some may not care for the camerawork in the film, which is admittedly terrible from a technical point of view. Yet, this does give the film a certain charm: regardless of what the casual viewer may think, this is how home movies were shot, focused on capturing everything and not on good camerawork. The jumpiness and jittery quality of the images may be sort of hard on the eyes for some people, but it an honest depiction of how amateur films were once shot. As a whole, a great picture of how life once was, and it gives the viewer a near feeling of shame on how the values and lifestyles of then are carelessly discarded today. Maybe the quality of life was much greater then?