Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania (1972) YIFY - Download Movie TORRENT

Reviewed by chaos-rampant

Artificial intrusions in life

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.

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Reviewed by madsagittarian 9 / 10

Dear Diary

(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.

Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania

1972

Action / Documentary

Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania

1972

Action / Documentary

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Artificial intrusions in life

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