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Just Like A Shadow
Film Stills and Text By Jonas Mekas
As an exile, as a displaced person, I felt that I had
lost so much, my country, my family, even my early written diaries, ten
years of it, that I developed a need to try to retain everything I was
passing through, y means of my Bolex camera. It became an obsession, a
passion, a sickness. So now I have these images to cling to... It's all
ridiculous, I think. Because what I have, after all, is already fading, it's
all just like a shadow of the real reality which I do not really understand.
When you go through what I went through, the wars, occupations, genocides,
forced labor camps, displaced person camps, and lying in a looming potato
field - I'll never forget the whiteness of the blossoms - my face down to
earth, after jumping out the window, while German soldiers held my father
against the wall, gun in his back - then you don't understand human beings
anymore. I have never understood them since then, and I just film, record
everything, with no judgment, what I see. Not exactly "everything", only the
brief moments that I feel like filming. And what are those moments, what
makes me choose those moments? I don't know. It's my whole past memory that
makes me choose the moments that I film.
I usually film my friends, or my family. As it happened
all the people who played a central role in the life of arts in New York,
during those decades, they were all my friends. And, of course, most of them
were not yet famous at all. We were all involved in the same thing. We were
like a large family. We knew each other, we helped each other. And of
course, sometimes we argued. It was an incredible period. Why did I film it
all? I have no real answer. I think I did it because I was a very shy
person. My camera allowed me to participate in the life that took place
around me. My film diaries are not like the diaries of Anaïs
Nin. Anaïs, whom I knew, she agonized about her psychological adventures. In
my case, the opposite, whatever that opposite may be. My Bolex protected me
while at the same time giving me a peek and a focus on what was happening
around me. Still, at the very end, I don't think my film diaries are about
the others or what I saw: It's all about myself, conversations with my self. |
