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The documentary cinema platform Ours tomorrow offers its subscribers the film Lost lost lost by Jonas Mekas. A film diary that retraces the Lithuanian artist’s first years in New York.
Between nostalgia and humor
Lithuanian artist who took refuge in the United States after the Second World War, Jonas Mekas never stopped filming, for a few minutes a day, his life in a strange and unknown city, New York. It is these images, taken with the regularity of a diarist, that his film Lost lost lost gives us to see. Thus unfolds a long documentary of three hours, sequenced in six equal parts which account with distance and nostalgia for the progressive integration of the emigrant.
If the first part is borrowed from the nostalgia and pain of exile, filming with particular acuity the Lithuanian community of New York, the following are lighter and give a large place to humor. If the director, often, seeks his place, he seems, from this film, to find it, thanks to another community, that of the artists of the counter-culture.
New York as main character
The autobiographical journey that we follow leads us indeed to Dali, but also Allen Ginsberg or Robert Frank. We are thus witnessing privileged rehearsals of the Living theatrewhich Jonas Mekas will shoot in 1964 The Brig. This interference in the cultural life of New York invites us to consider Lost lost lost as much as a hymn to the Big Apple as a diary, the path of the filmmaker gradually joining that of the city that never sleeps.
This experimental film, which shows off the modesty of its resources, alternates between silent and talking images, black and white and color. This change of universe is done without solution of continuity, with the simplicity of the means at hand. The voice-over commenting on certain images gives pride of place to the anaphora, a figure of wandering, when the music gives a large place to compositions by exiles, such as those written by Chopin in Paris.
Jonas Mekas, who was Andy Warhol’s assistant on the famous Empiregives us here a sober and captivating testimony.
Lost lost lost brings together images shot between 1949 and 1963 and edited in 1976. It is visible on Tënk from July 29 to September 24.
Visual: movie poster
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Julia Wahl
Literature teacher for ten years, production manager for various dance or theater companies, cultural action and public relations manager… Everything that has to do with the promotion of culture and the development of its audiences fascinates me. . Because you can’t see a show without wanting to convey your emotions, I regularly chronicle cinema, theater and cultural policy for Tout la Culture.
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