One bit of footage shows issues of Film Culture magazine, which Mekas started in 1954 with his brother Adolfas, rolling from a printing press. Several of Mekas’s segments show the buzz of activity at the Film-Makers’ Cooperative, which he co-founded in 1961 to distribute little-known movies. Mekas was also the first full-time film critic for The Village Voice and helped found Anthology Film Archives, in addition to directing films including “Guns of the Trees,” a feature about the lives of two New York City couples, and “Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania,” about his eventual return.
A diary segment from the early 1990s shows Allen Ginsberg at a dinner party at the Manhattan loft where Mekas lived for decades before moving to Brooklyn. Ginsberg rhythmically taps a table as he intones: “I’m alone in the sky / Where there’s nothing to lose / The sun’s not eternal / That’s why there’s the blues.”
In another segment, Mekas theorizes that Andy Warhol used a camera to mask his withdrawn nature. “A shy person is not able to connect 100 percent,” Mekas says gazing into his own lens, adding that a camera is then “the chain that keeps you attached to the people around you.”
Davison said that the diarylike segments, in which Mekas spoke to the camera and shot footage as he walked around New York, are among the most revealing parts of his archive because “he was so open and vulnerable” in them.
“It’s almost like no one knew him as well as the camera knew him,” she said.
In one moment of openness, Mekas recalls that he and his brother were “full of doubts about civilization” by the time they got to the United States. “We loved you, world, but you did lousy things to us,” he says. Elsewhere in the film, he speaks about the first time he did “not feel alone in America.” Referring to Lithuania, he adds: “There was a moment when I forgot my home.”
In a 1990 segment, Mekas speaks about his days as a “displaced person” as he walks through the Lower East Side of Manhattan, noting that he had lived there and across the East River in Williamsburg after arriving in New York.
“There is a point somewhere where you don’t know anymore where your home really is,” Mekas says, turning the camera toward the river. “I think my real home is cinema.”
