Issue 8: Winter 2011
A Foolish Genius: The Life and Work Of Adolfas Mekas
Philippe Dijon de Monteton
A great film should ideally do one of three things: It should either make you want to 1) run out, grab a camera and explore filmmaking yourself or 2) run out and do foolish things, or ultimately: 3) run out and fall in love, no matter the chances or cost. There are few films that can achieve all three effects at the same time through a rare ability to marry great filmic artistry, a unique talent for fun loving practical nonsense, and a profound love for life.
Hallelujah the Hills (1963) by Adolfas Mekas is one of these masterpieces, if not the only one. If one day the majority of people on this planet came to see the film and then decided to greet each other in the street not by saying "Hi" anymore but "Hallelujah" in homage to Adolfas' picture, this should come as no surprise: the film really is that good! Unfortunately though, Adolfas Mekas has not become the household name he deserves to be and even after his death in May 2011 his work is still awaiting discovery by a wider public.
One of the causes of this is that Adolfas has always somehow lived in the shadow of his more famous brother, Jonas, even though they grew up together and lived their first adventures in cinema like brothers in arms. They collaborated on many films, especially their earlier ones on which they were practically working in symbiosis. Adolfas would star in Jonas' first feature Guns of the Trees (1961) and Jonas in turn would assist his brother on Hallelujah the Hills a year later. Notwithstanding their close connection, Jonas gained more celebrity with his films and also because of his intense activity as a film critic and activist that would lead him to create internationally renowned structures for the exhibition, distribution and preservation of avant-garde film.
The fact that his brother Adolfas would lose attention at the same time as Jonas' reputation grew is a great pity, because he deserves an equally established place among the greats in the pantheon of immortal filmmakers, his films being the fruit of a truly original mind. His capacity to marry a highly inventive avant-garde (1) spirit to comedy and parody made him a unique figure in the landscape of American Cinema, making work which also had the potential for attracting audiences way beyond the experimental film circuit. It's a body of work that not only can stand on its own but which is in a way wonderfully congenial and complementary to Jonas' films. Both brothers would in fact share a unique sensibility for moments of paradise, but, unlike his brother, Adolfas was much more attuned to comedy and the ‘sublime in reverse', enabling ecstasy to come to us by means of humor and foolishness: ‘divine idiocy' as he used to call it. For these reasons, without wanting to diminish Jonas' invaluable contribution to cinema, it would have seemed more appropriate if the subject of fame had not been ‘Jonas Mekas' mostly by himself but rather the 'Mekas Brothers'.
1) A Tale of Two Brothers
"I will run it slowly so that you can see the ecstasy in our eyes fooling around in front of our first Bolex", says Jonas running the first sequence ever shot by the two brothers (2). The footage shows them, standing next to each other, cheerful and excited indeed: Adolfas is even raising his arms, as if he was celebrating their discovery of cinema and the Mekas films that were yet to come. Very moving images in hindsight, especially if you think about what the brothers had gone through before.
Adolfas and Jonas were born and raised in Semeniskiai, a quiet farming village in Lithuania (3). Jonas would show a gift for poetry from an early age and published his first collection of poems at 14. Adolfas, on the other hand, was more interested in theater (4). When the German army entered the country, they began to contribute to an anti-Nazi underground newspaper. However, when Jonas' hidden typewriter was stolen, they knew that their time had come and that the Nazis would soon catch up with them if they did not try to escape. Thus, with forged papers, the brothers left Lithuania on a train for Vienna where they intended to attend university. But the train was stopped and joined to another train with Russian and Polish prisoners, which was headed to a forced labour camp in Elmshorn, near Hamburg, Germany. They tried to escape to Denmark and ended up on a farm near Flensburg, where they hid until the end of the war. Afterwards, they lived in several displaced person camps, including Wiesbaden, Kassel, and Mainz, where the brothers enrolled at University. Jonas continued his writing activities, editing the camp newspaper and publishing a book of poems, Idylls of Semeniskiai, a major work of contemporary Lithuanian poetry, which Adolfas would later translate into English with great skill (5). A year later they moved to another DP camp in Schwäbisch Gmünd before eventually leaving for America (6). Finally, in October 1949, the brothers arrived in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Adolfas was 24 and his brother 27.
Alone in an unfamiliar city and confronted with the bitter realization that they would not be able to return to Lithuania, the brothers would nonetheless show an impressive ‘hunger' for film, right from the beginning: three days after they landed, they had already attended a screening of The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari (1919) and The Fall of the House of Usher (1928). A week later they borrowed money and bought their first camera. Earning their living with factory jobs (8), they read avidly about film and wrote scripts of their own which they submitted to Hollywood and renowned independent filmmakers like Flaherty - alas, with no success. They also made contact with Hans Richter at this time, then a teacher at City College, who quickly became one of their heroes and through whom they learnt to cherish Dadaism and the freedom to think and film whatever you please (9).
In retrospect, it is interesting to ask: what it was it about cinema that connected with Adolfas and Jonas so greatly then?
"Well, we came from the background of literature. And I, besides literature, had a background in the theater as an actor and director. So when we came to the States, we realized literature would have to go to sleep, that theater had to be put to sleep, so the natural progression was cinema, which did not require English. So that, I would say, is my understanding of how we came into the cinema. And of course we were fascinated.(10)" (Adolfas Mekas)
This interest had already been stirred when they were still in Germany:
"After the labor camps, in 1944-45, suddenly, after three or four years of being deprived of what's happening in the world, we got exposed to fantastic cinema, mostly French because we were in Germany in the French occupied section. And there it was, everything just opened up. When you saw [Cocteau's] Beauty and the Beast, this is the language of the future. And I think the early post-war cinema really captivated us and seduced us into cinema.(11)"
However, not long after their arrival in Brooklyn, in a bleakly ironic twist of fate, Adolfas got drafted, even though he had been in the country less than one year, without residency and was hardly able to speak English. Jonas, on the other hand, was not drafted because he was over 25, but he would recall this sad and absurd episode in his Reminiscences from a Journey to Lithuania (1972):
"My brother said he was a pacifist and that he hated war. So they drafted him into the army. And they took him back to Europe, back to older war memories. So he started eating leaves from the trees and they thought he was crazy. So they shipped him back to the states."
Back in NY, the brothers would soon become a vital part of the local film community. Jonas quickly began to organize his own programs of avant-gade film in 1953 and 1954. And the following year the brothers founded Film Culture, a critical film journal that championed the then presumptuous notion that cinema was a serious form of art, well before the study of film was deemed respectable by the academic world. In their hands Film Culture would soon become an important platform for avant-garde film with contributors like Andrew Sarris, Stan Brakhage, Richard Leacock, Rudolf Arnheim, Arlene Croce and Peter Bogdanovich.
Jonas Mekas (left) and Adolfas Mekas (centre) and Leonas Letas in the ‘Blue Room' in Mattenberg, Kassel, Germany.
"These two guys," said Pola Chapelle, Adolfas' wife. "I always told our son: ‘They came to this country with $10. They couldn't speak the language, and they started the first serious film journal in English. Not bad. (12) "
Finding themselves at the center of a bourgeoning film culture, the brothers became members of a group of filmmakers that essentially constituted, under Jonas' lead, the art film movement known as New American Cinema Group, which included Robert Frank, Alfred Leslie, Shirley Clarke and Gregory Markopoulos. This ‘self-help organization' for distribution and exhibition would pave the way for the creation of the New York Filmmakers Cooperative in 1962, the first artist-run distribution house for independent cinema, which Adolfas co-founded, and which quickly lead to the creation of similar groups based on the Coop model in San Francisco (Canyon Cinema) and London (The London Co-op) among others. Associated with the neo-Dadaist art movement Fluxus, Adolfas also took part (along with Yoko Ono) in the first Fluxus performance ever in 1961 (13).
However, ever since the first shot they made with their first Bolex, the brothers had themselves been experimenting with film, and it was only a matter of time before they would make the first true film of their own.
2) Guns of the Trees
The first major result of their adventure in cinema was Guns of the Trees, a bleak existentialist meditation in black and white, which Jonas directed. Adolfas' help and contribution proved to be substantial: "I assisted my brother Jonas in all stages of production, writing and editing. I also played one of the leading roles in the film.(14)" Given his background in theatre, it is not surprising that Adolfas ended up in front of the camera for Jonas' first feature. Following the lives of two couples, one black, one white, the film portrays the soul of the beat generation, as it were, in a somewhat gloomy, melancholy key. Adolfas plays the young Gregory who meets Frances, a beautiful but depressed young girl who is desperately trying to find some value in her life as she considers committing suicide. With his tall and well-dressed appearance and his elegant, intellectual features, Adolfas perfectly reflects the very earnest and deeply concerned posture of the film, which is certainly angst-ridden but also capable of catching brief glimpses of joy and poetry. Notwithstanding its imperfections, Guns of the Trees holds its own with other classics of the period like Pull my Daisy and Shadows; and it's really a shame that it has moved into the background of our collective memory of 60´s New American Cinema.
3) Hallelujah the Hills
Adolfas had already made two short films, Grand Street and Silent Journey (15), when he set out to direct his first solo feature effort on which Jonas would assist him. The film that came out as a result of this adventure, Hallelujah the Hills, is his masterpiece. Even if later works of his would often turn out less brilliantly than this one, they are always interesting because you can still see the ‘Hallelujah spirit' occasionally flickering through.
Made on a slim budget of $65 000 from concept to can (16), the film tells the story of Jack and Leo, two young ‘shlunks' in Vermont, that are courting the same girl, Vera, who is actually very different for each of them through an effort of wishful projection. Wandering without any real aim in the forests, they soon get confronted with the end of their dream: Vera has married the horrible Gideon! Unable to do anything about the rejection, they recall the past seven years of courtship a in a dazzling series of flashbacks and games.
Adolfas needs very few narrative elements to create a unique slapstick poem that seduces the viewer quickly with a continuous run of ideas, gags, and mishaps. A great deal of comic potential is already naturally inherent in the characters of Jack and Leo themselves. It's clear that the choice of brothers or friends who are very close is always very appealing (the ‘buddy movie factor') but it creates an even more endearing effect when they are bunch of fools who constantly get themselves into trouble - the fact that they are fools by nature puts them in line with a tradition of other comic duos like Laurel and Hardy or more numerous bands such as the Marx brothers. With this premise and a general upbeat rhythm to it, Hallelujah the Hills really is - notwithstanding a certain melancholic lyricism - a true ‘feel-good-movie'.
Rich in quotes from and puns on other classic movies, this black-and-white comedy is also imbued with a profound love for the history of cinema. This is in fact how Adolfas himself once summarized the film: "It's my tribute, my hat off, to all the filmmakers that have come before me and who taught me to love movies. I don't use the word ‘film', I use the word ‘movies'. This ever-startling thing that never stops surprising us.(17)"
And it certainly does not stop doing so in Adolfas' ‘movie'. For even as he ‘plays' with other films by quoting them, cinema in Adolfas' hands is always ‘alive' and continuing to surprise us. This celebration of cinema works so well perhaps because it is linked to or superimposed on the celebration of something else throughout the film: call it the celebration of friendship, of youth, of life, here and now. This spirit of celebration is all the more powerful and precious, as it seems to contrast with an underlying melancholy mood. And it is the tension between the two that is very much at the source of the unique poetry of the film and its continuing appeal.
But before going deeper, let's have a closer look at how the plot elements are related to each other and what we know or don't know about our two anti-heroes.
Narrative Anarchy
Generally, the narrative structure is non-linear and, to a great extent, fragmentary, with the chronology of events being highly indeterminate. Nonetheless, it is possible to discern bits of an overall structure that moves between the present, in the forest, and flashbacks of the past, even if the chronological order of these past events remains a mystery:
Jack and Leo, a duo of fun-loving and fairly childish youngsters (wonderfully played by Peter Beard and Marty Greenbaum), spend a lot of time in the woods. Even though they sometimes act as if they were on a scout or military expedition, we know nothing about their actual occupation or profession, if they have one. In the first scene after the credits, they go to Vera's house only to find her father telling them that she's already married to Gideon, a horrible fellow they hate (and who is interpreted by 'Emsh', or rather Ed Emshwiller (18), the cameraman). Shocked by these announcements, the guys drop by at a liquor store in the evening and try to get rid of the dog that was initially intended as a present for Vera. Then, during the day, as he is carrying some firewood, Jack meditates: "It's the seventh winter now, tomorrow is Christmas." In the subsequent scene, Jack is arriving at Vera's place with the wood, slightly drunk. But already here we cannot really know if it's a continuation of the ‘seventh winter' or already a flashback.
In the next scene we are back in the forest, with the boys' games and mishaps: they are shooting a Gideon-mirage who is dressed up as an evil pirate, before Leo walks up to the camera saying "I remember" and thus opening up his flashback memories with Vera. The film thus apparently seems to settle for a structure that alternates between the present in the forest and the past with Vera, where the flashbacks of Jack's courtship take place in the winter and Leo's in the summer respectively.
Each of the two suitors also has one scene in which he proposes to Vera but gets asked to wait until the next Thanksgiving. And even if it's true that Jack and Leo's paths generally never cross in the flash-back sequences, they do so once exceptionally for Thanksgiving. For that's when we find them incidentally together at Vera's house for supper and an after-dinner competition between the suitors which Jack eventually wins. Jack's winter courtship memories continue straightaway, leading up to a vision of Vera's showing him running naked through knee-high snow.
In the meantime, on the forest-track the boys have moved into a hunting cabin for the night.
Then, after an extended chapter dedicated to Leo's courtship, the next flashback shows Jack square-dancing with Vera at a local folk party with live music. This wonderful sequence has a strong ‘documentary' feel to it. It really seems to cover an event that is typical of the customs of the Vermont region where it was shot (19).
The alternation between past and present continues, and in the flashback sequences there is one scene for each, where the passage of the seven years is summarized in a montage of very brief shots, all generally identical in framing and position, alternated with inter-titles stating: '1st Summer', '2nd Summer', '3rd summer' etc. or '1st Winter', '2nd Winter', '3rd Winter etc. In each of these sequences it is Jack or Leo, not Vera, that pulls away, as it were, in so far as both try to make excuses for having to leave for ever longer periods of time for fairly absurd reasons: "I have to dig bones in Mozambique", Jack argues for instance.
Leaning against a tree in the forest, Leo's statement "I haven‘t seen a movie in ten days" kicks off a couple of sequences that are not flashbacks but fantasies in the form of a film-within-a-film. First the guys watch ‘Leo's Film' of his dreamtime with Vera and then Jack's version. Whereas Leo's film essentially depicts an intimate La Notte-like stroll in a morning field with Vera, Jack tries to kiss her in an interior setting but he ultimately gets interrupted and kicked out by Gideon who Vera then gives herself to with at least equal enthusiasm.
Shortly afterwards, they have vision of many beautiful and friendly girls suspended in a tree and dancing on a rock. They try to catch them but fail. Still, it seems that they can now ‘get over' Vera and they prepare to leave in their jeep. As they drive off, however, the film cuts to two convicts on the run, played by Jerome Hill (20) and Taylor Mead (21), who wander onto the road and accidently find a box with a pair of pistols. When they set out to perform an old-fashioned duel on the road, the jeep with Jack and Leo passes between them at the very moment when the shots are fired. The End.
The anarchy of the narrative structure is very often an end unto itself, but sometimes it does serve a purpose. Let's consider the chaotic structure of the winter and summer flash-backs. These memories are essentially constituted of a series of moments that the couples spend together in their free time. It's hard to see any evolution or chronology between them, so that in the end one winter or summer seem like any other, as if they were interchangeable. But this lack of chronology which translates into an impression of chaos or anarchy has a purpose: "The fact that no progressive chronology can be discerned across the purported span of seven years is precisely the point: this past is itself a kind of timeless, continuously unfolding present that can neither look forward or cares to look back. It mirrors the time awareness of children whose behavior Jack and Leo also comically mirror." (22)
It's true, though, that the boys each have one montage-sequence where the years of courtship pass in a brief series of shots (in Leo's case, in a drugstore) and the intertitles indicate the passage of time ('1st Summer', '2nd Summer', etc.). These intertitles might be taken to correspond to a real chronological structure. But even there the chronology is illusory and anarchy wins: for the characters find themselves repeatedly in the same position, making it clear that these moments were shot on the same day and that time didn't actually pass. It's a wonderful way of mocking common cinematic ways of representing the passage of time while at the same underlining the ‘uniformity' of their past that resists all sort of chronological structure.
Secondly, it has been argued that the narrative anarchy and the lack of linear action and causal links between events, enhances the film's comic potential. Events in the film that can be regarded as leading or developing into subsequent ones are rare indeed. John Pruitt has thus hailed the movie's ability to "pull the camera back from the action" and let improvisation unfold as a catalyst of comic effect. "Whether it was Keaton, the Marx Brothers, or even later performers like Eddie Murphy or Bill Murray, the more scripted...a movie is in its making, the less chance for a genuine comic richness to emerge."(23)
Paradise Lost
It is difficult to see Jack and Leo's behavior as not being somehow based on Adolfas and Jonas' own experiences and foolery together (24). Hallelujah the Hills is therefore probably also an autobiographical tribute to the Mekas brothers themselves.
As Adolfas said:
"We lived together until two days before I got married. ... we did everything together, we went to the same places together. (Laughs) And there were a few times when we were in love with the same girl. (Laughs)".
Another autobiographical element is probably the film's largely natural open-air setting. Adolfas and Jonas grew up in the countryside on a farm, close to hills and a forest, and just as much as they have lived in close contact with the surrounding landscape, the film has an intimate bond with nature and its beauty. The snowy white, the light of the sun and its reflections, the wandering shadows of the trees in the snow, are all expressions of a sincere romanticism regarding their environment. Adolfas called the film a 'Romance' (in the opening title) and that's what it is, not only regarding their love for Vera, but also for the places that surround them (25).
The experience of unrequited love must have been traumatic for the Mekas brothers as it is for Jack and Leo. Still, in the film this does not fundamentally affect the young fellows' joy of being alive and of sticking together as they stumble from one mishap to the next. "We have done it again" (26) is the refrain of the brotherly friendship that unites our comic duo and which they exclaim at almost every gaffe. It's a curse-like expression but it can also be understood as a sign of secret jubilance and enjoyment.
But you could also argue that it was exactly that continuous boyish passion for anarchic fun that made Vera prefer to marry somebody else in the first place because she realized that the boys in the end would not want to grow up and become responsible, as this meant being removed from the timeless paradise of fun and foolhardiness they had created for themselves.
However, their attachment to the present and the lightheartedness which they display, even after Vera's rejection, has probably deeper causes and could stem from a more profound experience of loss.
Among the possible hints at past trauma are the numerous references to war in their childlike games. From the first scene onwards when they freeze at a shot-like sound, war has a continuous presence: more than once the boys interrupt their action for an army-type salute, they engage in military exercises at the cabin including push-ups, they practice shooting from a distance (albeit using a cake as target) and they get attacked during an imaginary air-raid at the cemetery. Even when they cross the river to reach the tree full of girls, they hold up their guns in a military fashion.
Notwithstanding their satirical value, couldn't these war-elements have a hidden, darker background?
Another scene that comes to mind is the boys laughing on the cabin floor when the soundtrack plays a melancholic children's song which tells the story of two young children who got lost in the woods and died (27).
This scene especially could be taken to suggest that Jack and Leo's attachment to their paradise is so strong because somehow, somewhere they must have already been taken from it prematurely in the past, an experience that would resonate with Adolfas' and Jonas' own life story where the war had abruptly taken them from the paradise of their childhood and adolescence in Lithuania. The fun-loving silliness of the film and the lads' behavior is a reminiscence of the brothers' days of heaven, but also a screen hiding deeper feelings linked to the trauma of having been cast out of paradise.
John Pruitt has pointed out how these suppressed, deeper feelings would eventually be addressed in later films by Jonas, especially Lost, Lost, Lost (1976) where he reflected more directly upon his and his brother's exile and condition as outsiders and misfits:
"It's not that much of a stretch to see Hallelujah the Hills as an astonishing adumbration of highly moving themes that would emerge to a far greater visibility in subsequent films, to see, in other words, Jack and Leo's escapades in Vermont as a kind of failed return to a lost Lithuanian dream; they are misfits in exile trying to lay down roots via the hapless pursuit of an elusive all-American girl whose ‘truth' is ironically akin to the false but undeniable beauty of, say, a John Ford western. (28)"
Loving Homage and Pure Invention
In their years in exile the brothers found a new community through cinema, and this probably affects the way cinema is celebrated in the film: it is not only a celebration of the history of film (through numerous both affectionate and satirical quotes), but also of the pleasure of watching films together (as in the scene when Jack and Leo watch their movie-like fantasies with Vera), and it's certainly a celebration of the sheer delight of filmmaking itself. This comes across not only in the many references to movie history which are full of the joy of reenactment, as it were. It's also obvious in its formal playfulness and an impressively wide range of techniques that in some cases also directly pay tribute to films of the past: the frequent iris-shots and inter-titles notably evoke the cinema of the silent era.
Adolfas was certainly not the only filmmaker in the 60's whose work alluded to the history of cinema. Much informed by Mekas' own activity as a film-critic, Hallelujah the Hills is part of a larger movement of films that, like many works of the French New Wave, didn't abstain from literal allusions in a sort of post-modern-dandyist posture. Like those films Hallelujah the Hills abounds with quotes: running from Griffith, Renoir, Welles, Kurosawa, and Antonioni, up to Truffaut and Godard (Breathless), and many more, not to mention traditional pairs of characters (such as Laurel and Hardy) and filmic genres in general (war-movies, westerns, and samurai-films.) (29).
At one point Adolfas even lifts an entire excerpt from Griffith's Way Down East (1920). It's the beautiful scene from the film's climax where a man played by Richard Barthelmess comes to rescue Lilian Gish's character who has passed out and is lying on one of many ice slabs in a river that is heading towards a waterfall. The fragility of the movements with which he desperately jumps from one slab to another, arriving beside the woman just in time and then carrying her in his arms back to the riverbank, is of exceptional beauty. Both the action and the spectacular setting are expressions of a melodramatic exuberance that relates in an interesting manner to the romanticism of Hallelujah the Hills.
It should also be mentioned that Peter Beard's performance, in particular, is reminiscent of a Keaton- and Chaplinesque tradition of great improvisational and physical virtuosity, which Beard takes into new territory. His bravura and recklessness leads him to perform a number of stunts that are as hilarious as they are baffling. Whether he is climbing up and sliding down a cabin roof before falling to the ground, running naked through high snow, falling through ice or climbing high up into the trees, the only possible thought while watching these scenes is that the Olympics should create a special discipline in honor of his exploits in Hallelujah the Hills. A special mention should also go to the strange dexterity of the way in which he re-enacts his fight with a Nandi Bear at a Thanksgiving dinner, twisting his knees and jumping upside down in the most random and bizarre fashion, making this arguably one of the funniest scenes of the movie (30).
Still, one of the most striking features of Hallelujah the Hills is its inventiveness, which already made an impression on Godard:
"Next to the two big shots of the New York School, Clarke and Cassavetes, he seemed a poor relative, especially since people got him confused with his brother. Hallelujah proved clearly that Adolfas is someone to be reckoned with. He is a master in the field of pure invention, that is to say, in working dangerously - ‘without a net.' His film, made according to the good old principle - one idea for each shot - has the lovely scent of fresh ingenuity and crafty sweetness. Physical efforts and intellectual gags are boldly put together. The slightest thing moves you and makes you laugh - a badly framed bush, a banana stuck in a pocket, a majorette in the snow. He shows life as defined by Ramuz: ‘As with a dance, such pleasure to begin, a piston, a clarinet, such sorrow to be done, the head spins and night has come.'" (31)
‘One idea for each shot' is perhaps an understatement. At times there are definitely more than one. The film virtually crackles with originality and interesting uses of iris ins and outs, freezes and returns to action, slow motion and speeded-up movements, jump cuts and voluntarily jerky panning shots, plus the use of cleverly random thin white lines framing a part of the image, which he sometimes uses as a frame for a different image to discrete comic effect. Just when Leo says "I've never seen a bear in my life" a bear pops up in the little frame to his left. Some shots randomly feature pictograms in Japanese or Cyrillic text (which aren't given any subtitles or translation) for the sheer pleasure of their beauty (32).
Not to mention the use of two actresses for Vera (Sheila Finn and Peggy Steffans), in order to underline the way in which the two suitors each project their desires on to her, a wonderfully playful and sharp directorial decision that came fourteen years before Bunuel's arguably similar use of it in That Obscure Object of Desire (1977).
However, one of the most beautiful, poetic moments is when the two lads enter their cabin in the woods, both carrying an elephant-tusk. A gentle male voice kicks off singing a folk song (33), covering all other sounds, as they stumble into the house and fall laughing hysterically on the floor. It's a brief moment of comic ecstasy for them, set in contrast with the tender, melancholic song in the soundtrack:
My dear, do you know how a long time ago
Two poor little children whose names I don't know
They were stolen away on a bright summer day
And lost in the woods, I heard people say.
While they wandered all night so sad was their plight,
The sun went down and the moon gave no light,
Well, they wept and they cried , they bitterly sighed,
Then the poor little things, they laid down and died.
As they are laughing and the song is playing, the image suddenly cuts to the space in front of the house, where three little children are dancing in a circle holding hands. But another sudden cut makes them disappear leaving us with the empty space for the rest of the song. It's moments like this one which, through a complex, inventive use of sound and editing, combining laughter and lyricism, makes Hallelujah the Hills stand out as work of exceptional poetry.
It is a true, though, that the film somehow loses momentum in the second half. The biggest shortcoming, however, may be the music. Notwithstanding the musical craftsmanship that informs Meyer Kupferman's score, some of the parts for flute and harpsichord can feel a bit quirky and hysterical to the ear. It's perhaps less the score itself than the instrumentation that becomes particularly tiring after a while.
Adolfas, in any case, was probably not striving for perfection. Energy was more important to him and it is still there: Hallelujah the Hills is unarguably an exceptionally funny, original and genuinely inspiring ‘movie' that is capable of guiding future film pioneers who recognize the beauty of creating one's own territory ‘in the hills'.
The idea that Jack and Leo can even be taken to represent the ideal of a new cinema has been suggested with great verve by Frédérique Devaux:
"These two voyagers, somewhere between lazy, countryside dandyism and be-here-now idealism, may represent, in their own way, the metaphor for a new cinema, infused with the history of great artists, searching for its traces and, refusing to follow the beaten track, creating from what it finds along the way, at the peril of sometimes falling prey to its rejection of conformity and previous experience.(34)"
Following this line of thought, the film can stand as a model for progress in art in general and how we ought to deal with the masters of the past:
"The film suggests that a work pieced together day by day on a shoestring is better than one venturing into the aura of what henceforth belongs to our collective memory, those unmatchable masterpieces that can no longer serve as standards to be measured against, but rather as starting points against which each person, depending on their vision and sensibility, can construct their own path. It calls on one to create one's own territory, far from the concrete America of buildings and dreams of power, in forests still untouched by the ‘all powerful (34)."
This theory of creation would then also gives the ‘hills' in the title another meaning, linking them to the personal territory as yet untouched by already existing power and production structures. Hallelujah the Hills is thus also a celebration of a cinema that is yet to come.
4) A Modern Inferno
In a surprising shift in style, the brothers' next project would be a co-direction based on a performance by the Living Theatre of a play by Kenneth Brown. The Brig (1964) is a claustrophobic, hellish experience of a Marine Corps Prison reproduced on stage where three steely guards have ten inmates perform rituals of humiliation and degradation. Following the course of a single day starting at the wake-up call, the viewer practically never leaves the prison and watches the penal dehumanization progress minute by minute until the lights go out. Adolfas was in Chicago for an editing job (35), when Jonas saw the play on the last night of its official run. Jonas was immediately shocked and his reaction was the impulse for turning the experience into a film:
"I went to see The Brig, the play, the night it closed. The Becks were told to shut down and get out. The performance, by this time, was so precisely acted that it moved with the inevitability of life itself. As I watched it I thought: Suppose this was a real brig; suppose I was a newsreel reporter; suppose I got permission from the U.S. Marine Corps to go into one of their brigs and film the goings-on: What a document one could bring to the eyes of humanity! The way The Brig was being played now, it was a real brig, as far as I was concerned. This idea took possession of my mind and my senses so thoroughly that I walked out of the play. I didn't want to know anything about what would happen next in the play; I wanted to see it with my camera. I had to film it (36)."
Access to the performance, however, was barred because tax collectors closed the tiny second floor auditorium in Greenich village where The Brig was performed. The director Judith Malina and the actors therefore had to break into their own theatre during the night in order to grant Mekas' camera one last performance of the play.
The result has a rare, crude live-wire intensity to it as Jonas follows the play with his handheld camera on stage, right amongst the actors. Because the camera positioning and framing was very spontaneous and intuitive, as Jonas didn't know the evolution of the play beforehand, the film acquires an enormous immediacy and lightness (37).
When the filming was done, Jonas handed the material over to Adolfas saying: "Take this stock and treat it with disrespect and cruelty. Cut everything that is not worth to be seen; forget that there was a play one day (we both hate plays, anyway); do to me that which I have down to Brown and the Becks. (38)" And so he did. Adolfas' editing would prove substantial, cutting various segments, at times because two of the three cameras (39) had malfunctioned during the shoot, sometimes going at 30 frames per second, sometimes at 20. While editing the film, they also realized that the distorted bits of sound were often more effective than the ‘better' ones.
When the finished film was shown abroad, it was often mistaken for a documentary. Much has been written about the strange cinema vérité effect of The Brig. The application of ‘direct cinema' techniques to a play-performance, which had itself a strong direct documentary character, allowed the film to counter some of the myths that had come to surround cinema verité. In this sense, The Brig is also meant to be "an essay in film criticisim" (40). In any case, when The Brig was released, the critics were both surprised and alarmed by the Mekas' change in style and material: "The Mekas brothers are no longer the gentle poets that we thought they were: they are two wild Indians drying scalps.(41)"
5) Twain Junior
The Double Barreled Detective Story (1965) is, technically speaking, Adolfas' third feature. Based on a Mark Twain novelette, the film tells the story of Hatfield, a carpetbagger, who marries the daughter of a prominent Southern plantation owner. He mistreats his wife in order to get revenge on the father, ultimately tying her to a tree and letting bloodhounds tear off her clothes. The father dies in a reaction of both shock and embarrassment. Shortly afterwards, the woman gives birth to a son that grows up into Siggins, who sets out to the West in order to avenge his mother. Eventually, in a twist that renders the quest for revenge futile, Hatfield is killed by somebody else.
Just Mark Twain's original story was a parody of the mystery novel, Adolfas' film plays with the genre codes that come with vengeance plots and generally thrives on Twain's rustic humour.
This adaption is just the most obvious expression of a more general affinity for Twain, who was a particular favorite of Adolfas'. Having been an avid reader of a great number of Twain's works (42), Adolfas probably connected not only with the writer's sense of humor but also with a certain taste for anarchy. It has been said (43) , for example that Adolfas was very fond of the ‘Warning' issued at the beginning of Huckelberry Finn:
NOTICE
Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot will be shot.
BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR
Per G. G., Chief of Ordance
Knowing about Adolfas' great love for Twain makes the troubled story of the film's release even more sad. P. Adams Sitney argued that "the misguided refusal of the sponsor to release the film in 1965 did considerable harm to the filmmaker's career", a filmmaker who was otherwise "an adopted Son of Mark Twain" (44).
Notwithstanding this blow, Adolfas kept pushing his ideas. But, as finding the financing for his feature proved too difficult and laborious, he accepted work as an editor on other people's projects in the meantime.
6) Adolfas, the Editor
Goldstein (1964), which Adolfas edited, is a forgotten gem of early American independent filmmaking and the feature film debut of Philip Kaufman (45) (who would go on to write the screenplay for Raiders of the Lost Ark and direct acclaimed films like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Right Stuff, The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Henry and June). Hailed by Jean Renoir as "the best American film I have seen in twenty years", this urban fable is centered around an old man who stirs up strange behaviour in those he encounters - a premise which certainly has some ‘adolfasian' qualities to it. Featuring strong performances by Ben Carruthers and by veteran character actor Lou Gilbert as the prophetic old man, Goldstein is both a charming experiment and a cultural document, especially in the way it uses unusual locations in Chicago - a city which was virtually off the map for filming movies in at that period. The film's basic ingredients, a critical black comedy loosely based on religious material - the tale of the prophet Elijah - must have appealed to Adolfas, and some have even argued that his "fingerprint [...] is all over this work. Although the subject matter is urban as opposed to the Vermont setting of Hallelujah, the beautiful pacing of that film is apparent throughout this effort, resulting in a sometimes whimsical, sometimes critical vision of the dreamers and schemers that make up a modern metropolis. (46)"
Albeit under the pseudonym George Binkey, Adolfas is also credited as the editor of several (s)exploitation B-films by Joe Sarno (The Love Merchant and Step Out Of Your Mind in 1966) and Allen Savage (Weekend with Strangers, 1971). Even if the films distinguish themselves by little more than an abiding focus on "tense, psycho-sexual character development", Adolfas apparently always spoke highly of his time with Joe Sarno. And, in later years, George Binkey was even meant to be at the heart of a struggling effort to complete a monumental fictional autobiography, titled George the Man (47).
In a much more serious register, Companeros and Companeras (1970), is a documentary about the Cuban revolution and the only film directed by David and Barbara Stone, in collaboration with Adolfas Mekas who also took care of the editing. The fruit of a five-month long stay in Cuba, the film documents the experiences and views of young Cubans, as they discuss their present and future in the light of the revolution.
7) The Man in White
In 1967 the anti-Vietnam movement is close to reaching its climax. In a time when war atrocities and ideological hypocrisy abound, it's hard to imagine how satire could do justice to the political absurdity and blatantly economic interest behind the Vietnam massacre. An Interview with the Ambassador from Lapland (1967) manages, however, to go very far in that direction: pointing to the hallucinating quest for business and efficiency behind the American warfare in a tone that is both humoringly ironic and illuminating.
Shot by Jonas and produced by Pola, this short features a memorable performance by Adolfas as a northern European ambassador, who discusses in a static shot in front of several microphones 'the great inefficiency of the US military establishment', suggesting that it should get reorganized on a private enterprise basis. Dressed impeccably in white, with a cigarette in hand, this tall, well-built, middle-aged man would be perfectly elegant, if there wasn't something slightly too 'polished' about him, just like his argument, which sketches a scenario that is, well, too efficient to work. Dominique Noguez has rightly interpreted Adolfas here as a contemporary reincarnation of Swift in his Modest Proposal which suggested that the impoverished Irish might ease their economic troubles by selling their children as food for the rich. The result is more than funny: "One really must admit that Mekas has made the USA a bit less loathsome (48)." (Dominique Noguez)
8) Elegiac Fugue
Windflowers (1968) is an extension of Adolfas' anti-war reflection. This "elegy of a draft dodger" as he called it, tells the story of a young deserter who has been on the run from the FBI for six years and living under a pseudonym in a strange town. As the Feds close in on him, he tries to escape once again but the police mistake a branch he has picked up for a gun and shoot him. The circular structure of the film restates the opening sequence at the end with his flight and tragic death. Dominique Noguez has praised Windflowers as a deeply musical film, like "one of those English ballads of the 18th century that made you cry."
Adolfas intercuts the flight with more lyrical moments of past happiness, images that are slightly slowed down, and which he repeats like a refrain. "On top of this tying everything together and giving it a touch of gray, is the original music score by Mekas, very simple. To sum it up, Windflowers is an elegy....without the final lament of the gypsy violins, without the second movement of the d'Aranjuez concerto, and yet poignant. The other side of the Vietnam war. The stubbornness of a young man who doesn't say a word. Who is escaping. Who simply wanted to live.(49)"
9) Going Home
In 1971, after a 27-year absence from their home country, Adolfas and Jonas decided to a make a journey back to their birthplace in Lithuania. They had left as young men, against their will. Now they return, back to their mother, brothers and friends, revisiting childhood memories, hardships of the past and celebrating their reunion with meals, songs and walks on long northern summer days across golden fields. The underlying narrative arc of this Ulysses-like journey back home, into an almost pre-modern rural setting, in order to reestablish a lost link, was, of course, ideal ground for a document on film and exceptional material for a testimony of how life and family can sometimes be strong enough to prevail against all odds.
Going Home is Adolfas' film-journal of this experience, shot in parallel with Jonas' Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania and Pola Chapelle's Journey to Lithuania. Pola, Adolfas's wife, joined the brothers for this adventure and recorded sound with a little Uher tape machine while the brothers were filming. Together these three films, which often deal with the same moments through different points of view, constitute a unique body of work that is very revealing of the process of diary-filmmaking as well as about each of the filmmaker's personal characters and sensibilities.
Adolfas' film has been somewhat overshadowed by the justly celebrated Reminiscences of his brother: a fast-paced intimate fresco of impressions and memories that are imbued with a very poetic lyricism and a special sensibility for the frontiers that have been emerging and separating the new, modern world from the old one which Jonas is undeniably a child of.
Still, Going Home is not a lesser piece of filmmaking. Somewhat more modest and straightforward in its composition and editing, Adolfas' film is also more ‘couple-driven', thriving on gags and jokes performed by and with Pola Chapelle.
Apart from Adolfas' and Pola's voice over commentaries, the narration of Going Home is based on the diaries which Adolfas kept as a boy in the village of Semeniskiai and later in a German forced-labour camp. It is by reading these diary-entries that the suffering and hardships of the past come to the foreground in what is otherwise a very light-hearted and up-beat film.
"July 23, 1944, Elmshorn, Germany. Images run, like horses they run. There's my country's wind and songs and flowery fields. Yes, July! They are in full bloom now, the meadows. I miss my country, my Lithuania. If I could, I would walk back to Semeniskiai. I sit by a window in the barracks. It is so depressing. Emptiness. Nostalgia. Loneliness as big as a bear mountain. Seven pounds of bricks, seven times seven times seven pounds of bricks on my chest. My eyes are so full, like grass in the morning with due."
One of the most moving moments is when Adolfas recalls his first love, a 12 year old girl, who was arrested with her Jewish family, marched out into the woods and forced to dig their own graves before getting shot by the occupiers. Adolfas does not remember her name but dedicates a silent still-shot of a rose to her, a very simple but powerful way of recalling this tragedy. "Here's a rose for you, my nameless little girl."
Generally though, Adolfas seems more robust when remembering the hard times of the past, whereas Jonas' Reminiscences presents a gloomier view of the world from the outset, in the first part of his film: "We loved you world, but you did lousy things to us!" When the brothers go to visit the site of the labour-camp in Elmshorn, near Hamburg, where they worked for a year, Adolfas seems to be the more extrovert and cheerful of the two, as he walks up to their former foreman and looks for the machine which he used to work on. Jonas by contrast recalls the "bench where I was beaten up for working too slow and talking back", and outside the factory, as he stumbles across a group of children running around, he's brought back to one of the darkest, most fateful moments of their life-story. "Run, Children, Run! I was also running once from here. But I was running for my life. I hope you'll never have to run for your life."
The endings of each film are also very telling: in Reminiscences Jonas dwells upon the flames that consume the Vienna fruit market in August 1971, the most beautiful one in the city according to Kubelka, and allegedly burnt down by the town in order to be replaced by a new one. As Jonas explains, full of loss and grudge, in his closing words: "They want a modern market now!"
By contrast, at the end of Going Home, we find Adolfas back in New York, choosing once more to show off his dancing skills in his garden. "I'll dance. I'll dance to all of you. I'll dance and dance to a tune that was a hit before my mother was born!"
Going Home also throws a revealing light on Hallelujah the Hills in so far as it takes us back to the country, the fields and the forest where Adolfas and Jonas were fooling around together when they were youngsters. We thus come to revisit the original sites of the experiences that were the inspiration behind Jack and Leo's games and nonsense in Vermont.
Still, notwithstanding the happiness of being back home and connecting with past memories, the meals and get togethers with friends and family, both Adolfas' and Jonas' films have a silent and tragic undercurrent. As Pola Chapelle recalls:
"One morning the five Mekas brothers stood in a line and allowed the family to measure their height. As Mama Mekas looked on, she spoke very solemnly. Adolfas translated for me. She said ‘My husband and I planted five birch trees. Two were straight and beautiful (Paul and Peter), one grew crooked (Costas with a limp, a war souvenir, said ‘that's me') and two fell down. The two that fell down were Jonas and Adolfas. She lost them. All the time we were with her, she never showed emotion. Only when she accompanied us to the airport in Vilnius, did I see tears in her eyes, as Jonas and Adolfas embraced her. She loved them and she would lose them twice."
10) When The Monies Dried Up
Going Home is Adolfas' last film, so to speak, a fact which can only invite the question: Why did he not make more films, ending up a lot less prolific than his brother? The answer is as sad as it is simple: he didn't manage to, unfortunately, or rather: they would not let him. Keen to continue with feature-length movies, Adolfas had written several screenplays, which he tried to turn into films. Alas, the industry and the general costs of production were changing in that period: for slightly more demanding projects, the independent ways of ‘the New American Cinema' were not available any more. As Adolfas puts it:
"At the end of the ‘60s, beginning of the ‘70s, the monies dried up for independent productions. I pushed my scripts, my feature-length scripts, pushed various sources, agents, lawyers, for about seven or eight years, and some of my scripts, especially two of them, were sitting with Warner Bros. for five years, and they died. And the cost of making feature films was getting out of hand by that time. And my interest was in feature film (50)."
Fortunately for us, Adolfas decided to publish his scripts later and invented each time he did so a new biography for himself: a basket weaver from North Dakota, a mushroom collector, or an opal hunter in Australia (51).
The failure to get his other, more ambitious projects financed must have been a severe blow. However, it ultimately had good consequence in so far as it made Adolfas stumble into an entirely different career for which he revealed an unknown talent.
11) The Bard Years
It was P. Adams Sitney who proposed Adolfas for a teaching position at Bard College, and Adolfas accepted, thinking that this would only be a temporary occupation. "I said I'll be there for a semester, and then I stayed there for 32 years (52)." The newly formed and probationary Film Department quickly became "the People's Film Department" in his hands and an "irascible, Dadaistic and anarchistic" institution just like Adolfas himself (53), who revealed unexpected teaching skills. As P. Adams Sitney noted: "his own fractured education and his nearly total disregard for academic decorum made him the ideal professor." His passion as a teacher was a driving creative force for a number of students. And filmmakers such as Jeff Scher (54) and Andy Galler were particularly inspired by Adolfas as they pursued a degree in filmmaking (55).
His time at Bard also was fraught with conflict, and Adolfas had supporters as well opponents (56). Cinema then didn't easily fit Bard's very conservative concept of the liberal arts - film was still considered a technique, not an art - and attempts were therefore made to suppress the department because of its allegedly high costs. Several years later, a college evaluation committee even voted to deny Adolfas tenure. But the Bard administration, in an unusual move, requested a second evaluation, which was supported by younger faculty members and a loyal group of students, with the result that Adolfas did receive tenure in the end.
One of the most memorable aspects of his academic career was perhaps his way of bringing some life into the boring periods in the college year: "When the spring semester was coming to an end, and the lull between finals and graduation had fallen upon Bard College campus, he would pull out his furry rabbit costume and stroll around the campus dressed as a giant bunny. Department Chairs, Deans, the college president, and other esteemed members of the academe would suddenly pretend they didn't know who he was, quickly darting away at the approach of the furry apparition.(57)"
His decision to quit in 2004, at the age of 79, was very revealing about way in which film culture and film teaching were changing. Unable to bear the freshman youngsters from the upper-classes anymore, Adolfas Mekas resigned, probably because they essentially lacked, in most cases, a true interest in cinema and the history of film in general:
"Each freshman would come in with six or seven feature films under their arms, made on video of course. But they had never heard of Orson Welles, they had never seen anything five years from yesterday. So I could not teach them. So I quit."
"They have no idea what cinema is. And Bard College is a college for rich kids, and each one of them had relatives, cousins, friends, uncles who are in business, agents. Mostly agents. ‘Oh yeah, my uncle's an agent. I can sell any script I want to.' They don't know what the hell they're talking about (58)."
12) Shit on Brakhage!
The wish to be a filmmaker once more came back to Adolfas in his last years, as he was playing with the idea of shooting a new film in Italy with Giuseppe Zavola and David Avallone (59). The film was meant to be about Giordano Bruno, the Italian astronomer who was declared a heretic for his theories and burnt at the stake. Adolfas called him 'the first beatnik' and gave the project the cheeky title Burn, Bruno, Burn!
Lucid up unto his death, Adolfas also remained a passionate observer and critic in his later years, and would reveal himself deeply critical of the sterile adoration that other avant-garde filmmakers of his generation were subject to. For the not so original mimicry which Brakhage films induced in younger admirers, he had only one response, a radical one and fundamentally right (the way he meant it): "Come on, shit on Brakhage!" Concerned that adoration will only produce imitation ("Low-Brakhage") he demanded that filmmakers, young or old, to just "go out and be original!" Nothing else. It's only natural the he felt so strongly about this given the integrity of the way he dealt with his own admiration for the masters in a film like Hallelujah The Hills. He really set an example for how you can quote or even steal an entire scene from another movie and still do something that is profoundly yours!
After all, originality may not only be a virtue in itself. It can also reveal itself useful in unexpected circumstances. Pip Chodorov recalls Adolfas saying that it is important to make good films because hell is a room where you are forced to watch your own films on loop for eternity. That's why they better be good. In any that case, Adolfas would have surely had a good time down there: Hallelujah then! Hallelujah the Hell!!
Special thanks to Francesca Betteni-Barnes, Pip Chodorov, Dario Marchiori and Maximilian Le Cain
Guns of the Trees, The Brig, and Lost Lost Lost will be released in March 2012 by Re:Voir, Potemkine and Agnès B DVD. Hallelujah the Hills and Adolfas' books are available from Re:Voir too. (www.re-voir.com)
Philippe was born and raised in Germany. He is a passionate lover of both avant-garde and commercial cinema and happens to be an unconditional defender of Adolpho Arrietta's cinema, the director of masterpieces like Le Jouet Criminel.
Website: http://houseonfire.fr/