Jonas Mekas, Shiver of Memory

Peter Delpeut

• Publisher: DoppelHouse Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781954600034
• eBook ISBN: 9781954600041
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Artist Monographs

The controversy over filmmaker Jonas Mekas's memories of his WWII Lithuanian youth are delicately and humanely approached in this book-length essay by a Mekas cinephile.

Stemming from a New York Review of Books article by a Jewish historian condemning the widely-beloved Jonas Mekas, known as the 'Godfather of American avant-garde cinema', this essayistic, self-reflective, and analytic book flowers into an inquiry about memory and forgetting; the moral compass of the future that cannot find its bearing in the past; the ability of art to witness; and how to write the history of events too traumatic for a just accounting.

Perpetrator and victim, bystander and accomplice, those who testify and those who refuse, the traumatized and those who dare not speak of the dead. These are among the vantage points considered in Shiver of Memory, which addresses audiences through the microcosm of one exiled filmmaker's life and the traces of his memory. Examining Mekas's poetry, autobiographical writing, and films, Delpeut travels back and forth between Mekas's boyhood in a Soviet-occupied borderland, where his first picture was reputedly destroyed by the passing Soviet army, to his youth in German-occupied territory during war and genocide — working as a poet and for the Resistance yet as an editor of an anti-Semitic-inflected newspaper— to his life as young Lithuanian filmmaker, Fluxus artist, and immigrant to the United States who became obsessed with recording the details of everyday life so that they might be relived in all their beauty and contradiction through the magical medium of film.

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Writes Peter Delpeut, " Reduction is the most virulent accomplice of moral judgment. What the 'Mekas case' taught me above all is that the moral compass can easily run wild, confused by all those magnetic fields of memory that surround it. So this has turned out to be a very personal essay, in which my quest is central. Every change of perspective triggers a different moral judgment. In a world that is increasingly trying to force us to come up with unequivocal answers, this may be a consoling message."

Author and filmmaker Delpeut was heavily influenced by Mekas's films and the Anthology Film Archives that Mekas founded. He revolves the prism of Mekas's life to shine a light on the central operations of memory and how Mekas's filmography interfaced with a barely-spoken-of trauma. Mekas's recollections of his WWII youth, interrogated by Michael Casper in the NYRB, become stepping stones for Delpeut over a dark lake enshrouded in mystery with no bottom but a sure number of victims from Mekas's provincial area: the 2400 Jewish men, women and children "herded together in the center of Biržai and taken in small groups to the Astravas forest, not far from the town on the shore of the lake" and murdered on August 8, 1941.

While Mekas never participated in the horrors, questions remain about what he knew and what he refused to let himself know, as well as what his artist's soul necessitated that he forget in order to live.

oral history

It is telling that for the life Jonas Mekas has led, there is so much material available to “get to know” him. Mekas himself is in charge of most of it. He has condensed his life in Lithuania into nostalgic anecdotes. Casper wanted to know what really happened and started questioning him. He presented Mekas with facts he didn’t remember. Or that Mekas provided with a different interpretation.

I tried to imagine how such a meeting had been, without realizing that there was a treasure waiting for me that would bring me very close to it. It took a while before the Google algorithms understood what I was looking for, but in the end it appeared as a self-evident item in my search results. There existed an oral history interview that Mekas had done for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM). One of the nine thousand personal testimonies that the museum has collected about the run-up to and the genocide during the Second World War. Two sessions, one of four hours and one of two. Six hours of Mekas in his own words: about his youth and the war years in Biržai, more detailed and in-depth than he had ever been in his films or publications about this period. To be found online from front to back. There was only one complication: the interview was recorded after the publication of Casper’s article.

The first session on June 29, 2018, took place just three weeks after the publication date of The New York Review of Books. Which is painfully palpable. Mekas looks fragile and insecure. He stutters and has trouble finding the right words, which is not the best way to be convincing. The English language seems to be his enemy, as if he has never been further from home than in those last months of his life. At the end of the second session, two days later, Lithuanian words pour out of his mouth. He never abandoned that language, I realized. Or has Lithuania never left him?

Interviewer Ina Navazelskis tries with iron patience to keep Mekas on the trail of his memories. She is the empathic listener he needs more than ever at that moment. For a “pure” oral history interview, Casper actually gets in her way. More than once Mekas is on the defensive against an absent opponent. He mangles Casper’s name, or calls him “that guy,” “my friend,” or “Michael.” Navazelskis, who is interviewing for posterity, repeatedly adds “Casper” and mentions the article as neutrally as possible, although she would rather keep that actuality out of Mekas’s story. She wants to know what happened “then” and not what is happening “now.” For Mekas, it is “that dirty piece” that troubles him: “You must be aware that somebody did a very, sort of dirty paper on me …”

I’m beginning to wonder if Mekas himself has pressed for the interview, and saw an opportunity for a rebuttal in it. In a conversation via Skype, Navazelskis tells me that it has gone very differently. Mekas has been on the museum’s list since 1972, after the release of Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania. Her predecessor tried for years to convince him to cooperate, but he put it off. The same applied to his brother Adolfas, also a filmmaker and for many decades a film teacher at the renowned Bard College. In 2011, Adolfas finally promises an interview with Navazelskis, but he wants to wait until he has undergone hospital treatment. He dies on his sickbed, and the interview never takes place.

Navazelskis’s cameraman is acquainted with Jonas and suggests trying to convince him one more time. Together they visit a poetry night in Brooklyn where Mekas performs and afterwards they talk with him. To their surprise, he agrees. He suggests a date somewhere at the end of June. Two weeks after the encounter, Casper’s article is published. Navazelskis had no idea this was in the planning. The appointment goes through, and she meets a broken man. “Mekas was very hurt and bewildered why Casper didn’t believe him,” she said, describing his mood.

She doesn’t enter the interview unprepared. Aware that the article deals with issues she can’t ignore, Navazelskis calls Casper the night before. She might be able to get answers to questions that remain open to him. But, she explains to me, an oral history interview is not an interrogation. And doesn’t want to resemble it in the slightest way. It’s all about the experience and perception of the interviewee. How does he remember his life; what does he recall as a direct witness to what happened. Navazelskis is interested in what it was like to be “a participant” in historical events.

The oral history project consists of countless personal histories. As an interviewer, Navazelskis can help bring chronology into focus. She provides context when it is necessary to situate personal events in relation to the landmarks in the wider history of countries and communities. But there is no intention to contradict the interviewees’ memories. She has, she confesses, had to put aside the self-evident mistrust of the journalist she once was. Judging is not part of her assignment. She collects micro histories with respect for each person. In that sense, she unconditionally stands by Mekas during the interview.

It is an instructive experience to see Mekas speak for six hours in one continuous recording. I can look at him and listen as if he’s sitting across from me. Navazelskis’s empathy gives him every opportunity to tell his story, from his earliest childhood memories to the years in which life in Biržai and the surrounding area lost its normal routine.

It is striking that before the world fire reached Lithuania, his youth was mainly colored by the desire to go to school. His father and mother demanded that he worked on the farm. In the harvest months, there was no time for school. Simply mapping out the chronology of his repeatedly broken school years racks Navazelskis’s brain. What becomes visible is an inquisitive young boy with great expectations.

Even when Mekas was shepherding, he was carrying a book with him. The young Jonas plundered the local library and yearned for a life as a poet. Despite all the nostalgia in his poetry for the simple peasant life, he seemed destined to get away from it. The diligent existence of his parents was a beautiful metaphor for a life in harmony with nature, but it certainly was no dream of a future for himself. Who would he have become, you wonder, if the war hadn’t driven him to New York?

The interview also shows memory at work. A faltering memory then, in which only a few events survived as vivid anecdotes. Everything that happened in between has disappeared. The efforts to give a picture of this seem to be mainly an attempt to meet the interviewer’s wishes. A crystal-clear memory is rarely found.

Mekas is easily disturbed by questions that remind him that he has forgotten a lot. The longer I watch, the more his stutter appears to me as a sign of helplessness. Not of Mekas as a person, but of his memory. As if his memory doesn’t belong to him, but to an outsider, with whom he has to beg not to abandon him.

Mekas indicates more than once that he has to rely on “deduction,” something Navazelskis obviously does not want: she wants unmediated experiences. The facts that Casper presented to Mekas (in the form of photocopies and history books) and to which Navazelskis sometimes subtly steers, have visibly made him doubt the reliability of his memory. Which is something else than doubting the memories that (although with difficulty) do appear to his mind’s eye. What can he do other than to trust them? In his own way.

In the meticulous transcription that the Holocaust Museum makes of all interviews, this is how it reads:

“Sure, when I’m talking about, you know now, around the questions here, and I’m sort of trying to get to it. You see, intuitively, and as a poet, and who sort of was there, and some of it I remember like un-directly, and un-directly, I know that I’m right, but I cannot feel — put my — you know, fingers on — on — on — on — on facts, on specifics, that I’m no — I know that I’m right un-direct, about the feelings of the people there. I know — remember very clearly, you know, sort of, you know, what I heard — some glimpses out there, and I don’t need everything literally, from A to Z to make my — my — my observations, yes.”

Mekas struggles for six hours through the “fleeting impressions” that his memory still offers him. Save when he can fall back on one of his frequently repeated anecdotes, then some amusement glows behind his eyes, the addiction of the popular conversationalist. If something becomes clear, then this: Mekas has handed in the novel of his life and would prefer not to change a word. He’s finished writing. Too bad Casper is trying to be the stern and demanding editor of it.

Why would anyone need an editor if the story were already good? Take the anecdote about the first photo Mekas took, a story that in light of his later film career easily could acquire the luster of a myth.

In the spring of 1940, his older brother Povilas gave Mekas a photo camera as a present. He patiently waits for a good moment to take his first photograph. He only has one film, so he has to be frugal. Then Russian tanks roll into Lithuania. Growling columns in impressive clouds of dust pass by his parental farm. The young Jonas runs out of the house, leaving his parents terrified behind. From a rock he takes one picture after the other. The euphoria is short-lived, as a Russian officer dashes towards him. He grabs the camera, pulls the film out of it, and tramples it under his boots. He shouts to him in Russian to run away. Jonas doesn’t need a second word for that, and rushes back home. His first contribution to the photographic arts, he will be only too happy to tell, is trampled under the boots of a Russian soldier.

In a version on a Facebook page, Mekas experiences the same story as a sixteen-year-old. He is sixteen after December 22, 1938, i.e. most of 1939. The Red Army invades Lithuania on June 15, 1940. Mekas knows that too, so he situates the incident in the summer of 1940. Then he is seventeen, and half a year on his way to eighteen, one learns by simple arithmetic. Figures and data are not Mekas’s strongest point, but why do I care?

The anecdote is a Mekas myth in optima forma. Fate has predestined young Jonas to follow the path of the arts. A path that he must tread unbiased and in utter innocence. The naivety of his very first use of his camera has surprised his Russian attacker so much that it has saved his life. With a camera you can exorcise evil.

But when I watch the oral history interview, I hope to get a glimpse beyond the myth. Issues have piled up that I finally want to sort out. My research has lost its permissiveness.

Three questions return in my notes: Has Mekas realized that his work with the two magazines could be understood as collaboration? What did Mekas know about the mass murder of the Jews in Biržai? Why did he flee to Germany in 1944, at the same time as the German troops are retreating from the Baltic States? These questions are explosive because with every one of them Casper puts forward information that compromises Mekas. That is, if you take the moral subtext of them into account and you consider them in the light of collaboration.

What does Mekas have to contribute to this in the interview? In any case, no facts. He has little to contradict the truth of hard data and documents. What Mekas can offer is context (besieged by two totalitarian powers shortly after each other in a country that finally thought itself to be independent), personal circumstances (Biržai is in a remote corner of Lithuania, far away from the news; his character didn’t allow him to observe things that were too horrible) and his own version of events (how a partisan urged him to leave Biržai as soon as possible).

Context, circumstances, version — all three the swampy domain of interpretation. It forces me to weigh, consider, judge, adjust. It comes down to asking the stuttering Mekas to take up his own defense, which any lawyer or judge would discourage a suspect to do. First of all, of course, the question is whether one can expect of seventy-year-old events, which were not cast in the concrete of the successful anecdote, the accurate representation that I am now demanding. To what extent can you build a case on Mekas’s memories at all?

It is not difficult to find an expert witness who puts the reliability of memories into perspective. For a novel, I once studied the work of Willem Wagenaar, the forensic psychologist who became internationally known as an expert witness in the trial of John Demjanjuk, who after a long and confusing trial turned out not to be Treblinka’s “Iwan the Terrible,” but a perhaps no less terrible guard in the Sobibor extermination camp. Anyone who wants to prove the unreliability of memories, especially the use of unreliable witness statements in court cases, will find an abundance of examples in Wagenaar’s research.

According to Wagenaar, a trial is a competition between stories. Which story does the judge (and in Anglo-Saxon countries, the jury) think is best corroborated by the facts? Which story is most synchronous with the available evidence? Even if someone confesses, Wagenaar emphasizes, that story should be anchored in irrefutable and factual evidence. If not, a confession is meaningless. People can remember events that never took place. Memories will move with the stories others add to them. Every interrogator is therefore a potential polluter of the confession. There is no need for malicious intent behind this — it is rather incompetence, Wagenaar likes to point out.

The pure memory, the memory that coincides exactly with whatever has happened, does not exist. Events become a story immediately after they have taken place, or more precisely: several stories from the various people involved. And not everyone is an equally good observer or storyteller. Judicial errors are almost always based on an excessive reliance on witness statements or confessions. A reliance that goes back to nothing more than an unconditional — and incomprehensible, Wagenaar states — belief in the possibility of pure remembrance.

(I have an amusing personal memory of Willem Wagenaar in the light of this essay. Wagenaar collected nineteenth-century magic lanterns and slides. In his spare time, he used them to perform enchanting shows. When I worked at the Netherlands Filmmuseum in the nineties, he regularly used to perform there during Christmas time. With the forerunner of the film projector he brought the ingenious, mechanical slides to life. Phantasmagorias, Victorian melodramas, kaleidoscopic images, starry skies and visual jokes — Wagenaar enjoyed bringing the imagination to life as an explicateur, making up stories completely free from the demands he made in his daily work of finding legal truth.)

However, it does not help to put aside every testimony on the basis of a desperate relativism. In his introduction to Remembering Survival: Inside a Nazi Slave-Labor Camp, historian Christopher Browning recalls the trial that had put him on the trail of the Starachowiche labor camp, the subject of his study. In a 1972 criminal trial of Walther Becker, head of the German security police in the Polish industrial city of Starachowiche between 1941 and 1945, several Jewish survivors made incriminating statements about his brutal actions during the deportations in the region. Starachowiche was not an extermination camp, so there were relatively many survivors who could testify against Becker. Becker denied everything.

To the dismay of everyone who followed the case, the German judge on duty acquitted Becker. His justification: witness statements are the most unreliable kind of evidence. He then reviewed each statement to identify inconsistencies and contradictions with other statements in the smallest details. In the eyes of the judge, no testimony could be trusted one hundred percent. He demanded a perfection of the survivors’ memories, according to Browning, “nowhere to be found in the real world.”

In contrast to that judge, Browning was not prepared to let Becker get away with it so easily. If the German legal system allowed Becker to escape, he figured, “I felt that at least he could be given his appropriate place in historian’s hell.”

Browning is a historian who does not, like many of his colleagues, shy away from using individual testimonies as a primary source. Based on official interrogations with members of the Reserve Unit 101 of the German Ordnungspolizei (Order Police) about their role in the Holocaust, he wrote Ordinary Men, a crushing reconstruction of the daily practice of massacring entire Jewish communities in rural Poland. In spite of the fact that the interrogations took place some twenty years after the events and each of the interviewees tried to evade legal persecution, as a result of which lying often seemed wiser than the honest truth, it turned out to be possible to gain insight into the mass murders which had occurred outside the extermination camps on the basis of the stories of the perpetrators.

In his meticulous reconstructions, Browning revealed how with careful contextualization, weighing and differentiation, oral memories are as valuable to historiography as written documents and dry statistics. His reconstructions are so convincing precisely because he has an eye for inconsistencies, the anomalous detail and for individuals (whether perpetrator or victim) who do not conform to the usual image of the behavior of the group to which they belong. By daring to chang...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Memories
• Jonas Mekas
• Michael Casper
• Mekas Revisited
• Charisma
• Diary
• Oral History
• Magazine
• The Forest of Astravas
• Trauma
• Character
• Loyalty
• Admiration
• Settle the Scores
• Literature
• Internet Sources
• Filmography
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• Back Cover