Jonas Mekas - Lost Lost Lost

"The period I am dealing with in these six reels was a period of desperation, of attempts to grow roots into the new ground, to create new memories. In these six painful reels I tried to indicate what it feels to be in exile, how I felt in those years. These reels carry the title Lost Lost Lost, the title of a film myself and my brother wanted to make in 1949, and it indicates the mood we were in, in those years. It describes the mood of a Displaced Person who hasn’t yet forgotten the native country but hasn’t gained a new one. The sixth reel is a transitional reel where we begin to see some relaxation, where I begin to find moments of happiness. New life begins." - Jonas Mekas

“The borderline is fading between an artifact – an ‘œuvre d’art,’ conceived as such, a pure product of stylized imagination – and what can be described as a poet’s account of events; as sincere and as honest as only a poet’s account can be. Maybe Jonas Mekas’ Lost Lost Lost has just marked the beginning of a new genre. In the line of a Gide, of a Sartre, of a Malraux. But in film.” - Antonin J. Liehm, Thousand Eyes, 10/76

“Jonas Mekas has led a life of extraordinary interest; his autobiography is not merely interesting for ‘how it is put together,’ but also (and perhaps primarily) for the intensely personal relationship of the teller to the tale: of a life to itself. A central part of Mekas’ life is cinematic style, however… The somber, almost neo-realist shooting of the beginning gradually is eclipsed by faster movement, more extremes of angle and distance, and finally by single framing. (…) Mekas and the camera are one, and the French critics’ camerastylo pales when compared to the union Jonas Mekas-Bolex as recording device, as ‘pen.’” - Alan Williams