Lost, Lost, Lost

“Long, lonely days; long, lonely nights. There was a lot of walking through the nights of Manhattan. I don’t think I have ever been as lonely.” After fleeing from German-occupied Lithuania, being captured and interred in German labor camps and spending four years in different facilities for displaced in Germany, Jonas Mekas emigrated to America in 1949. Over 25 years later, he returned to the first footage he had shot in and around New York shortly after arriving in the US. It’s the melancholy-tinged first part of the two-part LOST LOST LOST that best describes a period spent moving within a set of unstable coordinates: lost between worlds, between memory and exile, between a Lithuanian past and an American future. (mg)