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Jonas Mekas (1922-2019), Lithuanian-born poet, philosopher and film-maker, has made hundreds of films and set up the Anthology Film Archive. He emigrated to American in 1949 where he earned the title of 'the godfather of American avant-garde cinema'. [Listener: Amy Taubin; date recorded: 2003]
TRANSCRIPT: 'Paradise not yet Lost' falls after 'Reminiscences...' There were other films in between that includes the material that I've filmed in 1977, my second trip. It was also a period when I became sort of more... on many occasions with my friends here around our big table here we used to discuss and talk, you know, about culture and where things are today and where things are going. And a lot of it with Peter Kubelka, I used bits of those conversations in the film and it has to do with some of the... what we considered good things that we still have and that those good things and which I call the 'fragments of paradise' that are still here and it's like our duty, our... that we defend them and sustain them and don't permit them to disappear, but the opposite: that they should grow, they should grow and of course that's the beginning of that theme that continues now through much of my thinking and works in that period.
Though some people, you know, accuse me of being escapist, I say that I'm very realistic and down to earth and I'm not a pessimist. I consider the situation that we have now is not very much different maybe from what it was 10,000 years ago or... there are always, always little islands of... groups of people or individuals that keep the best that there is and the rest of the population is always somewhere else and fighting and nobody knows what they're doing, what they're caring about, and we... I try what I can to say, I mean why... why I'm keeping in Anthology Film Archives? Because I consider that this in cinema, this... this is like the avant-garde film to me some of those works are... are ecstatically beautiful. These are fragments of paradise and I have to do everything to keep them to see that they don't disappear, even if the rest of cinema disappears, I don't care, but this I will do everything that it wouldn't disappear. So this kind of obsession or craziness that keeps me alive, I would say. No, I go a little, you know, further in that theme, you know, that we are talking about image but we're all creators... makers of images, you see, in... in whatever we do, whatever you say, so cinema, yes, images of one kind. But, you know, the imaginations and we create images that affect everything and everybody around us so that, you know, that's the extension of my thinking of little paradise that, you know, I should do everything not to think, not to project, not to project images into the world around me that would affect the world in the wrong way, you see... you... the way I see it. But that's, you know, the difficult thing for all of us to do. But one does one's best.
