Reminiscences from Germany

Regarded as one of the most influential figures of avant-garde cinema, Jonas Mekas was interested in his works in the essence of the present time and place, though they also give weight to history and memory. He transformed little fragments of everyday reality, with very little to no interventions or editing, into a mixture of personal experience, documentary, and narration.

In “Reminiscences from Germany”, Mekas revisits places he lived in Germany between 1944 and 1949. Born in a small village in Lithuania, Jonas Mekas and his younger brother Adolfas were arrested and deported to a forced labour camp in Hamburg during the Nazi occupation. They escaped eight months later, hiding in a farm near the Danish border until the war ended. They lived in a series of temporary refugee camps for four years until they arrived in New York in 1949. In this video, Mekas uses footage from 1971 and 1973 shot by himself and his brother Adolfas. He travels to Elmshorm, Flensburg, Wiesbaden, Mainz, and Kassel: the places where he spent five years of his life, first as a forced labourer, and later as a displaced person. With voice-over, he recounts his own story in a non-chronological manner and incorporates features of diarist cinema, presenting an intimate first-person narrative that oscillates between poetry, fiction, and documentary.

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