Displaced and Dispossessed:

Jonas Mekas and his Search for the Pastoral homeland.

Identifying avant-garde filmmaker Jonas Mekas within a particularly Romantic strain of the pastoral tradition was first posited by P. Adams Sitney in his groundbreaking work, Visionary Film.
Mekas [sic] Diaries Notes and Sketches (1964-69) [later renamed as Walden] and Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania (1971) [sic] are exercises in romantic autobiography. Mekas constantly weaves together celebrations of the present moment [...] with elegiac and iconic allusions to a presence that is forever absent to the camera lens: the vision of nature and of his childhood.1

Sitney has since gone on to connect Mekass work with the 19th century American Transcendentalists texts of Ralph Waldo Emerson.2 It is true that Mekass gestural, fragmented and ecstatic cinematographic style perfectly equates to Emersons privileging of the visual and his description of himself as a transparent eyeball.3 Also the multiple and rich connections between Mekass Walden and its literary namesake written by Emersons great disciple Henry David Thoreau have been thoroughly explored by both David E. James and Scott MacDonald.4 However, the pastoral genre extends much further and wider than the romanticism of Blake and Wordsworth or their aforementioned American counterparts, and it will be the contention of this

P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde 1943-1978 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979) p. 360 2 See P. Adams Sitney, Eyes Upside Down: Visionary Filmmakers and the Heritage of Emerson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). 3 Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature (London: Penguin Books, 2008) p. 5
4

paper that much insight can be gained from placing Mekass work within the wider context of the issues and debates which have been at the center of the pastoral tradition since ancient times. Jonas Mekas begins his third long form diary film Lost, Lost, Lost, (1976) by quoting Homer. O Sing Ulysses. Tell the story of the man who never wanted to leave his home. Jonas

Mekas is a man who never wanted to leave his home, and his series of 16mm diary films, beginning with Walden (1969), are above all else aching laments over a theme which has preoccupied the pastoral from its very inception: paradise lost. Paradise in Mekass case was the tiny village of Semeniskiai in Lithuania where he spent his childhood on the family farm looking after livestock and working the fields.5 This rural and preindustrialized setting is Mekass equivalent to Virgils Arcadia, Shakespeares Forest of Arden and Prousts Combray. It is the disappearance of this Eden that all pastoral artists have mourned and consequently attempted to recreate in their work. Leo Marx has written that the pastoral has never been a mere simple wish-image of bucolic pleasure, but has always

David E. James, Introduction, in David E. James (ed), To Free the Cinema: Jonas Mekas and the New York Underground (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992) p. 4

been inextricably linked to politics.6 In analyzing Virgils first eclogue, The Dispossessed, Marx notes that No sooner does Virgil sketch in the ideal landscape than he discloses an alien world encroaching from without.7 The poem is in the form of a dialogue between two shepherds, Meliboeus, whose land has been expropriated by the Roman authority, and Tityrus, whose land was also at one point in jeopardy but has now been spared. Meliboeus, forced into exile by an unsympathetic government bureaucracy, faces the prospect of unending anxiety, deprivation, and struggle8, while Tityrus is able to continue spending his time sprawled in the shade practis[ing] country songs on a light shepherds pipe.9 Beginning with the Nazi occupation of Lithuania in 1942, unending anxiety, deprivation, and struggle must have been experiences with which Jonas Mekas became intimately familiar. Presumably unhappy with an alien worlds encroachment on his home, Mekas began to work for an anti-Nazi underground newspaper. When Mekas discovered that the typewriter he had been using to write his anti-Nazi articles had gone missing, he knew it would only be a matter of time before the Nazis would find it

Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000) p. 21 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid. 9 Virgil, The Pastoral Poems: a Translation of the Eclogues by E.V. Rieu (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1949) as cited in Marx, 2000, p. 20

and trace it back to him. Mekas was forced to leave his idyllic home in order to avoid arrest. In Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania (1972), he recounts how his uncle had urged him and his brother Adolfas to Go West, see the world, and then come back. Taking this advice they, with forged papers, boarded a train for Vienna. The train never reached its intended destination. Instead the Germans had the train re-routed to a forced labor camp close to Hamburg, where the brothers were subsequently interned.10 At the end of World War II, Europe was partitioned and Lithuania placed into Communist hands. Mekas was left permanently exiled from his homeland and from the immersion of nature he had experienced there as a child and adolescent.11 I have to bid goodbye to the home fields and the ploughlands that I love. Exile for me... says Meliboeus in the opening lines of Virgils eclogue. Later in the poem he agonizingly wonders, Ah, will the day come, after many years, when I shall see a place that I can call my home ...?12 These lines are uncannily echoed in the words to a Lithuanian folk song which Mekas relates to us in Reminiscences. Oh mother, how I long to see you again/I hope the long gray road will lead me

10 11

James, Introduction, 1992, p. 5 Scott MacDonald, The Garden in the Machine: A Field Guide to Independent Films About Place (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001) p. 234 12 Virgil, as cited in Marx, 2000, pp. 20-1

home again. Resolving oneself to the impossibility of returning to the lost homeland is one of the major themes shared by the two diary films (Walden and Reminiscences) under examination in this essay. Negotiating a middle ground between what is forever lost and what one is forced to accept in lieu of that fact has always been at the heart of the pastoral tradition and few artists have explored it with as much insight and poignancy as Jonas Mekas. 1969s Walden, comprised of footage Mekas shot on his 16mm Bolex camera during the years of 1964-68, is probably the most joyous of the three films under discussion. Mekass style [in the film] is aggressively personal: he refuses to hold the camera still, preferring an openly gestural style, and he often single-frames in a wildly erratic manner as he films ....13 It is this ecstatic and erratic style which animates the people, places and objects of the film. The images are suffused with life because the camera that records them is so obviously an extension of the human hand which holds it. The soundtrack too at times goes to great lengths to convey an almost euphoric bliss. Over images taken at his brother Adolfass wedding, Mekas, accompanying himself on the accordion, sings, They tell me I should always be searching/But I only celebrate what I see/I am searching for nothing, I am happy/I am searching for
13

MacDonald, 2001, p. 234

nothing, I am happy/I am searching for nothing, I am happy. Earlier in the film we have seen Mekas alone in his one room apartment in the Chelsea Hotel playing his accordion. Taking this and the words of the song he later sings it is not hard to equate Mekas with Virgils Tityrus, the archetypal pastoral shepherd, playing away on his pipe. However during his final refrain, Mekas cuts to a shot of a framed photograph of his father, Povilas, dead since the early 50s. He then cuts to a matching portrait of his mother, Elizbieta, alive in Lithuania but completely separated from her sons by what Marx would call an incursion of history.14 Both stare out from behind the glass of their respective frames, wearing those expressionless faces that people of a certain generation often adopted when having their picture taken. By showing us their portraits during the wedding sequence, traditionally a time for family unity, Mekas is making a point of their absence, and of the distance which now separates the brothers from their real home. The placement of these images right at the moment when Mekas is most emphatically proclaiming his happiness would seem to undermine that bald assertion. Are we to take his declaration to not be searching for anything at face value? Mekas indeed it would seem is searching for something. Though he pretends to be Tityrus, he has more in common with Meliboeus. He is searching for the home
14

Marx, 2000, p. 21

he has lost, and despite what Mekas may sing to us, Walden is the story of that search. Walden is also a great conjuring act. Here before our eyes New York City is transfigured into a pastoral Arcadia, or more specifically the Lithuania of Mekass youth. Mekass own comments are highly revealing on this point.
I thought I was keeping a quite objective diary of my life in New York. But my friends who saw the first edition of Diaries, Notes & Sketches (Walden), said to me: But this is not my New York! My New York is different. In your New York Id like to live. But my New York is bleak, depressing ... Its then that I began to see that, really, I was not keeping an objective notebook [...] that they [the diaries] contained everything that New York didnt have [...] In truth, I am filming my childhood, not New York. Its a fantasy New Yorkfiction.15

What exactly are the images Mekas returns to again and again in this fantasy version of New York City? A young bare-legged blonde girl, bathed in sunlight, races through the green environs of Central Park. Children dance and play in mounds of autumn leaves. There are winter scenes of children with sleighs or engaged in snowball fights and city streets covered in snow. A young girl in red, another of Mekass woodland nymphs who grace the film throughout, caresses the green grass of Central Park with her bare feet and intently studies a tiny flower. There are many shots of trees in blossom and branches gently

15

Jonas Mekas, The Diary Film (A Lecture on Reminiscneces of a Journey to Lithuania) in P. Adams Sitney (ed), The Avant Garde Film: A Reader of Theory and Criticism (New York: New York Univeristy Press, 1978) p. 191

quivering in the breeze. We see no images of ghettos, violence, exasperation, inequality or any of the other negative tropes one has come to identify with the city. urban is totally effaced. The undeniable urbanity of New York City is seamlessly integrated into Mekass overall pastoral design of the film. Whether it be frame by frame shots taken from a moving train of the sun rising over the smoke stacks of Newark, images of a coal worker unloading a truck on 41st Street or the Empire State building bathed in the blue evening light of sunset, the city is an essential part of Mekass fantasy. In his subconscious efforts to discover those images of nature hiding the city, Mekas also discovered a new beauty in the juxtaposition of those traditional scenes of pastoral bliss with the seemingly incongruous urban spaces which surrounded them. Of course this urban pastoralist vision was hardly a new thing. Wordsworth was one of the masters of the form.
The city now doth, like a garment, wear The beauty of the morning; silent, bare Ships, towers, domes, theatres and temples lie Open unto the fields and to the sky; All bright and glistening in the smokeless air.
16

16

This is not to say the

Alfredo Leonardi, Occhio mio dio: il New American Cinema (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1971) cited in Pip Chodorov and Christian Lebrat (eds), The Walden Book (Paris: Editions Paris Experimental, 2009) p. 127

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Never did sun more beautifully steep In his first splendor, valley, rock or hill; Neer saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!17

This Wordsworthian ability to infuse the city (and its associative technology and modernity) with the tranquility of the countryside, or more broadly to simply merge the two into a harmonious whole, is something that all of the great pastoralists have inherited. We see it in Mark Twains beautiful description of a steamboat slipping along in the dark, and now and then she would belch a whole world of sparks up out of her chimbleys, and they would rain down in the river and look awful pretty..., or in Proust when the smell emanating from a bush of Hawthorns in the Bois du Boulogne (a natural refuge for Parisians much like Central Park is for the denizens of New York) can transport the narrator back to his idyllic days traversing the Meseglise and Guermantes ways.18 According to Marx the shepherd of pastoral tradition seeks a resolution of the conflict between the opposed worlds of nature and art. Art in this case being the civilizing and cultivating forces of modern life which, when taken to extremes, threatens the perfection of

17

Excerpt from William Wordsworth, Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802, The Complete Poetical Works. (London: Macmillan and Co., 1888; Bartleby.com, 1999.) http://www.bartleby.com/145/ww206.html Accessed January 1, 2011. 18 Mark Twain, Complete Text of Huckleberry Finn, Spark Notes. http://pd.sparknotes.com/lit/huckfinn/section21.html. Accessed on January 2, 2011; Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time Vol. 1 (London: Everymans Library 2001) p. 135

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the natural world.19 However, whether we understand art in Marxs terms or in its more familiar meaning, the statement aptly applies to Mekas who, by creating films with his Bolex camera (itself a machine and thusly representative of the modern age) has tried to negotiate a resolution between the rural and the city, the past of his childhood in Lithuania and his present day life in New York. In Walden Mekas attempts to transfigure with his camera his adopted home into something reminiscent of the home he left behind. In Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania (1972) his camera no longer has to search for figurative images; he is able to film Lithuania itself. Of course the Lithuania that he and his brother Adolfas return to in 1971 is not the one they left behind in the early 40s. This is the bitter irony which suffuses the film: even when you can physically return there is no such thing as truly going home. Part of the alchemy of Walden was a result of Mekass fragmented style. Handheld shots of varying exposures and durations, refusing all of the norms of traditional filmmaking, help to create the mosaic and transformative nature of the film. In Reminiscences Mekas attempted to modify his approach.
The basis of Walden is the single frame. There is a lot of density there. And when I was going to Lithuania I thought I would bring back
19

Marx, 2000, p. 22

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material in the same style. But, somehow, when I was there, I just couldnt work in the style of Walden, there [sic]. The longer I stayed in Lithuania the more it changed me, and it pulled me into a completely different style. There were feelings, states, faces that I couldnt treat too abstractly. Certain realities can be presented in cinema only through the duration of images.20

The face in particular that Mekas seems most interested in scrutinizing in duration is that of his mother, Elzbieta. For instance in the scenes of her cooking on the outdoor stove, Mekass usual rapid fire cutting is slowed to a more contemplative pace. Using a tripod to film, Mekas even enters the scene himself. One senses his desire to create a fixed lasting record of this rare moment between mother and son. What is also being recorded in this moment is Mekass past. His mother still cooks in the traditional way with the same primitive tools she used when Mekas was a boy. Its one of the genuine moments in the film where Mekas has magically caught time suspended. When looking at the film overall, however, the great stylistic shift that Mekas indicates is not as pronounced as he seems to think. Some of this is due to technical issues Mekas had while filming. The untested Bolex he took with him was incapable of maintaining a constant film speed or consistent exposures. Thus much of the footage seems characteristic of

20

Mekas, 1978, p. 194

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Mekass previous disregard for the norms of filmmaking. Mekas, with his typical aplomb, decided to accept the cameras faults and incorporate them as part of the stylistics of the film.21 This must have influenced the very structure of the film, for the middle section (where all the Lithuanian scenes take place) is entitled 100 Glimpses of Lithuania August 1971 (however, in fact, there are only 91). Glimpses being the key word.
The images in this section of the film are of increased speed, the editing is choppy, the camera handheld; the lighting intensity, focus and camera angle vary wildly. The overall effect is one of euphoria, urgency, confusion and fragmentation ....
22

The fragment is essential to Mekass cinema. Even when he consciously attempts to avoid its use, he seemingly cannot escape it. Much like, one could say, the fragmentation and loss of a life lived in exile.23 Sitney suggests that the fragmented pieces of film which make up Mekass work act as glimpses of the world and triggers to memory.24 In Reminiscences he is still trying to remember. ...the truth is, I didnt see the real life there. I was always looking for what was left of the memories of what was, what has been long ago. I missed the reality of today, or I saw it through a veil.25 Much of what he films in

21 22

Mekas, 1978, p. 195 Jon Davies, Experimental Exilic Documentaries, 2003, Kersplebedeb, www.kersplebedeb.com/mystuff/video/review/exile.html, Accessed December 15, 2010. 23 Ibid. 24 Sitney, 2008, p. 97 25 Mekas, 1978, p. 196

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Lithuania is play acting. Whether it is an older brother pretending to whip Mekas as he pulls a cart, or the brothers picking up scythes, long since abandoned for the automated reaper, to cut the crops like they once did a lifetime ago, or lining all of the brothers and sisters up against the wall to record their height, as if they were still growing children, his Lithuania is just as much a fantasy world as his New York. Naturally, in the 100 Glimpses section of the film Mekas celebrates nature with a pastoralists zeal. The taste of fresh water from the family well, the smell of fresh hay with which one makes their bed, the sight of full grown tress which were only seedlings the last time Mekas was home, all of these pastoral elements are given righteous homage. However, the film is not dedicated solely to these things. The trip to Lithuania, the whole raison dtre for the film, is only one section of it. Granted it is the longest section, but its real power is only ascertained by its placement between the two other parts of the film, the early 1950s footage of New York in section one and the trip to Vienna to visit Peter Kubelka, made directly after Mekass trip to Lithuania, which is the focus of section three. Again we are reminded of Marxs contention that true pastoral works are much more than mere hymns to the bucolic joys of life. It the exploration of the impossibility of recapturing the past

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glories of the Golden Age (and every pastoralist has his or her own version of that) which is an essential part of their design. Mekas may be incapable of recapturing the past, but there is no forgetting it despite his own occasional protestations to the contrary. That early fall in 1957 or 58 we went to the Catskills, Mekas tells us at the beginning of Reminiscences, and we see black and white images of Adolfas and another companion traipsing through a wooded pathway. The autumn landscape seems to act as a balm for Mekas as he confesses that in that moment he was temporarily able to forget the last ten years of war, of hunger, of Brooklyn. For the first time he tells us he was even able to forget his home. Once again, as in Walden, we are assured of something which does not quite ring true. How are we to believe that Mekas would be capable of forgetting his past in a location which clearly resembles the natural world of that past? Also there is a double irony to his confession as the very scenes we are watching were shot some thirteen years before the recorded narration to which we are listening. We are seeing the past at the very moment Mekas claims to be forgetting it. What we see in Mekas is not forgetting but recreating. As Marcel Proust sat in his cork lined room and page after page, detail by detail, created Combray to stand in for the Illiers of his childhood, Mekas has

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taken all of these self described fragments of Paradise26, whether they be of young Bibbe Hansen frolicking in Central Park or the Mekas brothers playing farmer on their first trip home in twenty-five years, and created a fictional stand-in for the Eden he was so unduly cast out. Go West, his uncle had told him. See the world and then come back. The lesson of Jonas Mekass life and the thematic obsession of his entire filmic output has been that there is no coming back. It is in the third and final section of Reminiscences that we see Mekas coming to grips with this reality and his conscious efforts to make meaning out of his life in the present. At the end of The Dispossessed Tityrus urges Meliboeus to delay his journey into exile and to sleep here as my guest for this one night, with green leaves for you bed.27 As Marx comments, it is hardly that satisfying of a resolution. It may succeed aesthetically, but it must have offered little comfort to those real life victims of the ravaged countryside on whom Virgil based his story.28 Virgil must have been well aware of

the dark undercurrent that still remained unresolved at the end of his poem.

26 27

A phrase he uses in a later diary film, Paradise Not Yet Lost a/k/a Oonas Third Year (1979) Virgil, as cited in Marx, 2000, p. 30 28 Marx, 2000, pp. 30-1

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Is Mekass conclusion of Reminiscences any more satisfying than Virgils? Yes and no. The final section is a collection of ebullient images of Mekas and four of his artistic/intellectual friends as they converge in Vienna for a cultural holiday. The friends visit Wittgensteins home, tour a monastery, inspect a grand library, and indulge in the basic pleasures of life (food, drink, song). Amongst all this social revelry Mekas seems to find peace. He tells us in the voice over, I begin to believe again in the indestructibility of the human spirit. It is important to understand that the friends on this trip, Kubleka, Hermann Nitsch, Annette Michelson and Ken Jacobs are all artistic compatriots of Mekass as well as friends. The two categories are actually impossible to separate in Mekass life. The resolution Mekas seeks for the loneliness of the exile is found within the artistic community of the underground cinema. He and Adolfas did not make it to Vienna back in 1942, but here he is now in 1971 surrounded by some of the great minds of the avant-garde cinema. This importance placed on art and on filmmaking is explored throughout Walden as well. In that film Mekas combines his pastoral scenes with an equal number depicting the rise of the New American cinema, of which he was at the forefront, and of course at times he is able to combine the two as is seen in the extended sequence where Mekas visits Stan Brakhage at his home in Colorado. So, on the surface,

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Reminiscences finds the same kind of triumphal tone that many of the classic pastoral romances contained. Mekas at play with his friends in Vienna seems somewhat equivalent to the familial happiness shared by the characters at the end of Shakespeares As You Like It or The Tempest. However, the joyful tone is not sustained. At the very end of the film Mekas and company are returning to Vienna by train. Smoke from a nearby fire can be seen in the sky. They learn that a fruit market is burning down; the most beautiful in the city says Kubleka. He then claims the city set fire to it intentionally in order to make way for a new modernized market. We only see the smoke from the train so the claim can for us appears to have little veracity, but we are left unsure as to how Mekas wants us to interpret it. Regardless of the facts, the image of an old fruit market in flames, which, one imagines, was selling the kind of produce that might have come from a farm very much like the one Mekas grew up on, leaves the viewer with an uneasy feeling. We cannot help but now view his respite in Vienna as little more than temporary, similar to the bittersweet one Meliboeus enjoys at the end of Virgils eclogue. In Reel 4 of Walden during the bucolic episode in Colorado with the family of Stan Brakhage, a very curious moment occurs. Shots of little rabbit pellets in the snow are accompanied with

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an enthusiastic inter-tile which reads simply: I FIND RABBIT SHIT! To an uninitiated audience in 1969, the relevance of this moment would have been completely missed. Only to those who saw Lost Lost Lost seven years later would the reference begin to make sense. During a section of that film sub-titled Rabbitshit Haikus (comprised of footage Mekas had shot in Vermont during the winter of 62) Mekas tells a story.
Do you know the story of the man who could not live anymore without knowing whats at the end of the road, and what he found there when he reached it? He found a pile, a small pile of rabbit shit, at the end of the road. And back home he went. And when people used to ask him, Hey where does this road lead to? He used to answer: Nowhere, the road leads nowhere, and there is nothing but a pile of rabbit shit at the end of the road. So he told them. But nobody believed him.29

Is Mekas directing this cautionary tale at himself? It would seem to be a warning to those who grow up dreaming that life will be better in some faraway place. According to his own words though, Mekas was never such an ambitious dreamer.
No no no I never sleep well. Ill never sleep well. Because I never wanted to leave my home. Because I never wanted to be here.30

29 30

Transcript from Sitney, 2008, p. 94. From Mekass diary dated February 15, 1948, originally published in I Had Nowhere to Go. (New York: Black Thistle Press, 1991) cited in Chodorov and Lebrat, 2009, p.54

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The story must have a crucial importance for Mekas as a version of it, virtually word for word with the one in Lost, appears in a journal entry of his dated August 1947.31 Perhaps it is best read as a lament for those foolish enough to believe there is somewhere else other than home. Nothing is at the end of the road much travelled; the journey has no destination. Of course to find an assured rebuttal to this bleak assessment one only needs to look at the films themselves. Mekass films are abundant with beauty in all its forms. Whether it is the breathtaking time lapse sequence on the shore of Cassis or when Mekas captures the sunrise over Manhattan and the Harlem River, or simply a quiet field just before sunset on Timothy Learys Millbrook Estate, surely one must think that the journey was worth something after all.
A great poet not only asserts but exemplifies the possibility of harmony. When he assimilates new and seemingly artificial facts into the texture of a poem he provides an example for all men. What he achieves in art they can achieve in life.32

The great challenge of Mekass life and his art, which for him are one in the same thing, is to create harmony out of the discord that has been his life in exile. Using the poetic tools of his Bolex and a flatbed editing table, Mekas has attempted to immortalize the life he was forced to leave while finding and

31 32

Mekas, 1991, cited in Chodorov and Lebrat, 2009, p. 104 Mark, 2000, p. 242

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celebrating the beauty in the life he actually lives, wherever and whenever it happens to appear. Like all great pastoralist he has shown how the past can only ever be fitfully and artificially bridged with the humble tools of the poet. Nevertheless that Eden, or Arcadia or Walden, or Semenskai, whatever its name might be, still exists not in natural facts or in social institutions or in anything out there, but in consciousness. It is a product of imaginative perception, of the analogy perceiving, metaphor-making, mythopoeic power of the human mind.
33

Word Count: 5,138

33

Marx, 2000, p. 264

22 Chodorov, Pip and Christian Lebrat, The Walden Book. Paris: Editions Paris Experimental, 2009. Davies, Jon. "Experimental Exilic Documentaries ." 2003 . Kersplebedeb. Accessed 15 December 2010 <www.kersplebedeb.com/mystuff/video/review/exile.html>. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Nature . London : Penguin Books , 2008 . James, David E. To Free the Cinema: Jonas Mekas & The New York Underground. Ed. David E. James. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. MacDonald, Scott. The Garden in the Machine . Berkeley : University of California Press, 2001. Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden . New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Mekas, Jonas. "The Diary Film (A Lecture on Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania)." Avant Garde Film: A Reader Theory and Criticism. Ed. P. Adams Sitney. New York: New York University Press, 1978. 190-98. Sitney, P. Adams. Eyes Upside Down: Visionary Filmmakers and the Heritage of Emerson. New York : Oxford University Press, 2008. . Film Culture Reader . Ed. P. Adams Sitney. New York : Cooper Sqaure , 2000. . Visionary Film: The American Avant Garde. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979. Thoreau, Henry David. Walden . London : Everyman's Library , 1992.