An adventurer can always return home; an exile cannot. So I decided that my home would be culture.
My life is essentially not so unique. On some deeper levels we feel the same, we know the same things. Therefore if I show my life 365 days, moments from those days, it will reflect and it will have connection with lives of all of us.
Seek the insignificant small but essential qualities, essential to life.
Just as in writing, there are novelistic and sort of pedestrian ways of telling a story, to write a postcard with your little pocket camera and put it on websites. I think that’s where the most exciting kind of imagery and content is being recorded and exchanged today.
I make home movies-therefore I live. I live-therefore I make home movies.
I had the fortune to spend some time, mostly during the summers, with Jackie Kennedy’s and her sister Lee Radziwill’s families and children. Cinema was an integral, inseparable, as a matter of fact, a key part of our friendship.
Yes, I got my first Bolex camera a few weeks after being dropped in New York by the United Nations Refugee Organization. That was on October 29th, 1949. With my brother Adolfas, we wanted to make a film about displaced persons, how one feels being uprooted from one’s home.
As a film-maker and a poet, I feel it’s my duty to be an eye and an antenna to what’s happening around me. I always felt a solidarity with those who are desperate and confused and misused and are seeking a way out of it.
I am very active on the Internet. In 2007, I made one film every day and posted it on my website. That was a 365-day project, really exhausting, but I still put a lot of stuff on – from life, friends, my own life.
I brought Yoko Ono to New York and gave her her first job there. I was editing a magazine called ‘Film Culture.’
There is no other way to break the frozen cinematic conventions than through a complete derangement of the official cinematic senses.
Some cameras are heavier and need to be on tripods. Others are small enough to hide in your pocket. There are places where you don’t want to feel like you are disturbing anything, so I may use a camera like that.
People were rushing by, all hurrying to die.
Education is the resistance to everything that is bad today.
How to live? To fall, to fall, with eyes closed, to fall into every occasion, into everything.
All nature is full of hatred for humans. I don’t think man has any friends among plants or animals. I suspect that even dogs and cats, those so-called best friends of man, are only pretending friendship to man in order to spy on his misdeeds, and they would betray him without blinking an eye the first chance they had. They know that Man is the worst of the beasts.
We have learned to eat like snakes. When there is something to eat – we eat enough to last for a week. When there is nothing – we don’t eat. Now, when we get our food supply, we eat it all, right there, we leave nothing for tomorrow. Like the birds. And then we read our books. We go after spiritual food...
It’s more difficult for a mother to forget one child than for living humanity to forget all the millions who died in this war.
You want me to be rational. The most rational thing is the machine. Go to the machines. All their separate parts work together. But I live with no purpose, irrationally.
We try to hide it every way we can, but it always comes out, the lyricism. A Lithuanian connot live without nature. You can’t detach him from the wide, green fields, from the brooks, the snow, the cobwebs flying through the air in late September, or from his forests, fragrant with moss and beries.
A meeting with nature means to me sometimes more than meeting with a person. It wakes up feelings, memories. Its arrows shoot deep, always on target.