Have you seen any good Lithuanian films lately? I have to admit that I know nothing about the cinema of Lithuania and not that much about the country which borders Latvia at the north, Belarus on the southeast and Russia and Poland to the southwest. I only know that Lithuania was an independent country for centuries until it was occupied by the Soviet Union from 1944 to 1990, the year its independence was restored. The country does have a rapidly growing film industry and studios like HBO and Netflix have utilized the region for film locations as in the 4th season of Stranger Things and the 2019 mini-series Chernobyl. But the only Lithuanian filmmakers I can name are Jonas and Adolfas Mekas, brothers who immigrated to the U.S. in 1949 and became major figures in New York’s experimental film scene along with fellow peers like Ken Jacobs, Hollis Frampton, Jack Smith and Andy Warhol. Piligrimal (English title: Pilgrims, 2021) is the first Lithuanian movie I can recall seeing but it presents a refreshing and rarely used approach to the storytelling process that requires the viewer to play detective as the story begins four years after a terrible crime has been committed and details about the case emerge slowly in bits and pieces.
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Dining in the Buff
The idea of a nude restaurant where the clientele and wait staff are composed of various members of Andy Warhol’s Factory crowd such as Taylor Mead and Viva wearing little more than skimpy black briefs may not sound like the most appetizing destination for dining. Yet, as a film, The Nude Restaurant (1967) is a lively, frequently hilarious and occasionally despairing communiqué from the underground for those who have always avoided or dismissed the experimental cinema of Andy Warhol as something boring and interminable based on seeing snippets of 1963’s Sleep (a 321 minute static camera study of John Giorno asleep in bed) or 1964’s Empire (a 485 minute single shot portrait of the Empire State Building from dusk until approximately 3 am) or just reading about them. Continue reading
