![]() ![]() It took a decade to begin to see that it looked like the equivalent of a written diary. So I kept filming, I was a camera junkie. I was too busy for a time-consuming film project. ![]() HUO: What made you decide to film every day? I am very immersed in the possibilities of this way of re-using my films. They say that film is film and that you should leave it alone. I know that some of my fellow filmmakers look at this as almost sacrilegious. That content is transformed into a different and more contemporary event. It’s no longer a linear kind of memoir, there is a totally different energy that comes in. I am very interested in what happens when I break up a film into four parts and present it on four monitors. JM: I am more into using the filmed material in new ways. HUO: What role does re-use play in your role as filmmaker? I think I am coming closer to succeeding, but it takes a total submersion of my own identity it’s a meeting of trance and madness. I continue to face the most difficult challenge: being really individual while taping real life situations. You have to be able to wait patiently for that moment. The challenge is how to record moments of real life and catch the essence of the moment in one unbroken take. But I have to say that since I switched to video and especially during the 365 Day Project, I became interested in how to eliminate that transformation. So I extract little fragments of reality and I make something different out of them. But during the process of winemaking or breadmaking, the original materials get transformed into something else. JM: Say my films are like wine, or bread. HUO: How far removed can your films become from reality during the extraction process? We came to New York disappointed with humanity but discovered and got infected by a fresh energy for life. It was incredibly rich and exciting and we absorbed it like dry sponges. Then there was the Beat Generation, Abstract Expressionism, Tenth Street, and eventually, Happening Theatre. The exciting and emerging avant-garde films from Kenneth Anger, Gregory Markopoulos, Maya Deren and Sidney Peterson in those days were called experimental. When we landed in New York, we felt like we were dropped off in Paradise the city was full of cinemas, actors and jazz. JM: During Soviet and German occupation and the five years in displaced persons camps, in the ruins of what once was Germany, we were starved for culture and what we had missed during our younger years. HUO: What effect did New York have on you when you moved there after the war? I was suddenly in the West while my childhood friends remained in the East. My involvement in the underground press had affected the direction of my life very drastically. However, our train was captured by military police and we ended up in a forced labour camp with French and Italian war prisoners. A few days later the two of us boarded a train that was supposed to take us to Vienna. Fake papers were made for me and my brother. I informed my friends and a decision was made that I should immediately disappear. We could not take the chance of the thief selling the typewriter and the Germans discovering where it had come from. One of the methods they used to trace them was by studying the typefaces of the typewriters used, so I had to keep mine well-hidden. Those publications were strictly forbidden. Both the Soviets and the Germans did everything to eradicate the publications I was involved with. Their function was to listen to the forbidden, mostly British radio, and inform people of what was happening in Lithuania and in the outside world. During both occupations, a network of anti-Soviet and anti-Nazi underground publication sprang up. A year or so later, the Germans pushed the Russians out and Lithuania fell under German control. JM: The Soviets marched into Lithuania in 1940 when I was in the seventh grade. What impact did this have on your later work? HUO: In Lithuania you were actively involved in writing for anti-Soviet and anti-Nazi publications. Ever since, I have only tried to recreate it. It was then that I think I reached the peak of my poetic life. When I film today, I unconsciously want to achieve some sense of adventure and excitement as I did then. Since then, I have been trying to achieve that same intensity and closeness to everyday reality that I managed in my recitation that day. ![]() My mother and father listened to me and I can still remember their amazement. It was a very faithful recitation of what he had done on that day. Suddenly I felt like singing about the story of his day. I think that I must have been around six years old. Jonas Mekas: I remember my beginnings very well. Hans Ulrich Obrist: Tell me about your early life. ![]()
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