Original subtitles

0h, sing, ulysses.

Sing your travels.

Tell where you have been. Tell what you have seen.

And tell a story of a man

who never wanted to leave his home.

Who was happy

and lived among the people he knew

and spoke their language.

Sing, how then he was thrown out

into the world.

Life goes on. Father works in a factory.

In the evening the family gathers together around the table.

Everything is normal.

Everything is very normal.

The only thing is,

you will never know what they think.

You will never know what a displaced person thinks...

In the evening and in New York.

Those were long, lonely evenings,

long, lonely nights.

There was a lot of walking,

walking...

Through the nights of Manhattan.

I don't think I have ever been as lonely.

October 3rd, 1950.

I have been trying to write with a pencil.

But my fingers do not really grasp the pencil properly,

not like they used to grasp it a year ago.

From working in the factory my fingers became stiff.

They don't bend, they lost their subtlety of movement.

There are muscles in them I haven't seen before.

They look fatter.

Anyway, I cannot hold the pencil.

So, I go to the typewriter and I begin to type,

with one finger.

I'll never forget that Christmas night.

We couldn't sit home.

It was too lonely.

The streets were empty.

We stopped at ginkus' candy store.

Nobody was there. But ginkus was there.

We drank cold beer,

we looked at the street, at the Christmas wrappings.

The wind was blowing bits of newspapers along the street.

Somewhere, in Brooklyn, at the end of the world.

I know I am sentimental.

You would like...

These images to be more abstract.

It's o.K., call me sentimental.

You sit in your own homes,

but I speak with an accent...

And you don't even know where I come from.

These are some images and some sounds

recorded by someone in exile.

Occasionally we used to escape to stony brook.

I can imagine a house,

maybe in Paris or maybe near Paris...

Where, in the early 20s,

the Russian immigrants used to gather

and exchange their memories...

And then, as the years went by, slowly die.

Such a house for me was the house of lape.

We all gathered there; We all lived on memories there.

Poets, politicians,

and those who did not belong anywhere...

We were all accepted at the house of lape.

This was one of the sundays...

One of the weekends when everybody came

and everybody was embraced.

I remember that weekend.

We sat on the porch,

we looked at the green trees...

At the chairs outside, at the people.

There were so many guests,

so many guests that weekend.

Oh, and bernardas was there...

Playing...

With little branches and stones...

Maybe bits of memories...

We spoke about nothing in particular.

I remember we spoke about Dylan Thomas.

Inside, there was music.

You danced...

Then we all ran out, our little group.

Vida, and your friend...

I don't remember her name now...

But we all ran to the woods, and to the beach,

and there we played.

I look at you now from a distance.

Crowds, every Sunday afternoon.

I look at you.

Eh, and you thought it was all so temporary.

Paulius, paulius, I see you.

Remember, last days, that evening...

That evening we all danced

around a young birch tree outside of the barracks.

We thought it will be all so temporary...

We'll be all home soon.

And then we all went in different directions.

I see you, I see... you.

I recognize your faces,

each one is separate in the crowd.

I met prof. Pakstas in Philadelphia.

As a child I used to hear about prof. Pakstas's theories.

He said, Lithuania should buy an island

east of Africa, and move there.

There will never be peace for Lithuania.

It's on the road between Russia and Germany,

between east and west.

Move out, he said... They thought he was crazy.

Now, I see his point.

I didn't have much to do with politics during those years in Brooklyn,

even though the generals had branded me a communist.

Every poet is a communist to the generals.

But I was there, with my camera.

I wanted to be the recording eye,

I wanted to be the camera historian of the exile.

I was there with my camera.

I was there

to record the conflicting passions.

They were there,

Lithuanian communists and Lithuanian nationalists.

And they didn't know...

That they were Lithuanians first...

And only second nationalists and communists.

But they didn't see the truth of each other.

After all, Stalin was still alive.

As I was looking at the overgrown wall, I remembered another wall,

near my uncle's house.

In the silence of the night we used to hear screams

coming from behind the wall, through the night.

Those were headquarters of Stalin's nkvd.

Let my camera record the desperations of the small countries.

Oh, how I hate you, the big nations!

Your big rivers, and your big mountains,

and your big histories, and your big armies,

and your big wars!

And you always get together, like at the United Nations

and you proclaim yourselves the big three, or the big four,

and you always think that you are the only ones:

The others, the others do not matter.

They should be part of you or speak your language.

Oh, come, come,

the dictatorship of the small countries!

Oh, sing, ulysses,

sing the desperation of the exile,

sing the desperation of the small countries!

I saw you, and I made notes with my camera,

you, marching there,

through the noise of the big city,

that did not even know you existed.

I remember you,

gathering in dingy, smoky rooms,

remnants of the old government from the independent days,

and the new political activists,

students, poets, journalists.

I remember you. I was there,

the chronicler, the diarist.

And then there was juozas tysliava,

the poet, the futurist, and follower of marinetti.

We thought as we watched him,

we thought the whole calamity of the world

was just a stage for him,

for his futuristic performances.

In New York, at the Webster hall, with an audience of thousands,

he performed his last political gesture,

cursing the big nations.

Here was the last and desperate stand

of an individual against masses;

small countries against big countries,

poets against politicians.

Oh, sing, ulysses, sing.

Tell about the places you have been.

Tell what you have seen.

And I was there, and I was the camera eye,

I was the witness,

and I recorded it all,

and I don't know, am I singing

or am I crying?

Meanwhile, our life in Brooklyn went on.

Meserole street, fifth street, lorimer street,

maspeth, linden street.

We moved from place to place, from factory to factory.

We spent long days, long miserable weeks...

In the waiting rooms

of the Warren street employment agencies,

taking any job, any.

When I looked at them, like this, gathered,

talking, joking...

There was a feeling around them,

there was a feeling of a long vacation,

like they were on along vacation.

There was no desperation yet in their faces.

All that came later...

Here they still felt:

Going home was just around the corner,

$00“, $00“...

Very soon.

This is only temporary,

only temporary...

I was there with my camera,

I recorded it.

This was seventh year,

for some of you eighth year in exile.

There you were.

The only thing that mattered to you

was the independence of your country.

All those meetings, all those talks.

What to do, what will happen,

how long, what can we do?

Yes, I was there, and I recorded it...

For others, for the history,

for those who do not know the pain of the exile.

How beautiful is this music!

But this music was written by chopin

in exile, in Paris.

These were our last times together.

I began to feel, around this time,

I began to feel that I had been turning

on one spot,

around my memories.

I begin to feel

that if anything can be done for Lithuania

it can be done only by the people who live there,

That the only way I can be useful to Lithuania...

Is by rebuilding myself

from scratch, from the beginning,

and then giving myself back to it,

back to Lithuania, for whatever I am.

How I watched you, that day, singing,

with your faces transfixed,

transported back to Lithuania.

Oh, no, never, never...

From the very cells of your bodies.

This was our last time together.

I felt I was falling into 1,000 pieces.

Next day, I left Brooklyn and moved to Manhattan.

That spring my brother came back from the army.

We settled down on orchard street,

And we started, or rather we continued, writing.

We wanted to be writers.

We started shooting our first film.

I looked for the footage.

I couldn't find most of it.

We wanted it to be... About a woman, this woman.

She gets up in the morning.

The sun is streaming through the window.

She dresses up,

She walks out into the street.

And suddenly, she sees, or imagines.

She sees: She's at home.

Early in the morning.

Her husband is already up.

He's washing his face, drying his face.

She sees it all,

still half asleep.

She sees it all.

Later: He is in the street.

It's raining, slightly, drizzling.

There is a car.

There is a car...

And that's it...

He is in the puddle.

She sees it,

she sees it all.

She's awakened from her daydream

by a car accident,

Just like she saw it, just as she saw it.

She's very upset.

She cannot go to work. She goes to the park, instead.

She has to walk it out.

Of course, it was just another day in the city,

it happens every day.

But she had to walk it out,

to walk it out in the park.

She walked.

She walked.

She looked at the trees. It made her feel better,

the trees, the roots, early spring trees.

Not much life, but still... life.

That's all that remains from this film.

It was exciting.

Everything was new.

The city,

the people,

everything was new.

We walked through the city, we submerged in it.

There is very little known about this period

of our protagonist's life.

It's known that he was very shy

and very lonely during this period.

He used to take long, long walks.

He felt very close

to the park, to the streets, to the city.

It was the last good Autumn day.

It was one of those

fantastic Indian summer days.

We couldn't sit in the city.

Gideon said, "let's go to New Jersey."

So we went.

Gideon, Suzy, and the two of us.

We had good times.

We always had good times with Gideon in the country.

We stopped in places,

we walked through the woods.

Then, I don't know, was it Gideon or was it my brother

who said, "let's go to the shooting grounds!"

So we went to the shooting grounds.

Winter '59 found us on east 13th street.

It was a cold winter.

And it was a miserable period.

We lived on miserable sandwiches and coffee.

We wrote. We did a lot of writing,

with coffee eating our stomachs.

These bits I'm recording here

with my camera...

These images...

These bits that I have recorded

from the places I have passed through...

It's my nature now to record

everything I'm passing through.

Streets,

faces,

cities.

Oh my childhood,

fading now,

like these images will fade away.

We were driving back to New York that day, with bellamy.

I was looking at the landscape.

I knew I was in america.

What am I doing here, I asked myself.

There was no answer.

The landscape didn't answer me.

There was no answer.

Here I came,

to this point, to this place.

The winds have brought me here,

and I see you and I record you.

I don't know if I've ever understood you,

if I ever really understood

what you stood for, what you went through.

But I was there.

I was just a passer-by,

from somewhere else,

from completely somewhere else,

seeing it all, with my camera,

and I recorded it, I recorded it all.

I don't know... why.

I was with you.

I had to be.

You were... the blood of my city,

the heartbeat.

I wanted to... feel its pulse,

to feel its excitement.

Yes...

This was my city.

I think it was just before Christmas...

They stood there. They stood there all day, all night.

It was cold.

It was the coldest day of the year.

They stood there, the women for peace.

I stood on the corner of 42nd street and I watched them.

There were people passing by, hurriedly.

Nobody stopped.

They were passing by.

It was just before Christmas...

I have seen you, the leaflet women, the unknown!

In rain, in snow,

in cold; In hot summer days.

I sing you, the leaflet women!

I have no idea what winds are driving me and where.

But I chose this way,

this way without directions.

I chose it myself...

And here I am...

So let me continue.

I don't want to look back.

Not yet.

Or not anymore.

Ahead, ahead...

I am pushing.

Becks. Peace.

Anarchy.

I remember, that early morning, one Sunday,

they were there, in front of the United Nations building,

their rucksacks full of leaflets.

It was snowing, it was freezing,

and nobody was there, I don't know where the city was,

I don't know where anybody was... Sleeping, or in the churches...

But the becks were there, walking for peace.

It was cold, it was snowing, it was freezing.

They looked so lonely and lost.

It's my nature now to record,

to try to keep everything I'm passing through.

To keep at least bits of it.

I have lost too much.

So now,

I have these bits that I have passed through.

Later that summer we visited Vermont.

There was so much sun.

We were...

Drunk with the summer,

with the woods and lakes

and friendship.

We fooled around.

It was summer.

The sun.

The trees.

The sun.

The trees the trees the trees.

The road the road the road.

The sunset the sunset the sunset.

Emshwiller emshwiller emshwiller.

The childhood the childhood the childhood.

The window the window the window.

The frost.

The river the river the river.

The snow the snow the snow.

The childhood the childhood the childhood.

The field the field the field.

The frost.

The hills the hills the hills.

The clouds the clouds the clouds.

The wind the wind the wind.

The childhood the childhood the childhood.

The snow the snow the snow.

The river the river the river.

The wind.

The fall the fall the fall.

Do you know the story of a man

who could not live anymore without the knowledge

of what's 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 the road lead to?"

He used to answer: "Nowhere, the road leads nowhere...

And there is nothing at the end of the road but a pile of rabbit shit."

So he told them. But nobody believed him.

The window the window the window.

The river the river the river.

The summer the summer the summer.

The evening the evening the evening.

The winter the winter the winter.

The friendship the friendship the friendship.

The house the house the house.

The childhood the childhood the childhood.

The evening the evening the evening.

The wind.

The clouds the clouds the clouds.

He used to work, like everybody else...

And then stop and look at the horizon.

And when people used to ask him:

"Hey, what's wrong with you?

Why do you keep looking into the distance?"

He used to tell them:

"I want to know what's at the end of that road."

Yes.

He wanted to know what's at the end of the road.

No, he found nothing.

Nothing at the end of the road

when later, many years later,

after many years of journey

he came to the end of the road,

there was nothing, nothing but a pile of rabbit shit,

not even the rabbit was there any longer,

and the road led nowhere.

Those were the heroic days of park...

Of 414 park Avenue south.

Just across from the bellmore cafeteria.

I was trying to figure out the taxes for that year...

While p. Adams was making faces.

The leaves, the leaves, the leaves...

Peggy and Barbara,

Peggy.

Barbara.

Yes, singing he went,

singing for all friendships' sake.

She ran and she ran and she ran, towards the sun.

He knew he was making a fool of himself.

But it had to be done, it had to be done.

There was still a lot to go.

The sun, the water, the hair.

He was looking at her face, her hair.

He'd seen that hair before.

He was trying to remember where.

He had seen that hair before...

Those strings of hair.

No, no, he won't look back.

Singing he went...

Into the unpredictable

and unknown.

It was a fall day.

We decided to visit Barbara's friend in the asylum,

in long island.

On our way we picked up some pumpkins,

Which they presented to their friend.

No, those were not the best minds...

Of my generation,

there, behind those windows, no.

I don't know,

where the best minds of my generation are.

I am going.

Any direction.

I don't know where I am going,

and I don't trust any mind,

not any longer.

I haven't trusted any mind,

ever since I left my home.

It's the best minds of my civilization,

that brought me...

On this road,

this road...

That has no end,

this road, this journey...

That has no end.

As the New York night...

Slowly lifted...

There were two figures,

Barbara and Debbie,

waiting by the Coop door,

waiting for the jacobses to come.

The morning was coming...

Through the Coop's window.

It was our big trip to Flaherty...

Film seminar.

While the guests proper,

the respectable documentarists and cineasts...

Slept in their warm beds,

we watched the morning,

with the cold of night,

still in our bones,

in our flesh.

It was a Flaherty morning.

Slowly,

we woke up.

No, we didn't sleep well.

But it was beautiful.

There was a mist,

there was a mist hanging.

The earth was sweating out the night.

The sun was already there.

We felt closer to the earth,

to the morning,

than to the people sleeping there,

in those houses.

We felt like part,

of the morning,

Of the earth.

It was very, very quiet,

like in a church,

and we were the monks,

of the order of cinema.

Yes, the morning came,

and Linda and Barbara and Debbie,

we all...

Got up slowly,

woke up slowly,

together with the trees,

with the sun,

with the mist.

Ken and flo decided to spend a few days in Vermont.

The rest of us,

we hitchhiked

back to New York.

It was one of those clear,

sunny Autumn days.

Barbara and Debbie insisted on going swimming,

just as they were.

It was... foolish,

but it was their way of doing things.

There were few people,

on the beach that day.

A couple of children,

women.

We, we walked along the shore,

on the beach, along the beach.

We looked at the water,

the pebbles.

We stood, looked into the distance.

It was good,

it was good.

It was like being in a church.

Oh, yes, it was one of those Autumn days,

it was one of those many trips.

We were happy.

All the troubles,

were washed away,

by the waters.

Whatever wasn't washed away by the waters,

was washed by the colors of Autumn.

We permitted ourselves,

the little...

We stopped here and there.

We had a good time.

Sometimes he didn't know where he was.

The present and the past,

intermingled, superimposed.

And then, since no place was really his,

no place was really his home,

he had this habit of attaching himself immediately...

To any place.

He used to joke:

"Oh, drop me in a desert...

And come back next week, and you will find me.

I'll have my roots deep and wide."

He remembered another day.

Ten years ago,

he sat on this beach,

ten years ago,

with other friends.

The memories,

the memories,

the memories.

Again I have memories.

I have a memory of this place.

I have been here before.

I have really been here before.

I have seen this water before.

Yes, I have walked,

upon this beach,

these pebbles.