Paradise Not Yet Lost, or Oona's Third Year

In 1974, Mekas married Hollis Melton. Their daughter, Oona, was born the same year. Where Mekas had found a home in the independent film community during the 1950s and ‘60s, by the mid-’70s he had his own family to care for. He made Paradise Not Yet Lost (aka Oona’s Third Year) in 1979 with footage shot in 1977. The film is arranged in six chronologically-ordered parts, each filmed in a different location during Oona’s third year: the first, domestic life in New York; the second, a trip to Sweden; the third, a return to Lithuania with Mekas’ new family; the fourth, a visit to Warsaw; the fifth, time spent in Vienna and Italy with Peter Kubelka and his daughters; and the sixth, the family’s resumption of life in New York.

Oona is the film’s central figure. She sings and laughs, and Mekas pays careful attention to her expressions of wonder as she accompanies her parents through the city streets and rural pastures they visit. When an intertitle flashes with the words, “the diarist”, Mekas refers not to himself but to his small daughter writing in her book. The film is also constructed as a letter to Oona, “to serve her, some day, as a distant reminder of how the world around her looked during the third year of her life.” (19) To depict this world, Mekas also includes footage of the people and events that were important to their family: her cousin Sean’s third birthday, the story of how Mekas’ mother refused to leave her home, an arm wrestle between Mekas and one of Peter Kubelka’s daughters, a visit to Harry Smith’s hotel room, and Nicholas Ray walking down the street after a heavy snowfall.

The title, Paradise Not Yet Lost, suggests that through Oona and the growth of his family, Mekas finds some hope of redemption. To that end, Mekas passes on some of the lessons he’s learned to his daughter: “I’m talking to you, Oona. Be idealistic, don’t be practical. Seek the insignificant small but essential qualities, essential to life.” Yet his advice is marked by the bitterness of his own experience. In another passage, during which the family visits Oona’s grandparents, he says:

I’m talking to you, Oona, because I have no more trust in my contemporaries. They have betrayed the nature, they have poisoned mine and your air. They have even driven me out from my home. They have no interest in the things that are essential to life.

Several times intertitles appear, marking the images as “fragments of Paradise”. The Paradise that Mekas finds in his life are moments of simple beauty and joy: Oona standing on a table, looking at a cat; a feast of wild mushrooms, cooked in the field where they had been found. Moreover, these glimpses of Paradise describe the scenes of Oona’s childhood, and through them, Mekas’ own childhood. Midway through the section on Lithuania, Mekas recounts a story he had heard about Adam and Eve after they had left Paradise. While Adam slept next to a rock, Eve looked back and saw the “globe of Paradise exploding into millions of tiny bits and fragments.” Once ejected, the view back towards Paradise is a fractured one. For Mekas, Paradise can only be seen in “tiny bits and fragments”. The Paradise he seeks, then, is one experienced through the act of viewing.
To find Paradise, even in fragments, is a rare occurrence. In addressing Oona, Mekas also cautions us:

But I am not saying, Oona, that things have been that much better ever before. No, at any given time there were only very few women and men struggling to seek out and preserve the little bits of Paradise so that their lives would be more beautiful and the lives of those who would come after them. Paradise cannot be gained without a constant struggle, moment by moment. – Genevieve Yue, sensesofcinema.com

As we live after the Fall (and for Mekas, the devastating Fall occurred when he was forced to leave Lithuania), we can only catch glimpses of Paradise, in fragments. Mekas’ great accomplishment, then, is to persist in filming Paradise wherever he can, despite the darkness and struggle that surrounds him.