A cofounder of New York’s Anthology Film Archives and a tireless documenter of his own perambulations, the preservative archival impulse is an essential aspect of Mekas’ creative project, a fact never more explicit than in the conclusion of Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania, which ends with the counterpoised images of monastery libraries and a fire devouring the old fruit market in Vienna—the glories of preservation, the horrors of destruction. After early scenes of street life in Lithuanian Williamsburg, familiar from Lost Lost Lost, Mekas leaps into a homecoming montage showing his hometown Semenikiai twenty-five years after he left it, a pied flutter of wildflowers, washstands, wells, dray carts, dappled groves, potato pancakes, a largely intact premodern rural life, and Mamma—each shot held only about as long as it takes to adjust the f-stop. A number of relations work for the communal farm—an ex-classmate operates the combine. Some subjects are self-conscious of how they will seem to Americans, but life under the Communist SSR is only incidentally the subject of this sentimental journey: “You would like to know something about the social reality… but what do I know about it?”