Video/Film
Super8, video, color, sound
The film is an intimate portrait of the ‘godfather of American avant-garde cinema’ Jonas Mekas – and, at 95 years old, among the remaining few to have escaped and survived Nazi persecution. I had nowhere to go has been celebrated for its sparse materiality, and its reflection on the narrative of history. Douglas Gordon’s film work has redefined expectations of the relationship between sound, text, time, and the moving image. I had nowhere to go collates one minute of film time with each year of Mekas’s momentous life, including his journey from a forced labor camp and a displaced persons center during WWII, and his emigration from Lithuania to New York. The viewer is plunged into collective and individual spaces of memory via long, imageless stretches over which Mekas narrates excerpts from his memoir (from which the film takes its title). With an immersive sound environment and intermittent, fleeting images that stand in evocative juxtaposition to Mekas’s anecdotes, Gordon’s film reveals in its subject a puckish humor that outweighs despair, and an unabated curiosity for life that both illuminates and softens the sadness of his subject matter.
