Screening

Douglas Gordon: I Had Nowhere to Go

8 Oct 2016

Regular hours

Saturday
10:00 – 18:00

Cost of entry

£12.75
Concessions available

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Tate Modern

London, United Kingdom

Address

Travel Information

  • Bus: 45, 63, 100, 344, 381, RV1
  • Tube: Southwark/Blackfriars
  • Train: London Bridge
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A sound-based portrait of 93-year-old filmmaker and writer Jonas Mekas’s life in exile

About

Based on Jonas Mekas’s published diaries of the same title, Douglas Gordon’s latest feature takes a radical approach to adapting Mekas’s life story to the space of cinema, offering just ten minutes’ worth of images in the predominantly sound-based work. Sharing at once a very personal yet increasingly universal story of exile, Mekas tells of his experiences in a Nazi forced labour camp, his five years in a displaced persons camp and his first years living as a young Lithuanian immigrant in Brooklyn. His stories offer rich biographical context for the impetus to record seen across his work, from his seminal oeuvre of ‘diary films’ documenting both his daily life and the New York art scene to his role in founding Anthology Film Archives.  

Featuring a sound design by Frank Kruse (Cloud AtlasCitizenfour), I Had Nowhere to Go is the first film edited in Dolby Atmos surround to be presented in the newly refurbished Starr Cinema. The screening continues Tate Film’s thread of presenting cinematic conversations between artists of different generations, which began with Akram Zaatari and Hashem el Madani in May, Lynn Hershman Leeson and Tania Bruguera in June and continues with Tyler Hubby and Tony Conrad mid-October. The powerful dialogue established between the two Tate Collection artists in this work effects both a unique challenge to the documentary form and registers a compelling first-hand account of the life of one of the greatest documenters of the human experience.

Douglas Gordon, I Had Nowhere to Go, Germany 2016, DCP, colour, sound, 97 min 

The screening is followed by a discussion with Douglas Gordon in person and Joans Mekas via Skype.

Exhibiting artistsToggle

Douglas Gordon

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