Jonas Mekas I Had Nowhere to Go Signed 1991 First Edition Avant-Garde Film

Description

Before Jonas Mekas became one of the defining figures of American avant-garde cinema, he was a displaced person trying to survive the wreckage of Europe. I Had Nowhere to Go gathers his diaries from 1944 through 1955: his forced-labor experience during the war, years spent in displaced-persons camps, emigration from Lithuania and eventual arrival in New York, where the loneliness and exhilaration of immigrant life gradually intersect with the beginnings of his life as an artist. First published by Black Thistle Press in 1991, it is both testimony and diary—personal history told in the fragmentary, immediate form that would become so important to Mekas’s filmmaking.

Mekas would become a central figure in New American Cinema and a cofounder of Anthology Film Archives, but this book takes us back before the legend: a young Lithuanian refugee writing his way through war, exile and New York City. Allen Ginsberg said he was enormously moved by the book, and Phillip Lopate called attention to both its account of emigration and its portrait of the young Mekas discovering the strange mixture of rapture and loneliness in postwar New York. This is the original 1991 Black Thistle edition, inscribed and signed by Mekas—a terrific book by one of the essential artists and chroniclers of the American underground.

A powerful signed first edition from Jonas Mekas—filmmaker, diarist, immigrant, survivor, and one of the great eyes of the twentieth-century avant-garde.