In his Village Voice "Movie Journal" columns, Jonas Mekas captured the makings of an exciting movement in 1960s American filmmaking. Works by Andy Warhol, Gregory J. Markapoulos, Stan Brakhage, Jack Smith, Robert Breer, and others echoed experiments already underway elsewhere, yet they belonged to a nascent tradition that only a true visionary could identify. Mekas incorporated the most essential characteristics of these films into a unique conception of American filmmaking's next phase. He simplified complex aesthetic strategies for unfamiliar audiences and appreciated the subversive genius of films that many dismissed as trash. This new edition presents Mekas's original critiques in full, with additional material on the filmmakers, film studies scholars, and popular and avant-garde critics whom he inspired and transformed.

"Jonas Mekas' diaries have an aching honesty, puckish humor and quiet nobility of character. Many readers curious about the early years of this seminal avant-garde filmmaker will discover here a much more universal story: that of the emigrant who can never go back, and whose solitariness in the New World is emblematic of the human condition." -Phillip Lopate
"I was enormously moved by it." -Allen Ginsberg
Legendary filmmaker Jonas Mekas actually came to filmmaking relatively late in life, and his path to New York was a difficult one. In 1944, Mekas and his younger brother Adolfas had to flee Lithuania. They were interned for eight months in a labor camp in Elmshorn. Even after the war ended, Mekas was prevented from returning to his native Lithuania by the Soviet occupation. Classed as a “displaced person,” he lived in DP camps in Wiesbaden and Kassel for years. It was only at the end of 1949 that Jonas and Aldolfas Mekas finally found their way to New York City.
A new edition of Mekas’ acclaimed memoir, first published by Black Thistle Press in 1991, I Had Nowhere to Go tells the story of the artist’s survival in the camps and his first years as a young Lithuanian immigrant in New York City. Mekas’ memoir―the inspiration for a 2016 biopic by Douglas Gordon―tells the story of how an individual life can move through the larger 20th-century narratives of war and exile and tentatively put down new roots. In the words of Phillip Lopate, “This is a lyrical, essential spiritual anthropology.”
Jonas Mekas (born 1922) lives and works in New York. Filmmaker, writer and poet, he is a cofounder of Anthology Film Archives, one of the world’s largest and most important repositories of avant-garde film. An influential figure in New American Cinema and New York underground culture, he worked with Andy Warhol, George Maciunas, John Lennon and many others. Mekas’ work has been exhibited in museums and festivals worldwide.

There's a live-wire spontaneity to Mekas's writing, an excitement sparked by his sense of beauty, by his sheer pleasure in cinematic imagination, and it's connected to a soulful sense of inwardness and empathy. -The New YorkerAndy Warhol, Susan Sontag, John Lennon & Yoko Ono -- Jonas Mekas was well acquainted with a great many New York artists. Born in Lithuania, he came to Brooklyn via Germany in 1949 and began shooting his first experimental films there. Mekas developed a form of film diary in which he recorded his daily observations. He became the barometer of the New York art scene and a pioneer of American avant-garde cinema. Every week, starting in 1958 he published his legendary Movie Journal column in the Village Voice, writing on a range of subjects that were by no means restricted to the world of film. He conducted numerous interviews with artists, some of which will now appear for the first time in his Scrapbook of a Diarist. The book contains published and unpublished texts that reveal Mekas as a thoughtful diarist and an unparalleled chronicler of the day -- a phenomenon that has continued now for over fifty years.

Starting with personal film archives, the New York experimental filmmaker Jonas Mekas here offers a CD of an original bilingual French/English sound piece conceived as a retrospective diary--extended with drawings, photos and texts within the book.