I Had Nowhere to Go review – Douglas Gordon's fatuous bio-doc of Jonas Mekas

The Turner prize-winning artist has turned his attention to underground film-maker Jonas Mekas, pairing ponderous images with Mekas’s memories of the second world war. The result is clumsy, confused and desperately manipulative

‘The villain is the 20th century,” says emigre film-maker Jonas Mekas in Douglas Gordon’s pompous, empty feature film about this counterculture celebrity’s early life. Cue loud explosions against a dark screen, or a gorilla staring from its cage, or one of the other momentarily impressive but ultimately futile gimmicks that substitute for any actual insight.

Mekas has led an extraordinary life and played a spectacular part in New York’s art and film worlds. As a leader of the “underground film” movement in the 1960s he founded the Film-Makers’ Cinematheque and, later, Anthology Film Archives; helped Andy Warhol become a film-maker; and shot hundreds of hours of avant garde life in his copious diary films.

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