The debut feature by the godfather of the American avant-garde: a 35mm screening. The movie will be screened on 35mm film from the collection of Gosfilmofond.
As nuclear war looms in the early 1960s, two young beatnik couples try to stay sane in a world gone mad. Office worker Argus and insurance agent Ben find refuge in nature and their bohemian loft, while the religious Gregory unsuccessfully tries to talk his lost girlfriend Francis out of suicide.
Flashbacks to the time where Francis is still alive, and scenes from the future, where Argus and Ben’s baby is born, are seamlessly interwoven with the present. The mesmerizing nine-part work that has captured the energy of the American avant-garde has no clear timeline, storyline, or ending, as Jonas Mikes warns in the opening titles. “The mad, insane world has prevented me from finishing this film. [...] It will remain rough, a sketchbook of what I intended it to be, an unfinished poem, a madhouse sutra, a cry.” The non-linear narrative is held together by the unsettling, dissonant music by American composer Lucia Dlugoszewski and a poetical voiceover of Allen Ginsberg’s critique of capitalism and the American intervention in Cuba (a similar device was used two years earlier in Pull My Daisy by Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie, with a voiceover by Jack Kerouac). The film was rejected by its contemporaries as incomprehensible and pretentious, while The Village Voice, where Mekas had started his career as a film critic, accused it of maximalism and idealism.
Today, Guns of the Trees is a curious artifact of its time—to a great extent due to the clever use of audiovisual counterpoint and realistic acting. Contrasting the sounds of a child crying or a dog barking against the footage of clashes between the police and anti-military protesters, Mekas creates striking metaphors of an infantilized crowd and violent authorities. Instead of emotional character arcs, the actors present scenes from their own lives. The double-jointed Ben Carruthers, best known for his role as a percussionist in Shadows (1959) by John Cassavetes, also plays drums in Guns and later married Argus Spear Juillard while Frances Stillman actually suffered from depression during the filming. Gregory was played by Mekas’s younger brother and one of his closest collaborators Adolfas who two years later presented his own debut feature, the Rousseau-ist comedy Hallelujah the Hills.
The film will be screened in English with Russian subtitles.
Guns of the Trees
Director: Jonas Mekas
USA, 1961. 86 min, 16+