Jonas Mekas
Guns of the Trees
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Add rightsFormat DVD Interzone
Original format 35mm
Year 1962
Language(s) English
Artist(s) Jonas Mekas
Subtitles French, German, Lithuanian
Booklet 32 pages (French, English)
Running time 87 min
Films
GUNS OF THE TREES (1962) 75'
Description
"Four young people try to understand why their friend, a young woman, committed suicide. A film made of disjointed scenes oscillating between past and present. The title comes from a poem by Stuart Perkoff that tells how a few young people (around 1960) felt that everything was against them, even the trees in the parks and streets seemed to them like weapons threatening their very existence."
— Jonas Mekas
"Guns of the Trees expresses the thoughts, the feelings, the anguished efforts of my generation, faced with the moral perplexity of our time. Conceived as an episodic, horizontal film, there is no apparent connection between one scene and the next. The scenes act as pieces of a larger emotional mosaic. Where the direct word, or the direct image, fails—when one gets to more essential things—the poet's indirect way will capture the essence and the truth."
— Jonas Mekas