GUNS OF THE TREES
"Four young people are trying to understand why their friend, a young woman, committed a suicide. A film made up of disconnected scenes weaving between past and present. The title of the film comes from a poem by Stuart Perkoff which tells that some young people felt (around 1960) that everything is against them, so much that even the trees in the parks and streets seemed to them like guns pointing at their very existence."
"GUNS OF THE TREES deals with the thoughts, feelings, and anguished strivings of my generation, faced with the moral perplexity of our times. Conceived as an episodic, horizontal film, there is no apparent direct story connection between one scene and the next. The scenes act like pieces of a larger, timed, emotional mosaic. Where the direct word, or the direct image, fails — when we come to more essential things — the indirectness of the poet will seize the essence and the truth."
– Jonas Mekas
"It is a bitter but lyric work. It is also revolutionary in form, being unlike, in its technique, anything you ever saw. It is a poster declaration, a manifesto. I regard GUNS OF THE TREES as the most important film by far of the American 'New Wave.'"
– Herman G. Weinberg, New York Film-Makers' Cooperative Catalogue n°6, 1975
"It may be one of the most personal and revealing films of the intellectual, beat and hip fringe of society of America today."
– Gene Moskowitz, Cahiers du cinéma, n°119, May 1961
Contents
Format: DVD-PAL / Region 0
(No Regional Code); DSL/Downloadable 1080p .mp4 file on server
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GUNS OF THE TREES
(US, 1962)
Director: Jonas Mekas
Assisted by: Adolfas Mekas, Sheldon Rochlin, Charles Silver, Harrison Starr & Daniel Drasin
Poetry interludes written and spoken by: Allen Ginsberg
Music: Lucia Dlugoszewski
Fold-songs by: Sara Wiley, Caither Wiley & Tom Sankey
Cast: Ben Carruthers, Argus Speare Juilliard, Frances Stillman, Adolfas Mekas, Frank Kuenstler, Sudie Bond, Leonard Hicks, Louis Brigante, Barbara Tucker, Joel Walker, Sterling Jensen, Tina Stoumen, Marjorie Walker, George Maciunas, Marvin Karpatkin, Melvin Clay, Adam Barron & Anna Flanagan
• 87 minutes
• 35mm
• B&W
• Sound
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Bonus Material
SHOOTING GUNS
(US, 1966)
Director: Carles I. Levine
• 4:30 minutes
• Shot in 1960 on the set of GUNS OF THE TREES. Dedicated to Ron Rice.
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Total Running Time: 01:31:30
Language: English. English, French, Dutch & Lithuanian subtitles
Booklet Text: Jonas Mekas, Robert Temple, Alberto Moravia, Eugene Archer, Robert Ebert & Allen Ginsburg (Billingual French & English)
Published By: Re:Voir Video
Institutional Price: $250 (plus shipping), Digital File Download $500
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