Jonas Mekas: Guns of the Trees

Name: Jonas Mekas: Guns of the Trees
Start: 2025-02-21T20:00:00-05:00
Location: The Rotunda

Schedule

Fri, 21 Feb, 2025 at 08:00 pm

UTC-05:00

Location

The Rotunda | Philadelphia, PA

Bowerbird is pleased to present a special screening of Guns of the Trees by filmmaker Jonas Mekas and original musical score by Lucia Dlugoszewski.
Jonas Mekas’s first feature—which he wrote, produced, directed, co-photographed and edited—is an entrancing snapshot of the counterculture in the early 1960s and a work of beatnik existentialism concerning the fine line between generational hope and despair. Past and present intertwine as a young woman (Frances Stillman) searches for a reason to go on living amid a bout of paralyzing depression; she encounters a succession of characters (including a cynical intellectual, played by Mekas’s brother and frequent collaborator, Adolfas) who seem to represent some chance at salvation, but the dark cloud overhead refuses to dissipate. In Mekas’s own words, his scrappy yet ambitious and above all lyrical film “deals with the thoughts, feelings, and anguished strivings of my generation, faced with the moral perplexity of our times.”
Guns of the Trees | Jonas Mekas | 1962 | 35mm (digitized) | 75 minutes
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Jonas Mekas was born in 1922 in the farming village of Semeniškiai, Lithuania. In 1944, he and his brother Adolfas were taken by the Nazis to a forced labor camp in Elmshorn, Germany. After the War he studied philosophy at the University of Mainz. At the end of 1949 the UN Refugee Organization brought both brothers to New York City, where they settled down in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
Two months after his arrival in New York he borrowed money to buy his first Bolex camera and began to record brief moments of his life. He soon got deeply involved in the American Avant-Garde film movement. In 1954, together with his brother, he started Film Culture magazine, which soon became the most important film publication in the US. In 1958 he began his legendary Movie Journal column in the Village Voice. In 1962 he founded the Film-Makers’ Cooperative, and in 1964 the Film-Makers’ Cinematheque, which eventually grew into Anthology Film Archives, one of the world’s largest and most important repositories of avant-garde cinema, and a screening venue.
During all this time he continued writing poetry and making films. To this date he has published more than 25 books of prose and poetry, which have been translated into over a dozen languages. His Lithuanian poetry is now part of Lithuanian classic literature and his films can be found in leading museums around the world. He is largely credited for developing the diaristic forms of cinema. Mekas has also been active as an academic, teaching at the New School for Social Research, the International Center for Photography, Cooper Union, New York University, and MIT.
Mekas’ film The Brig was awarded the Grand Prize at the Venice Film Festival in 1963. Other films include Walden (1969), Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania (1972), Lost Lost Lost (1975), Scenes from the Life of Andy Warhol (1990), Scenes from the Life of George Maciunas (1992), As I was Moving Ahead I saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty (2000), Letter from Greenpoint (2005), Sleepless Nights Stories (2011) and Out-takes from the Life of a Happy Man. In 2007, he completed a series of 365 short films released on the internet — one film every day — and from then continued to share new work on his website.
From 2000, Mekas expanded his work into the area of film installations, exhibiting at the Serpentine Gallery, the Centre Pompidou, Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Moderna Museet (Stockholm), PS1 Contemporary Art Center MoMA, Documenta of Kassel, the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, and the Venice Biennale.
On January 23, 2019, Mekas passed away at the age of 96 at his home in Brooklyn.