Guns of the Trees

Confession of the moral and emotional struggle of one generation in one country at one time, which, from today's retrospective perspective, maintains its role as an intermediate stage: backwards, it is necessary to reach out for the American environment, just like the heroes of the film, in the depths of their nonconformism, in their lyrical expression, after the American Beatniks who were forming from the mid-1950s; forward, it is necessary to foresee, in an explicit embryo, the restlessness of the 1960s with the fight for nuclear disarmament, imperialist wars in the third world, and the desire for greater and greater self-realization. However, in the sphere of film, this double retrospective movement applies only on one level. From the perspective of cinematic history in general, continuities can be sought: the film strongly evokes the cult "Shadows" (1958) by Cassavetes in the environment of the American independent film scene, while also serving as a very dignified predecessor to later intellectual films and film essays (e.g. Jon Jost in the American underground environment), where fictional narration will interweave with declamation in poetic, political, or otherwise appellative forms. On what retrospective level, however, does the desire to pigeonhole the film into some continuous line fail? On the level of the author's own film history - here, there is no intermediate effect, but a rupture: his films will never be narrative like this one (although, by the standards of ordinary bourgeois cinema, this film is relatively less linear and narrative!), fictional in the classical sense, general in their statement, speaking to everyone from the perspective of the author's subjectivity only faintly sensed, hidden behind his work, which is not primarily meant to speak about him. Mekas's later films will be all those fragments of a private film strip, in which he will try to capture his life, without any intermediate stage, sublimated authorially like this fictional film here. (29/10/2019)