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 ARTISTS

Jonas Mekas (1922 – 2019) was a Lithuanian-American filmmaker, poet, and artist who has been called “the godfather of American avant-garde cinema”. He 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.

Lucia Dlugoszewski (1925–2000) was a Polish-American composer, poet, choreographer, performer, and inventor known for her radical approaches to sound and performance. She was a pioneer in experimental music, developing a unique performance practice on the grand piano called the “timbre piano,” which involved playing inside the instrument with mallets and other objects. In addition, she designed and built numerous innovative percussion instruments, expanding the sonic possibilities of contemporary music. Dlugoszewski was closely associated with modern dance and served as music director and later artistic director of the Erick Hawkins Dance Company (EHDC) for many years. She composed extensively for Hawkins’s choreography, crafting highly intricate scores that blended acoustic, electronic, and unconventional sound sources. Despite the originality and complexity of her work, she remained somewhat outside the mainstream of contemporary classical music, and in recent years, efforts have been made to rediscover and celebrate her contributions.