Guns of the Trees

Avant-garde filmmaker Jonas Mekas throws in the towel early with a disclaimer at the opening of Guns of the Trees stating the work is incomplete. Incoherent might be a better word as he sloppily applies his experimental ways to narrative story telling in this unfinished symphony that fails to jell in any form.

The film revolves around a quartet of anti-establishments absorbing the pressures of modern day living in a world they are finding harder to understand. One simply wants out by way of suicide. A cacaphony of logic and non-sequitor along with snippets of alienating barren imagery ragged editing and grating soundtrack with a little liviing theatre thrown in for good measure carry matters to their predictably indecipherable end that Mekas cautions us about at the outset does not exist. It's no surprise the most powerful shot in the film accompanied by others are stolen. A diffuse, incomplete, unsatifying attempt at offbeat story telling. For Mekas scholars only.

Shortly after Mekas criticized Cassavettes' reconversion of Shadows, the critic and experimentalist made a film that may point us to the lost virtues of the first Shadows.

Guns of the trees is a film with a very interesting approach, with a much less conventional character than the final Shadows, less enslaved to a conventional development plot, to characters developed in a conventional way, with a rhythm and a much fresher visual image than the remade half of Shadows.

But that's where the virtues end. Mekas's film collapses like a house of poorly linked cards. There is an insufferably pedantic and outdated tone in the theme, with an unbearably bombastic, and finally melodramatic, way of dealing with the existentialist obsessions of the characters. There are wonderful shots, very attractive scenes, but drowned in an ocean of presumptuousness, especially when the Barbara/Gregory couple appears.

Mekas dominates documentary experimental cinema, the small moments of almost unintentional poetry, but once again it is demonstrated how complex it is to superimpose a novelistic plot of tormented characters and suicide attempts over a freshly documentary style, which avoids theatricalization. In fact, Mekas stops interesting us when he superimposes some explanatory content on his images, or inhis other films, when he starts speaking in off-screen.

The best scenes are those with Argus, because fortunately Mekas does not try to show us an artificially complicated character, and shows us an attractive normal girl.

The result as a film would seem to agree with Cassavettes, although we suppose we would all like that first Shadows much more than both the definite Shadow and this Guns of the trees.