Guns of the Trees / Pull My Daisy

In 1960, Jonas Mekas together with other independent film makers start the New American Cinema Group in order to finance, promote and distribute their movies. The same year, Mekas and Edouard de Laurot start filming. The film opens with Mekas reading Prometheus Unbound and continues with pieces of jazz and folk songs, excerpts from news reels and readings by Allen Ginsberg. These fragments are composed of the many different facets of a young lady shattered journey, a lady who wishes to bring meaning to her life. A couple (the husband is portrayed by Ben Carruthers, the leading actor in Shadows) tries to rescue her from her desperation.

This movie was inspired by the third Act of a play by Jack Kerouac called The Beat Generation on the New American Church, initiated after a stay at Neal and Carolyn Cassady’s home. Coming from a poetical improvisation performed by several voices, the title refers to an erotic strip tease. Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso are engaged in a discussion about poetry, and Peter Orlovsky joins them later. The musical rendering of the text is unsynchronized between the soundtrack and the alternation of the filmed sequences., The writers perform their own role while considering the film as the context for a collective experiencel their spontaneous prose confronts their point of view to that of a bishop..