Structural conditions, not formal craft, drove Mekas’s anti-establishment filmmaking

Evidence

Guns of the Trees was Jonas Mekas’s contribution to the zeitgeist. The movie took its subject (and itself) seriously, contemplating human existence in the glare of annihilation and the shadow of the atomic bomb, in New York City circa 1960 A.D. Mekas even imagined that Guns might change the world, writing in his diary, “What I want to achieve—ideally—with my film: is to overthrow the government. All governments.” — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 167