Many Allen Ginsbergs - only the middle row is real

In 2008, the late Carolyn Cassady, one-time wife of Neal – Jack Kerouac’s trickster muse – revealed some lingering bitterness in an interview when she remarked that as “far as I'm concerned, the Beat Generation was something made up by the media and Allen Ginsberg." That’s an unfair dig at Ginsberg. When Lawrence Ferlinghetti & Shig Murao were prosecuted for the sale of Howl, Ginsberg – who became a household name from the resulting media coverage – stayed as far away from the trial as he could. It would have been a far better – even obvious – career move for him to have been sat in the front row of the courtroom in support of Ferlinghetti & Murao. Instead, he stayed as far away as he could &, when the chance presented itself, didn’t take a victory lap after the City Lights publisher & his book seller were vindicated, but instead hightailed it to India.

This was well before Ginsberg got to watch fame, alcohol & the media celebrity machine tear Jack Kerouac limb from limb, a painful public process that led to the novelist’s demise first as a writer & then as a person. Indeed, it might not have been until Ginsberg’s stint as Kraj Mahales, the King of the May, in 1965 Czechoslovakia – to which Ginsberg had been deported from Cuba of all places after protesting Castro’s persecution of gays – that the author of Howl seemed fully to appreciate his own potential as a symbolic public figure. But even then other poets rolled their eyes & looked askance. Jack Spicer’s very last poem, written just weeks after Ginsberg expulsion from Czechoslovakia, accuses Ginsberg of not understanding that “people are starving.”

That was 48 years ago &, if anything, the mythos of Ginsberg & radical beat culture as a forerunner of all things liberational has intensified over the past half century. In a five-day span late last fall, I saw three separate motion pictures, either current or very recent, that each included Ginsberg:

• John Krokidas’ Kill Your Darlings, starring Daniel Radcliffe as the future author of Howl, Jack Huston as Kerouac & Ben Foster as William S. Burroughs, which may still be in some theaters
  
  
• Walter Salles’ On the Road, an attempt to contain Kerouac’s sprawling autobiographical novel as an intelligible film narrative starring Sam Riley as Sal Paradise (Jack Kerouac), Tom Sturridge (like Radcliffe, a British actor) as Carlo Marx (Ginsberg) & Viggo Mortensen as (as Bull Lee, Burroughs), relatively new to the Netflix & DVD round after a modest theater run
  
  
• Robert McTavish’s documentary, The Line Has Shattered, recounting the 1963 Vancouver Poetry Conference, during which 48 “students” took seminars & participated in readings over three weeks from Allen Ginsberg, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov & Margaret Avison – this film is still rolling out via the art film / festival circuit

Ginsberg’s stature on the curious fulcrum between public intellectual & public anti-intellectual is worth noting. In addition to Radcliffe & Sturridge, Ginsberg has also been portrayed by Roger Massih, Wade Williams, James Franco, Charley Rossman, Hank Azaria, Yehuda Duenyas, David Cross, Tim Hickey, Jon Schwartz, Ron Livingston, Bill Willens, John Turturro, Richard Cotovsky, David Markey, Ron Rifkin, & George Netesky. David Cross, who played Ginsberg in in the Dylan anti-biopic I’m Not There, plays Allen’s father Louis in Kill Your Darlings.¹

Erica Hunt

Evidence

A film by Phill Niblock



1983

Does an unvarnished truth exist? And, if so, does it intersect, even slightly, with what one might call good? Those questions are at the core of Margarethe von Trotta’s Hannah Arendt, a heady film that is only superficially a biopic of the famed political thinker, “Martin Heidegger’s favorite student” and one-time lover, the first woman hired to teach at Princeton. Arendt has opened in New York & Los Angeles, after having been nominated for & won a number of awards,  in Middle & Eastern Europe, including two German best actress nods for Barbara Sukowa as Arendt.

Although the film has flashbacks to Arendt’s days as a student in Marburg, von Trotta focuses on the few short years of Arendt’s career in America after the capture of Adolph Eichmann, whose trial she “covered” for The New Yorker, resulting in a series of articles published in book form as Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.  The drama of the film itself occurs not in capture of Eichmann, which happens in the first 30 seconds, nor in Arendt’s relationship with Heidegger, nor even in the trial itself – though this may well be the heart of the movie – but in the revulsion with which Arendt’s reporting is met by her closest friends at Princeton, in New York, and especially in Israel.

Arendt, who fled to Paris as the Nazis came to power, was briefly interned in a French concentration camp at Gurs near the Spanish border, from which she escaped and eventually made her way to the US. Alluded to but not represented in the film itself (which is more than can be said for much of her writing, her work with Karl Jaspers, her friendship with Walter Benjamin, her first marriage, or her work in Germany after the war), von Trotta presents Arendt as wanting to understand this ultimate evil by staring it in the eye. Her friends among the US exiles are wary of her trip to Jerusalem to report on the trial for a readership that cannot be expected to comprehend their experiences of horror, a sharp contrast to the almost boyish enthusiasm of New Yorker editor William Shawn (portrayed by Nicholas Woodeson doing everything he can to mimic Wallace Shawn, who might have been better cast to portray his father). Her husband thinks the trial itself is a travesty of justice. In Israel, her friends are frank about the political nature of the prosecution. Israel, she is told, needs myths.

 

If I see another motion picture in 2013 that is as remotely as intelligent or mature as Upstream Color, it will be a very good year for movies. One can go years between films this well-conceived & executed. It seems to have done well in an art-house cinema in New York, but the self-distribution plan by writer-director-lead actor-producer-composer-editor-cinematographer Shane Carruth found it playing in the basement auditorium of a science museum in Philadelphia where I  caught it on the second day of its release showing to a crowd in high single digits. This in spite of a near-rave review from the Philadelphia Inquirer just one day before. Carruth, who settled on the do-it-yourself distribution scheme even before the film showed at Sundance, is undoubtedly correct in his presumption that the old model for getting films to people is breaking down for films just as much as it is for books, music and just about every other intellectual endeavor (heads up, art dealers – they’re coming for you). But his cobbled-together alternative really isn’t working unless the stream-or-download distribution that starts – hey  – this Tuesday catches on. I’m here to tell you it’s worth spending twenty bucks, give or take, to see something extraordinary. But if it’s on a big screen, do that – even if it’s in the basement of a science museum.  As film, Upstream Color is gorgeous. And the sound is to cinema what Red Desert once was to the use of color.

I could recount the narrative of Upstream Color, but you wouldn’t understand it because the protagonists, played by Carruth and Amy Steimetz, don’t and the film really wants you to feel their sense of confusion even when it flirts with omniscience. Steven Soderbergh has been quoted as calling Carruth the “illegitimate offspring of David Lynch & James Cameron,” but the directors who seem to be the hovering godparents of this project are Wenders, Tarkovsky & early Polanski. Envision, if you will, Wings of Desire blended with Rosemary’s Baby, seasoned with just a sprinkling of Babe (& Babe in turn as read through Soylent Green), all filtered through the depressed lens of the driving sequence in Solaris. Did I say you wouldn’t understand it? Now consider that much, maybe all of this hinges on the text of Thoreau’s Walden. 

Gilles Deleuze:

What is the creative act?
(1987)

Les Blank

1935 – 2013

Roger Ebert

1942 – 2013

Jennifer Lawrence wasn’t the only one who stumbled at this year’s Academy Awards.

The Oscars are an increasingly bizarre display of decadence – corporate capital’s stranglehold over the film industry, having laid waste to competing national cinemas in other “markets” such as Europe, tries in vain to figure out how to attract younger viewers to its sclerotic annual spasm of self-congratulation, opting this year for all-snark, all-the-time, with Family Guy’s Seth MacFarlane as host to an event that began with William Shatner (reminding us yet again why the original Star Trek got dumped to the ¹Friday night “death slot” in 1968) and included everything from racist, anti-Semitic and homophobic  humor to Ron Jeremy jokes & a song to actresses’ boobs. Hidden amid all that crap were some awards to a few good people, though not necessarily the best in any given category. It’s a rough night if the only thing to get enthused about is a lifetime achievement award for DA Pennebaker  & why any exec thinks an infinitely tedious routine from a TV show that got dumped 45 years ago will keep younger viewers engaged is beyond me. I kept waiting for an actress – or anyone – to announce that next year there were would be a medley dedicated to MacFarlane’s penis, but that it would be a really short number.

Argot is an efficient little thriller, tho not the sort of film that would have risen to the surface in the good old days of American cinema. Likewise Silver Linings Notebook, a romcom whose premise is that both of the primary characters are damaged. A nice little film but, save for Jennifer Lawrence’s performance, barely worth rousing oneself from a two-hour snooze in the theater. Against the excesses of The Miserables or the bloat of Lincoln, however, these two films look pretty darn good. But against cinema that is worth watching – Beasts of the Southern Wild or Amour – why are these films even on the same list? It’s not that the Oscar hasn’t gone to outright dreadful movies over the years – Chicago, Out of Africa, Rocky – but there was a time when such films stood out against the backdrop of a vital, raucous industry being challenged by great films from abroad. Nobody would make Hiroshima, Mon Amour today – Emmanuelle Riva’s first film in 1959. Nobody would distribute it, nobody would see it.

No wonder that Netflix sees an increasingly large slice of its market opting for serious cable dramas – the simple demands of story-telling over one or more seasons forces better writing, better acting, better direction than the movies in 2013 have any desire to deliver.  

¹ I’ve only seen Lawrence be less than spell-binding in one performance, X-Men: First Class, where she plays Raven & looks like she wandered in off a live-action shoot for Shrek. 

The House is Black
by
Forough Farrokhzad

Paul Auster
on Brooklyn & Smoke

Chris Marker

1921 – 2012

There is something of the awfulness of an Ed Wood film about James Franco’s Hart Crane biopic, The Broken Tower, except that there’s not, not really. What made Ed Wood everybody’s favorite bad filmmaker was a fundamental joy underlying all of his projects, the thrill of making movies, even if the flying saucer was a paper plate dangling on a string, the dialog wooden, the plot preposterous. The dialog is wooden, the acting atrocious, the narrative movement non-existent in The Broken Tower, but its underlying sense is one of brooding pompousness. You’re cringing at the self-importance of it all from the first frame to the last.

The ultimate crime here is that nothing in this film gives you the sense that Hart Crane was an interesting or an important poet, let alone both. When his texts are presented as voice overs or as text on the screen, they’re too long and rushed – it’s impossible to absorb it all & the passages cited aren’t the ones that inspire an impulse toward further inspection. When Franco as Crane gives a reading, it’s so ponderous & Victorian that both my wife & I nodded off before it was over. Indeed, the impact is so different from Franco’s quite moving reading of Howl in his role as Allen Ginsberg in the Rob Epstein-Jeffrey Friedman film of that name that it’s shocking. The two readings should be studied by film students so that they can understand why an actor is so often better off in the hands of another director, even relative novices to dramatic filmmaking like the documentarians Epstein & Friedman. We’ll get to see Franco try it all a different way when Franco stars as CK Williams (I kid you not) in the forthcoming Tar, a film with nine – count ‘em – directors.

The Beat Hotel, which begins a weeklong run at Cinema Village in New York tonight, is a charming, if imperfectly intimate, documentary about an important and too-little-understood chapter in American letters, the convergence of all the major Beat writers save for Jack Kerouac in Paris between 1957 & 1959. It was at 9 Rue Gît-le-Cœur on the Left Bank that Allen Ginsberg composed Kaddish, Gregory Corso composed Bomb, William Burroughs completed Naked Lunch & Brion Gysin built his Dreamachine & demonstrated the use of cut-ups, a literary collage device that he appears to have stumbled across independently of Bob Cobbing’s earlier work, and which Burroughs would make his signature literary tool. Also living there at the time were Peter Orlovsky, Harold Norse & Ian Sommerville, quite a gathering for a 42-room residence.

Directed by all-around-renaissance man Alan Govenar, the film functions by pulling together interviews with a number of former residents of the hotel, including photographer Harold Chapman, Cyclops Lester, artist Eliot Rudie, designer-musician Peter Golding & Jean-Jacques Lebel, making heavy (and generally felicitous) use of Chapman’s photos & Rudie’s artwork, as well as some klutzy dramatic re-enactments (the only one that is really needed is of Bill Burroughs’ “disappearing” trick), as well as commentary from some of the standard Beat scholars such as Barry Miles & Regina Weinreich.

As a retelling of a familiar story, The Beat Hotel wins points for not belaboring the larger beat narrative & honing in on what its key figures really know, which was & is their experiences sharing the same small establishment run by Madam Rachou & containing this wealth of creative energy. When it ventures much outside this range, its reliability as narrative becomes more questionable – Neal Cassady is twice identified in the photograph linked to his name as Jack Kerouac.

Like so much work around the Beats – Beat scholars must be the ufologists of literary criticism – there are a lot of claims here about the revolutionary nature of these geniuses & very little actual demonstration of that genius, as such. I don’t quarrel with the claims – I think that largely they’re correct, especially with regards to Ginsberg’s best works, Kerouac’s early writing and Burroughs’ sardonic satires – but to continue to see such unsupported major claims when plenty of evidence for it actually exists does make me cringe, not just here, but here also. Other than a few lines of Howl, very little of the work as such is quoted directly, and the most interesting literary discussion as such is Lebel’s depiction of his translation of Howl into French.

But this is quibbling. I just wish that anybody making a doc today on the Beat movement would commit themselves to doing at least as good a job as What Happened to Kerouac? Beat Hotel has its limits, but its virtues are substantial as well. I would especially point to the interviews with Chapman, Rudie, Golding & Lebel for their capacity to give a real feel for what life was like in Paris in the 1950s. The film does an excellent job articulating Brion Gysin’s oft-misunderstood role in Burroughs’ development & the movement in general, and really excels at suggesting not only how Naked Lunch was cobbled together, but also how the period at the hotel marked a turn in Burroughs’ work away from being simply the avuncular guru to the wide-eyed Ginsberg and becoming a major artist in his own right. If the film has a blind spot, it’s in articulating what became of the likes of Sommerville & Sinclair Beiles, and who precisely Madam Rachou was beyond somebody who liked to rent to poets.

This year’s recipient of the Oscar
for best animated short-subject

Ai Weiwei: Ordos 100

Samuel Beckett’s Film with Buster Keaton