Naked Lens: Beat Cinema

251 Pages·2009·14.57 MB·English

by  Jack Sargeant

Naked Lens
Beat Cinema
A Soft Skull ScreenPrint Book
Naked Lens
Beat Cinema
Jack Sargeant
A Soft Skull ScreenPrint Book
Copyright © 2008 by Jack Sargeant and contributors.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.
Originally published by Creation Books, London, 1997, 2001
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.
ISBN 10: 1-59376-220-8
ISBN 13: 978-1-59376-220-9
Cover design by Elinor McDonald
Interior design by Elinor McDonald
Printed in the United States of America
Soft Skull Press
An Imprint of Counterpoint LLC
2117 Fourth Street
Suite D
Berkeley, CA 94710
www.softskull.com
www.counterpointpress.com
Distributed by Publishers Group West
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Many thanks to
the following individuals and organizations for their support while researching and
writing this book: Joe Ambrose, Mark Bennett, Phillipa Berry, British Film Institute,
Arthur and Corinne Cantrill & Cantrills Film Notes, Angus Carlyle, Stephen Drenham,
Graham Duff, Robert Frank, Marisa Giorgi, Allen Ginsberg, the Harry Smith Archives,
Tessa Hughes-Freeland, Jeff Keen, Richard King, David Larcher, Andrew Leavold,
Alfred Leslie, Marian Luntz, Klaus Maeck, Gerard Malanga, Richard Marshall,
Carlo McCormick, Taylor Mead, Jonas Mekas, Richard Nash, the New York Film-Makers
Co-Operative, Kim Newman, Genesis P-Orridge, Donna Ranieri, Bob Rosenthal,
Frank Rynne, MM Sara, Roslyn Sargeant, Rani Singh, Michael Sippings, Michael Spann,
Stephanie Watson, Rob Whalley, Vanessa Winter, Casper Williams, James Williamson,
Terry Wilson and Peter Whitehead.
Cover image
Allen Ginsberg from Wholly Communion
Courtesy Peter Whitehead.
This edition for MBS
with freedom, liberty and supreme love.
Contents
Foreward 8
Introduction 10
Part One: Searching For A Free Vision 15
Chapter One: Pull My Daisy 17
1. Notes On Pull My Daisy 18
2. An Interview With Alfred Leslie 27
3. An Interview With Robert Frank 41
Chapter Two: John Cassavetes’ Shadows 55
Chapter Three: Wild Men & Outcast Visionaries 69
1. Notes On The San Francisco Renaissance 70
2. Ron Rice & Taylor Mead: Flower Thieves & Dharma Bums 72
3. An Interview With Taylor Mead 80
Chapter Four: Eyeball Head Poem: Harry Smith 91
Chapter Five: Cobra Camp: Jack Smith 101
Chapter Six: An Interview With Jonas Mekas 111
Chapter Seven: Wholly Communion 125
1. `A Few Poets Trying To Be Natural’ 126
2. An Interview With Peter Whitehead 131
Chapter Eight: Conrad Rooks’ Chappaqua 143
Chapter Nine: An Interview With Allen Ginsberg 151
Part Two: The War Universe Of William S Burroughs 161
Chapter Ten: Image Hoard 163
1. Cinematic Experiments & Collaborations:
Balch/Burroughs/Gysin/Sommerville 164
2. An Interview With Brion Gysin (Paris, October 1983) 173
3. Thee Films: An Account By Genesis P-Orridge 181
4. Ongoing Guerilla Conditions 190
Chapter Eleven: Cut-Ups/Burroughs/Punk/Cut-Ups 195
1. Electronic Revolutionaries 196
2. An Interview With Klaus Maeck 201
Chapter Twelve: Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch 209
Chapter Thirteen: Burroughs Animated 215
Appendix 219
1. Mainstream/Hollywood & Beat Culture 220
2. Notes On Gus Van Sant 223
3. Shocking Beatniks & Beatsploitation 226
4. Notes On Charles Bukowski 228
5. Affiliated Works 233
6. Beats On Film 235
7. Herbert Hunke 239
Bibliography 241
Index of Films 245
Picture Credits 249
Film Sources 250
Author Biographies 251
Foreword
All the obsessions start here. Completers — the academies, revenant psychogeographers,
metaphysical panhandlers, norns — they have circled this book for years and now it comes
back again to inseminate their tortured psyches. Wearied by the crank calls that have woken
the hidden sleepers of this domain — recall Scorsese’s No Direction Home playing at revelation
whilst hiding Renaldo and Clara at the beginning of the new millennium — Sargeant takes
us to the ur-texts, where Burroughs, Mekas, Kerouac, Frank, Gysin, Balch, Cassavetes et al
improvise to their inner shadows and change the world into celluloid driftwood.
First time around there was gratitude for the book; second time, the parameters resist
the wearisome arterial hardening of the theoretical mode. He hunkers down with the moot
points like Pat Mezz McGillicuddy’s horn playing in Pull My Daisy and if you don’t get the
atmosphere then the laconic thrills of the book’ll be lost. More than that, though, he resists
the tight sphincter of dotting every abstracted connection, crossing every theorized ‘T’. It
is writing with the Blakean signature, playful in its seriousness, needing little more than
depth of perspective to reveal the whole underworld marvels of this junked-out cinema.
To return to the book and read it again is not a chore but a fix brought about by the need
for plenitude, for inspiration.
Because Sargeant is a more disinterested abstracted figure than a mere author. He
works in the scholar’s library, works his sources and references — interviews and essays,
notes, rumours, asides, other books, other films — he takes them all out and makes them
labour, react, do something, walk somewhere. Sargeant is out to revolve round a kind of
wayward soul; he’s working up a shrine to things maybe people think they know, think
they’ve experienced — when you read this stuff you half remember conversations about
some of the material — Kerouac’s jazz ’50s, Ginsberg’s hippy ’60s, Burroughs’ punk ’70s
— and makes us mindful of what he calls “a cognitive mapping of this previously neglected
area of cinema.”
He’s clear about what he is doing. Tracing a gesture is the romantic’s dream of capturing
the noumenal, the momentary blast of silver light in a mirror that spontaneously erupts into
the eye and then is lost. Recall Kleist crouching by the mirror, trying to recall the strange
image of his own abstracted body leaping through the air he’s glimpsed in the glass, attempt-
ing to articulate something that could only be shown. Having moments that exist but only
for a moment and then are lost in ever-impoverished memory is why these peculiar films
engage Sargeant and his readers so deeply. It is the articulation of “a personal vision” that
Sargeant is fetching up — and it’s this notion of “personal vision” that Sargeant wants to
say is Beat — those Wordsworthian “Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears,” and
after reading the text you’re able to find Sargeant as much as the people he discusses and
engages with. His book is part of the project he describes. It’s got a fluxy, engaged style.
It’s an example of Beat scholarship that’s precise, critically alert and enthusiastic without
being windy or asking for second chances. It’s a book that knows the score. It’s been there.
It’s done that. No special pleading.
What’s fascinating about this book is the tension between the attempt to find out what
this cinema was all worth — tracing the gesture but also making it accountable both in
the sense of measuring its worth and also in the sense of making it utterable as narrative
— and the counter ideal, which is to leave everything as messy, unmeasured, fluid, unstable
— organs without a body — archiving the gesture, archiving it as just the haunted cinema
it seemed to think it was at the time. In terms of style there’s the feel and the mood of its
subject matter — especially when reading the second section which revolves around Bur-
8 Foreword
roughs and his “war universe” — but throughout, especially when you read the transcribed
interviews you pick up the ‘to the moment’, ‘unmediated nowness’ of the text. In a way
it’s about working out values without connecting up to any franchise.
The stories about the films — about how they were conceived, about how they were
made, about how they were received — Sargeant has packed his detailed knowledge into
this as into each of the stories he has to tell to give the reader a sense that everything’s
there and nothing vital is missing. These are organs of a fabled beast, scattered out for some
alchemist to breathe life into them, to regenerate. Read them in the right order, find a way
through and you’ll restore the whole, complete it, bring it all back home. Perhaps memory
will do this, or else an engagement at a level a notch above reality, explaining everything
via a guilty conscience. Conscience is in the habit of clinging on to apparent consciousness
and this Beat Cinema project was all about slinging out that habit. And Sargeant is writing
it up to keep a certain kind of momentum going and break our lazy habit.
Once you’ve read this stuff, you want to get out and see the films he’s investigated and
test them out. You also want to get in on the projects, you want to do something yourself.
This is the sign that the book works. Sargeant has done a job on the reader, he’s made
you feel lazy and stuck in a dumb habit and that you don’t measure up to what is pos-
sible at a whole other level. Which is what good writing should do — cross a border and
break things up.
Richard Marshall, 3:00AM

Foreword 9
Introduction
To attempt a definition of the ontology of ‘Beat’ is necessarily problematic; by its very atti-
tude ‘Beat’ continually re-negotiated and re-defined aesthetic, philosophical, sociopoliti-
cal and ‘spiritual’ perimeters. Exploring multiple possibilities which were antithetical to
the homogeneity which dominated post-war American society and manifested itself most
clearly in the paranoia of McCarthyism, ‘the Red Scare’ and the witch hunts undertaken
by H.U.A.C. (the House Committee on Un-American Activities). The schizophrenic ety-
mology of the term ‘Beat’ reflects this interest in potentialities: ‘Beat’ was a term which
arose from street slang, as a phrase which referred to a state in which one was: exhausted,
poor and homeless. The term was introduced into the vocabularies of William Burroughs,
Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg by street hustler storyteller Herbert Huncke1 in 1946. But
Allen Ginsberg articulates, this interpretation of ‘Beat’ does not only imply weary poverty
or finality, but also implies a state in which one was open, a state that was “equivalent to
humility”2 and thus “receptive to vision”.3 In On The Road Jack Kerouac describes Dean
Moriarty as “BEAT — the root, the soul of Beatific”.4 Kerouac thus draws attention to the
idea that Beat is simultaneously Beatific, a state that is related to spiritual illumination,
to an epiphany; to seeing the face of God. As Kerouac stated: “Beat means Beatitude, not
beat up”.5 The wider term of Beat Generation is generally
attributed to a 1948 conversation between Jack Kerouac
Being BEAT and and John Clellon Holmes.
CREATION. ‘Beat’ Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs,
means the absence Herbert Huncke, Neal Cassady and later Gregory Corso6
would become known as the Beats and/or the Beat Gen-
of ambition directed
eration literary movement. This term would be expanded
towards obtaining
to describe the downtown New York literary and artistic
money. Practically
scenes of the early ’50s, which included the poets and
all the people spend writers: LeRoi Jones (who later changed his name to
their days in the active Imamu Amiri Baraka), Diane DiPrima and John Clellon
pursuit of Money. Those Holmes. Following Allen Ginsberg’s 1955 performance
few who ignore this of ‘Howl’ at The Gallery Six in San Francisco, the phrase
Beat was applied to/affiliated with the ‘San Francisco
trend are given a special
Poetry Renaissance’. A loose-knit term for the North
grace, the freedom of
Beach scene, which included poets such as Lawrence
the mind which enables
Ferlinghetti, Gary Snyder, Bob Kaufman, Philip Lamantia,
them to Create and Michael McClure, Robert Duncan, Peter Orlovsky and
receive the Joy. Philip Whalen. In 1957 the Beat would be re-appropri-
Ron Rice ated and re-mobilized by Gregory Corso to name Mad-
ame Rachou’s cheap hotel at 9 rue Git-le-Coeur, Paris:
The entire Beat the Beat Hotel. In the late ’50s this Class 13, 42-room
hotel, became the European residence of three of the
literary movement
‘original’ Beat writers, Corso, Ginsberg and Burroughs,
was based, to some
in addition to Peter Orlovsky and Brion Gysin.
extent, on Kerouac’s
The etymological duality of the word ‘Beat’ empha-
estimate of be-bop sized by Ginsberg and Kerouac may further be viewed
as an improvised as intrinsic to the Beat weltanschauung. The Beats lived
spontaneous form. a liberating philosophy which embraced the very limits
Allen Ginsberg of experience; simultaneously celebrating both the fre-
10 Introduction