April 16, 2008
Beat Film Series Tonight at Alamo Ritz
Wednesdays in April
Alamo Drafthouse Downtown (320 E 6th Street)
7pm, $8.25, DIscounts for AFS / HRC Members
[info] | [tickets]
Tonight's penultimate screening features four more rarely shown films from the era of Ginsberg, Kerouac and Burroughs. Courtesy HRC:
Alfred Leslie's The Last Clean Shirt
(1964), 39 min., 16 mm.
Shot in one long take from the back seat of a wandering convertible, the audience watches as the silent driver is subjected to a treatise on angst, delivered by his female passenger. Print courtesy of Alfred Leslie and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Peter Whitehead's Wholly Communion
(1965), 33 min., 16 mm.
A documentary record of the Royal Albert Hall in 1965 in London. While Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, Corso, and others read, 7,000 people filled the hall, and 3,000 more waited outside. Print courtesy of Contemporary Films, London, UK.
Anthony Balch and William S. Burroughs's Towers Open Fire
(1962), 10 min., 35 mm.
A print with hand-colored cells, of a filmic representation of Burroughs's radical “cut-up” technique. Its title is taken from the phrase repeated in the film by Burroughs himself. Print courtesy of the British Film Institute, London, UK.
Christopher MacLaine's The End
(1953), 35 min., 16 mm. and Beat (1958), 4 min. 16 mm. MacLaine's early experimental short feature The End distractedly follows six random people through a frustratingly quotidian day to a preordained yet unexpected climax, capturing the uneasy veneer of postwar America. Beat uses similar techniques to depict San Francisco Beat culture. Print courtesy of Film-Maker' Cooperative of New York.
The Beat Film Series is sponsored by Austinist and the Austin Chronicle.
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