Beat Cinema Season

Friday 25th July 7pm – 2am

7.30pm: Presentation

7.35pm: Puce Moment by Kenneth Anger

7.40pm: Early Abstraction by Harry Smith

8.20pm: Flaming Creatures by Jack Smith

9.05pm: DJs until close

Sunday 27th July 7pm – 12am

7.30pm: Presentation

7.35pm: Chumlum by Ron Rice

8.25pm: Senseless by Ron Rice

9.15pm: Two Films by Stan Vanderbeek

A la Mode

Breathdeath

9.30pm: DJs until close

Tuesday 29th July 7pm – 12am

7.30pm: Presentation of the video tape RE:VOIR collection by Claire Renie

7.35pm: The Cool World by Shirley Clarke 

9.15pm: Beat Music lounge until close

Howls by Allen Ginsberg - Kronos Quartet

Thursday 31st July 7pm – 12am

7.30pm: Wholly Communion by Peter Whitehead (UK, 1965, 35mins)

Partly catalysed by Allen Ginsberg’s visit to London and readings at the ICA, the international Beat Poetry event brought together 7,000 people inside the Royal Albert Hall on 11th June 1965. Ginsberg performs a Hindu mantra, poets read, the audience shouts: Peter Whitehead caught events as they happened, shaking up the concept of documentary cinema.

8.05pm: Q&A with director PeterWhitehead, Beat poet Adrian Mitchell and Michael Horovitz. Hosted by Steve Wheeler.

8.45pm: No President by Jack Smith (US, 1963, 50mins)

Smith created No President originally titled The Kidnapping of Wendell Willkie by the Love Bandit, in reaction to the 1968 Presidential campaign. It mixes black-and-white footage of Smith’s creatures, with old campaign footage of Wendell Willkie, the 1940 Republican Presidential candidate.

9.35pm: DJs until close

Friday 1st August 7pm – 12am

7.30pm: Presentation

7.35pm: Notebook by Marie Menken (US, 12mins, 1962)

"These are too tiny or too obvious for comment, but one or two are my dearest children." Marie Menken

7.50pm:Two films by Bruce Baillie

All My Life (US, 1966, 3mins)

One shot, early summer in Mendocino. Song, Accompanied by the song All My Life (Ella Fitzgerald) with Teddy Wilson and his orchestra.

Valentin De Las Sierras (US, 1967, 10mins)

Skin, eyes, knees, horses, hair, sun, earth... An old song about Valentin, a Mexican revolutionary hero, sung by Jose Santollo Nasido.

8.30pm: Pull My Daisy by Robert Frank/Alfred Leslie (US, 1958, 27mins)

“The first truly Beat film” Jonas Mekas

Shot over two weeks in Alfred Leslie’s flat, Pull My Daisy is one of the founding films of New York underground cinema. Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso improvise, loosely playing an act from Kerouac’s (unproduced) play The Beat Generation. Poets, musicians and painters discuss sex and the sacred with a bishop, his mother and a prim sister - personifications of straight society.

9.20pm: Respectable Creatures by Jack Smith (US, 1950-66, 40mins)

Jack Smith, one of the most important figures in camp cinema, mixes shots of the Rio Carnival with extracts of his first film Buzzards over Baghdad. The latter mimicked The Arabian Nights, a film starring Maria Montez, whose Hollywood-generated image fascinated Smith.

10.00pm: DJ until close

Pull My Daisy by Robert Frank/Alfred Leslie (US, 1958, 27mins)

Shot over two weeks in Alfred Leslie’s flat, Pull My Daisy is one of the founding films of New York underground cinema. Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso improvise, loosely playing an act from Kerouac’s (unproduced) play The Beat Generation. Poets, musicians and painters discuss sex and the sacred with a bishop, his mother and a prim sister - personifications of straight society.

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Notebook by Marie Menken (US, 12mins, 1962)

“What Marie essentially “mothered” into film was cinematic collage. As a painter in the collage tradition she embedded into thick paint both hard and soft objects. She also mixed the paint with various textures, such as sand, and “wove” objects through her paint and across the surfaces of her canvasses. When she came to film, then, she looked at it first of all as a “thread” of many shades and colours to be woven or “spun out” into related patterns. She would hold the strips of film in her hand very much as she would strands of beads to be put into a collage painting. She would hang the film strips on clothespins and, after much meditation and often without running them through a viewer at all, would cut them together. Finally, of course, she would view the film over the projector because, as she once pointed out to me, “You cannot judge back-and-forth movements very well looking at the film strip – unless they are very fast in-and-out movements. Often, she under-cranked her camera to increase speed of depth movement.”

Stan Brakhage, Film at Wit’s End, p. 41

Bruce Baillie (1931)

"In his earliest films, Baillie explored ways of visualizing his own mental states and of capturing something of the lovely simplicity of the people around him he saw as most deeply spiritual. Increasingly, his films became characterized by a tendency to layer or combine multiple images and by an unusual sensitivity to texture, color, and light. Each of these tendencies can be understood as an emblem of a particular understanding Baillie had developed" (MacDonald, Scott - A Critical Cinema 2).

All My Life (1966, 3mins)

One shot, early summer in Mendocino. Song, Accompanied by the song All My Life (Ella Fitzgerald) with Teddy Wilson and his orchestra. Inspired by the magnificent daylight, All My Life (1966) is a continuous, single-shot film in which the camera pans along a flower lined, weathered fence followed by a gentle, vertical tip skyward. Shot with Ansco film, the colors are magnificent and the accompanying Ella Fitzgerald soundtrack, inspiring.

Valentin De Las Sierras (1967, 10mins)

Skin, eyes, knees, horses, hair, sun, earth... An old song about Valentin, a Mexican revolutionary hero, sung by Jose Santollo Nasido.

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Respectable Creatures by Jack Smith (US, 1950-66, 40mins)

Jack Smith, one of the most important figures in camp cinema, mixes shots of the Rio Carnival with extracts of his first film Buzzards over Baghdad. The latter mimicked The Arabian Nights, a film starring Maria Montez, whose Hollywood-generated image fascinated Smith.

Ron Rice made four films before dying prematurely in Mexico at the age of 28. His filmography includes The Flower Thief (1960) (with poet, writer, actor and filmmaker Taylor Mead), Senseless (1962), The Queen of Sheba Meets The Atom Man (1963) and Chumlum (1964).

Chumlum by Ron Rice (1964, 28mins)

“One of the underground’s best and most influential films” Peter Gidal

People bedecked in brightly coloured costumes, varying from drag to a Hollywood-style Sultan’s outfit, move and dance with complete creative freedom. The delirious atmosphere and the baroque, colourful and Arabian decor are emphasised by doubly exposed footage.

With Jack Smith, Mario Montez, Gerard Malanga.

Senseless by Ron Rice (US, 1962, 28mins)

“In 1962, still before Chumlum, Rice made Senseless. It covers a journey to a contemporary land of Oz, in this case the marijuana fields of Mexico. The journey is made up of filmic exploits and themes of playful scenes and ,ore dramatic ones. And so it goes, from the road to the bullfight, to the fields, to make the biggest joint ever”.

Stephen Dwoskin, Film Is. The international Free Cinema, ed. Peter Owen, London, p.117

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Stan Vanderbeek (1927-1984) began making films in 1955. A la mode (1961, 10mins) and Breathdeath (1963, 12mins) are two examples of his early collage animation works. Then he produced theatrical, multimedia pieces and computer animation. In the 1970s, he constructed a "Movie Drome" in Stony Point, New York, which was an audiovisual laboratory for the projection of film, dance, magic theatre, sound and other visual effects.

“[…] I should mention the work of Stanley Vanderbeek and Richard Preston, two foremost satirists of the new cinema. During the last three years they have produced a number of short films which in a free plotless manner, sharply comment on various aspects of contemporary American life. Nothing is spared – the arts, the sciences, the press, television, housewives, presidents, sex. Both use collage and assemblage techniques; both are ingenious manipulators of everyday imagery; both are perfect masters of their medium. Unlike the surrealists of the 1920s, who expressed their dissatisfaction in personal, often indecipherable imagery these satirists use the everyday objects and textures of modern America as their vocabulary. They are not entertainers nor are they story tellers. They are, rather, modern clowns who splash their discontent and their irony into the face of their public. Their style, like that of other modern artists, is a result of an exploded emotion, an act that couldn’t be kept back any longer.”

Jonas Mekas, “Notes of the New American Cinema”, 1961, in Experimental Cinema – the film reader, ed by Wheeler Winston Dixon and Gwendolyn Audrey Foster.

“The animation collage drown from social content is part of Stan Vanderbeek’s imagery, with its magazine cuttings, fixed movements and juxtaposition with drawings. The use of scale and size offers an array of associations in which people gain tyres and cars rule people. The sacred paradoxes of the American nightmare became the horror of the rest of the West. The film now becomes the ‘political cartoon’, as with Vanderbeek’s anti-war Breathdeath (1964). Wheels (four versions made between 1958 and 1965) portray social horror as the machine runs over life. Vanderbeek’s many films range from animated collages to mixed-media films, computer films, to the ‘expanded cinema’. Examples of his mixture of assemblage and serious and comic political and social satire are Skullduggery (1966), Summit (1963), The Life and Death of a Car(1962- ) and Science Friction (1958-65). Needless to say, most of the films are brilliant visual experiences. But VanDerBeek’s approach also involves an engrossing concern with the medium as a method of communication. He has explored and expanded the potential of film language as a form in itself and with his Movie-Drome he has explored film’s potential for environmental expansion, beyond the flat screen into the surrounding space. His involvement with the technology of visual language has also taken him into multiple-screen projection and thus into the area know as the ‘expanded cinema’ […]”

Film Is – The International Free Cinema, Stephen Dwoskin, ed. Peter Owen, London, 1975, p. 233-234