Beat Beatific

FROM BEAT TO BEATIFIC The Truth, the Whole Truth – well, nearly…

War – and Peace...

• In America, after 1945, artists and intellectuals craved for an end to the regimented, psychologically repressed society of the war years. The spontaneous expressions of the Beat Poets and the release of unconscious forces by the Abstract Expressionist painters were parallel manifestations of this desire.

Bombhead, Bruce Conner

Activities At The Margins... • There were parallel and inter-related developments on both the East and West coasts. Painter Jackson Pollock worked on Long Island, while Surrealist Max Ernst lived nearby. Poet Allen Ginsberg moved from New York to join West Coast Beats in San Francisco, in 1954

‘1949 No. 1’ by Clyfford Still, San Francisco Artist

Meanwhile, in Europe… • No film can be too personal. The image speaks. Sound amplifies and comments. Size is irrelevant. Perfection is not an aim. An attitude means a style. A style means an attitude. Lindsay Anderson.1954.

From ‘The March To Aldermaston, 1959. Anderson and others.

Dissatisfied "More Or Less Amateurs“...

• ‘In making these films, and presenting these programmes, we have tried to make a stand for independent, creative filmmaking in a world where the pressures of conformism and commercialism are becoming more powerful every day’.

From ‘The March To Aldermaston, 1959. Anderson and others.

Lorenza Mazzetti Lindsay Anderson Karel Reisz Tony Richardson

Jean –Luc Godard

• Grew up in Switzerland, French protestant family. University in Paris. Wrote for ‘Cahier’s Du Cinema’, founded by theorist Andre Bazin. The magazine sought a cinema of ‘objective reality’ and rejected cinematic tricks.

A Certain Tendency Of The French Cinema... • The French New Wave responded to a crisis in French artistic and intellectual life. The Cahiers du Cinema critics who became the first New Wave directors felt cheated by the French film industry, which offered stagy dramas and literary adaptations. Text: Dr. Barry Mauer, associate Professor of English at the University of Central Florida.

• François Truffaut, in his manifesto "A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema," denounced what he called the "Tradition of Quality," those heavyhanded, overly symbolic films which dominated the French film industry. The New Wave critics disliked any filmmakers who did not use the medium.

‘À Bout De Souffle’ - Breathless • One of the first products of the critics turned film-makers was an international success. Pioneered use of handheld camera, working outside of the studio. Editing used jump-cuts.

Bruce Conner

• Conner, like Brakhage was from the American midwest. He grew a practice in San Francisco as a ‘Beat Assemblage’ maker, producing items from scrap and garbage. His work at one point was widely shown, but he felt limited within the Gallery system and tried to declare himself dead...

Bruce Conner, St Valentine’s Day Massacre/Homage To Errol Flyn, 1960

Make Love, Not War… • It (The Army) not only isolates men from the company of women, but it takes that creative force (using that isolation) and turns it into a destructive force. By taking the youngest men in the society. They're told to kill. So it's perpetuating a kind of activity ...Somehow you're a weakling, you're not a man if you don't go into the Army, if you don't want to fight the enemies of society. Bruce Conner, 1974

From ‘Cosmic Ray’, Bruce Conner, 1962

Stan Brakhage

• Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, and eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception. How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of 'Green'?

Window Water Baby Moving

Window Water Baby Moving, 1959

• ...Jane emphasized her share in the conception and creation of Window Water. Her husband, though admitting her to be a consistent "inspiration," asserted with equal emphasis that Jane was completely absorbed in the dynamics of childbirth and that the finished film, which includes shots made by Jane of the relieved father, was solely his work

Kenneth Anger

• He was born in California and grew up in Hollywod. Went to Paris in 1949 to work with Jean Cocteau. Wrote ‘Hollywood Bablylon’ exposing the scandals of Hollywood. Disciple of Alastair Crowley. Scorpio Rising refers to birth of ‘Luciferian’ Age of Aquarius.

Scorpio Rising

• “...it became, like, a landmark case of redeeming social merit. That was the phrase that was used to justify that it wasn't pornography. And, indeed, there's nothing pornographic about it. Somebody had to break the ice and have that kind of case at that time to establish the freedom, because, before then, the police could seize anything they wanted to”.