The two films under review are valuable as social history. “Ruth Weiss,
the Beat Goddess” was supposed to open at a film festival today, but I
can’t seem to find the location, not even onthe film’s website
<https://www.ruthweissfilm.com/>. However, I don’t think the filmmaker
will have any objection to you watching the film for free, courtesy of
the Vimeo link they sent to me above. Ruth Weiss is a 92-year old poet
who was part of the San Francisco jazz and poetry scene but never
achieved the fame of her friends like Jack Kerouac. As the film points
out, there was a patriarchal element to the beat generation that
prevented women writers from getting their due as both Hettie Jones
(LeRoi Jones’s wife) and Joyce Johnson (Jack Kerouac’s girlfriend point
out in “How I became Hettie Jones: A Memoir” and “Minor Characters”.
Available for rentalon Amazon Prime
<https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08BDFB22S/>for $3.99, “Hitchhiking
to the Edge of Sanity” recounts the story told by the two principals
about hitchhiking across the Sahara in February, 1971. Rather
audaciously, the film consists mostly of the two men, now in their
seventies, speaking into the camera while black-and-white photos from
their trip are superimposed while they speak. It is the only film I have
ever seen that defies documentary conventions like this except for
Jonathan Demme’s filming of Spalding Gray behind a table as he performs
“Swimming to Cambodia”. While Dick Russell, a journalist, and Steve
Ewert, a photographer, are not performance artists, their tale is
spell-binding and a reminder of how my generation lived on the edge
full: https://louisproyect.org/2020/08/18/ruth-weiss-the-beat-goddess/
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