Hollywood Does the Beat Generation Beat These Films! by LOUIS PROYECT Over the past three years there have been no less than four narrative films about the beat generation, starting with “Howl” in September 2010. Walter Salles’s “On the Road” followed in 2012, and then just a month ago “Kill Your Darlings”, about Ginsberg and Kerouac at Columbia University, arrived. And now there is “Big Sur” that opens on November first at the Cinema Village in New York. All of these films reflect continued interest in the lives and work of Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, et al, motivated in large part by a new generation of “hipsters” needing to understand what Ginsberg called “the Nightmare of Moloch”. This article will assess the four films as well as a BBC documentary featuring Russell Brand that traces Kerouac’s itinerary in “On the Road”, a film that says more about Brand than it does about Kerouac. It will conclude with some thoughts about the connections between the beats and the radical movement, something that deserves a book of its own.
full: http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/11/01/beat-these-films/ _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
