It's worth noting that Time/Life always saw itself as protecting mainstream
(American) moralities, including sexual, by this treatment of underground
and bohemian arts and subcultures. Underground film was certainly one, Beat
poetry and culture another, as was the gay world. There's an article on
all the emerging Beat writers from sometime in 1958 I think, just before
Naked Lunch was published. It pulls the same bait-and-switch that David
Tetzlaff describes - unremittingly nasty and then suddenly some respectful
words about Burroughs' talents. This happened over and over again. By the
mid-80s they were making fun of Ginsberg's partial paralysis, describing
his face as one [eye] wide and innocent, gazing at eternity; the other
narrowed and scrutinizing, looking for his market share. (Quote in Barry
Miles' biography.) Of course, Ginsberg had early on attacked Time in his
poem America (Do you want your emotional life to be run by Time
Magazine?). And watch Pennebaker's Dont Look Back if you want to know
how Bob Dylan feels about Time.
And what Chuck says is also true: even negative articles were valuable to
people isolated from the phenomena they describe. There's a whole chapter
in Martin Meeker's book Contacts Desired devoted to an article Life
published in 1964 on gay men in San Francisco, and the impact it had on
isolated gay men across the country. Among other things, there was a photo
spread of the inside of a leather bar, showing men socializing, and that
was a big deal. For those interested, it's at:
http://www.solresearch.org/~SOLR/cache/pubn/mag/Life/19640626-Gays.pdf
Sorry to take this far out of film - just thinking about one way of
contextualizing the underground film articles.
Andy Ditzler
On Sat, May 31, 2014 at 10:07 PM, Chuck Kleinhans chuck...@northwestern.edu
wrote:
On May 31, 2014, at 6:24 PM, Jonathan Walley wall...@denison.edu wrote:
Okay, here it is: In the Year of Our Ford. Fred was right - the
article I cut-and-pasted earlier is nothing compared to this one. It is
truly sickening. Why TIME would choose to go on the rampage against handful
of avant-garde filmmakers getting small grants at a moment when MUCH
weirder stuff was getting much more widespread media attention (and $$)
is beyond me.
Although Time had unsigned articles back then, you could often determine
the reviewer/writer by looking on the masthead staff list.
Chuck Kleinhans
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Andy Ditzler
www.filmlove.org
www.johnq.org
Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts, Emory University
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