Poetic Justice: Shock American poetry to light up Glasgow film screens
A film about a poem that shocked America is a fitting highlight for the
Glasgow Film Festival
• James Franco and Howl co-star Aaron Tveit as Ginsberg's partner Peter
Orlovsky
ALLEN Ginsberg's performance of Howl at the Six Gallery, San Francisco,
in October 1955 was more than just another poetry reading. The
jazz-inflected four-part work the young Beat writer unveiled was a
full-frontal assault on bourgeois sensibilities that broke with
classical poetic forms and opened a door to a new kind of uninhibited
self-expression.
It said - pace John Lennon - that there was nothing that could not be
talked about, no words that could not be used. Drugs, homosexuality,
mental illness, race, war, alienation, paranoia - Ginsberg had captured
the concerns of a generation with shocking frankness, wrapping them all
up in an ecstatic celebration of sexual, social, racial and intellectual
diversity ("Everything is holy") that would help lay the foundation for
the countercultural movements of the 1960s and 1970s.
The poem was so daringly liberal its publisher, Lawrence Ferlinghetti,
found himself on trial in 1957, charged with obscenity, after undercover
police purchased a copy at his City Lights bookshop in San Francisco.
How the poem came to be written, what it was, how it was tossed like a
grenade at an unsuspecting America, and how the establishment tried to
fight back, is the subject of Howl, a film by Oscar-winning directing
duo Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman (The Celluloid Closet). Starring
James Franco as Ginsberg, the movie is one of the highlights of this
year's Glasgow Film Festival, which starts today.
The project, recalls Epstein, began with a call out of the blue from
Ginsberg's former secretary, Bob Rosenthal, asking if they'd be
interested in doing a project on Howl. The idea was appealing.
The poem's 50th anniversary was then looming, so it was perfect timing.
Moreover, the film-makers felt connected to Howl: Epstein had been born
in 1955, while Friedman, the son of a Beat writer, had grown up in the
1960s counterculture and as a child had seen its impact first hand. What
they didn't know was that the journey to the screen would last eight
years.
The original plan was to make a documentary. They videotaped
Ferlinghetti, Peter Orlovsky, Ginsberg's partner, and other relevant
figures, but somehow the material failed to convey the vitality and
radicalism of Ginsberg's achievement.
They wanted a new generation to feel Howl had relevance to their lives
now, not as if it was some distant voice from a bygone era.
The turning point came when they visited Tuli Kupferberg, a poet and
anarchist alluded to in Howl, and discovered Il
luminated Poems, a collection of Ginsberg's work, including Howl,
published in 1996, with illustrations by Eric Drooker. It proved to be a
lightbulb moment.
Part of the problem for the film-makers, says Epstein, had been that
apart from a few shots in Robert Frank's 1959 short film, Pull My Daisy,
no footage of Ginsberg or any of the other Beats, such as Jack Kerouac
and Neal Cassady, existed from the Howl period. "That kind of
necessitated breaking out of the traditional documentary mode," explains
Friedman. "But also the more we thought about it, the more it seemed
like, taking that approach, it would only have lived as historical
artifact; and we really wanted to come up with a form where Allen would
be alive and young in the present tense."
Their solution was to use Drooker's artwork as the basis for an animated
Howl. They then combined this with reconstructions of Ginsberg's seminal
reading at the Six Gallery and of the trial, as well as an interview
between Ginsberg and an off-camera journalist, constructed out of bits
of different interviews given by the poet, and flashbacks to Ginsberg's
life before Howl.
They wanted to understand why Howl was written when it was. The best way
to do that, says Friedman, "was to use Allen's story to try to uncover
the layers of the process that he had to go through to get to the point
where he could create this thing… because so much of his personal life
is expressed in the poem. Then we wanted to see how it affected the
society, and the trial seemed like a really good dramatisation of how
1950s society responded to this unusual expression."
It responded with shock and awe. Here was a work in which homosexual
lust and desire came out of the closet loud and proud. The directness
and explicitness of the language, (particularly for 1957 America) is
still striking, while Ginsberg's attack on the forces that try to
alienate people from themselves, is as relevant now as it was when Howl
was written. That the film-makers were working on their movie at a time
when the Bush administration was telling Americans to "go out and shop
and be happy" only seemed to them to make its denouncement of
"militarism and consumerism and advertising dehumanising culture" all
the more urgent. "At the same time there were all these free speech
issues that made it feel very current," says Friedman. "At this point
they were talking about Janet Jackson's nipple, but it's the same kind
of thing: what's acceptable in terms of sexual expression? What can you
broadcast?"
Not Howl, apparently.
Plans to play one of Ginsberg's readings of the poem for the 50th
anniversary were dropped by a radio station, says Friedman, "because it
was the Bush years and they were afraid they would be fined."
Howl may have won the battle when Judge Clayto
n W Horn ruled the poem was not obscene in 1957, but the war over the
poem between censorship and free expression stills go on. However, for
those who still doubt the importance of Ginsberg's masterpiece, Epstein
says: "This is the work that really created everything that followed."
"All the counterculture movements that we think of blossoming in the
1960s and 70s, you can find their seeds in Howl," adds Friedman. "This
group of Beat writers, this kind of literary fraternity that was
rebelling in the 1950s, which we think of as this very conservative,
very repressed period, that's when it was all bubbling up ."
The poem's reach is long but only time will tell if Howl is a truly
prophetic work as defined by Franco/Ginsberg in the film. That is to
say, not something that merely predicts tomorrow, but which makes a
statement that has meaning in 100 years.
For the film-makers there is no question: "Obviously we believe that
about the material," says Epstein, "and that's why it felt like the
right time to introduce it."
•
Howl is at Glasgow Film Theatre, tomorrow and Saturday for the Glasgow
Film Festival. It goes on general release on 25 February.
--
http://news.scotsman.com/entertainment/Poetic-Justice-Shock-American-poetry.6719420.jp
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