Writing
Public Information Film on the dangers of solvent abuse.
The first feature-length film documenting the life and work of Pulitzer Prize-winning poet/activist Gary Snyder. A participant in the famed 1955 Six Gallery poetry reading in San Francisco that launched the Beat era (and the careers of Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac), Snyder later lived and studied in Japan, becoming a Zen teacher. He is the model for the character of Japhy Ryder in Jack Kerouac’s bestselling novel, The Dharma Bums.
Working outside the mainstream, the wildly prolific, visionary Stan Brakhage made more than 350 films over a half century. Challenging all taboos in his exploration of “birth, sex, death, and the search for God,” he turned his camera on explicit lovemaking, childbirth, even autopsy.
Colin Still's BLACK MOUNTAIN BLUES invites Robert Creeley to reflect on his life and work with patience and unobtrusive guidance. The film provides an invaluable view of Creeley in the last years of his life, with commentary from Charles Bernstein and Susan Howe, two of Creeley's closest colleagues, and from poet, musician, artist, and teacher Bobbie Louise Hawkins, who was married to Creeley for nearly 20 years. Vincent Ferini figures prominently, having put Olson in touch with Robert Creeley, shaping midcentury American writing.
Documentary on three Asian families in Britain.
Witness the last days of the Beat poet whose works would capture the very essence of the 1960 counter-cultural movement in an informative documentary featuring Allan Ginsburg's final television interview as well as remarkable deathbed footage shot by underground cinema icon Jonas Mekas.
The story of how Everett Leroy Jones became Amiri Baraka, from his childhood to the mid '60s, is told through interviews recorded in the late '90s.
