The booklet accompanying the Rhino Records audio compilation, The Beat
Generation, includes quite a good list of sources, including books by
the principals and about the scene, films from the time -- most set in
the subculture or incorporating "beatniks and beat chicks" -- and more
recent films about individuals or the scene, television programs,
exploitation novels, and parodies.
To add to Gloria's list of films:
The Beatniks
Beat Girl (aka Wild For Kicks)
Color Me Blood Red (Herschell Gordon Lewis exploitation pic)
Expresso Bongo (UK production; haven't seen it, but great title, eh?)
Fried Shoes, Cooked Diamonds (doc)
The Interview (Ernest Pintoff animation)
Jack Kerouac's Road (doc, from National Film Board of Canada)
Jazz on a Summer's Day (doc about Newport Jazz Festival)
Kerouac: The Movie (doc)
The Life and Times of Allen Ginsberg (doc)
On the Bowery (low-budget drama on the downtown margins)
The Subterraneans (MGM adaptation of Kerouac novel)
Towers Open Fire (William S. Burroughs collaboration)
There are also plenty of Hollywood films that include representations
of beat-types or bohemians -- for instance, Bells are Ringing and My
Sister Eileen.
For further information, commentary, and sources, let me refer you to:
David E. James, Allegories of Cinema: American Film in the Sixties
(Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1989);
Moody Street Irregulars, no. 22-23 (Winter 1989-90), an issue of the
Jack Kerouac Newsletter devoted to film and the beats;
and, with all due immodesty,
my dissertation, "The New American Cinema and the Beat Generation,
1956-1960," Northwestern Univ., 1984. It discusses beat culture
at some length, with case studies of On the Bowery (Lionel Rogosin),
Shadows (John Cassavetes), Pull My Daisy (Robert Frank and Alfred
Leslie), and Jazz on a Summer's Day (Bert Stern), in order to
outline a moment in independent filmmaking in the US when interests
of narrative, experimental, and documentary cinema converged. (If
you can hang on for one last toot on my own horn, part of one
chapter was published as "The Making (and Unmaking) of Pull My
Daisy," in Film History 2, no. 3 (1988) -- a more accessible source
than the diss. itself.)
For reasons that should be self-evident, I'd be interested in what you
come up with, Tammy. Let me know, if you like.
Blaine Allan [log in to unmask]
Film Studies
Queen's University
Kingston, Ontario
Canada K7L 3N6
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