Beat Angel

Pull My Daisy(en)

Based on an incident in the life of Beat icon Neal Cassady and his wife, the painter Carolyn, the film tells the story of a railway brakeman whose wife invites a respected bishop over for dinner. However, the brakeman's Bohemian friends crash the party, with comic results. Pull My Daisy is a film that typifies the Beat Generation. Directed by Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie, Daisy was adapted by Jack Kerouac from the third act of his play, Beat Generation; Kerouac also provided improvised narration.

Big Sur(en)

Big Sur is a film adaptation of the Jack Kerouac autobiographical novel of the same name.

The Subterraneans(en)

A disillusioned writer explores the subterranean depths of San Francisco's North Beach district.

William S. Burroughs Birthday Bash(en)

To celebrate the 100th birthday of America's most audacious writer, William S. Burroughs, Chicago Humanities Festival brings together a motley crew of poets, writers, and musicians. William Seward Burroughs (1914 - 1997) was an American writer and visual artist. He was a primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodernist author whose influence is considered to have affected a range of popular culture as well as literature. Burroughs's needs took him across the United States, down into Mexico, to Europe and beyond. On his travels, he meets up with various members of the underground drug and "outcast" cultures.

Chicago 10(en)

Archival footage, animation and music are used to look back at the eight anti-war protesters who were put on trial following the 1968 Democratic National Convention.

Living on the Edge: The Poetic Works of Gérald Leblanc(fr)

A child of the Beat Generation, Gérald Leblanc conjoined urban-ness and American-ness, wandering and belonging, far beyond the boundaries of taboo. In so doing, he helped propel Acadia into the modern era.

A Line a Day Must Be Enough!(en)

In a film bursting with lyrics, pictures, and music the director shows us a way into the peculiar universe of Tóroddur, and the otherwise not very talkative artist gives us a glimpse of his thoughts on art, God, life and death.

Black Lodge(en)

Set in a nightmarish Bardo, a place between death and rebirth, a tormented writer faces down demons of his own making. Forced to confront the darkest moment in his life, he mines fractured and repressed memories for a way out. A woman is at the center of all the writer’s afterlife encounters. She is the subject of his life’s greatest regret, and she materializes everywhere in this Otherworld. The writer cannot detach any thoughts of his life from her.

Howl(tr)

Howl is an homage to the reading rituals of the Beat poets, to Wholly Communion, to 1965, to Allen Ginsberg, to Jack Kerouac, to William Burroughs, to all those books that we believe to be published in heaven, and to all the restless spirits, from these lands. The film documents the translator of the poem Howl into Turkish, accompanied by a musician.

The Honey Bee(en)

Beat poem parable to black youth.

Odd Børretzen: Mer enn helt all right(no)

A portrait of Norwegian poet Odd Børretzen in his own words, featuring musical highlights from Børretzen's work with musicians Alf Cranner and Lars Martin Myhre.

Sing! Fight! Sing! Fight! From LeRoi to Amiri(en)

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.

Tinta Film(es)

When Do We Eat?(en)

Impersonating Little Eva in a third-rate travelling production of Uncle Tom's Cabin fails to earn Nora enough for a square daily meal, and to make thing worse, her stage career comes to a sudden end when the sheriff arrives with a writ of seizure. Nora hops a passing freight but is frightened by a tramp, jumps off, and literally rolls into the town of Wattelville. After being arrested as a suspicious character, Nora is adopted by the kindly Ma Forbes, whose son James works in the local bank. "Pug" Hennessy and "Soup" McCool, two crooks, inveigle the scrupulously honest James into a poker game and, as a result, he is forced to steal $300 from the bank to cover his losses. Impersonating expert safe-cracker Velvet Mary, Nora helps the crooks to break into the bank, but upon opening the safe, she sounds the alarm, and the crooks are arrested. Having learned his lesson, James proposes to Nora, who never again is forced to go hungry.

A Nine O'Clock Town(en)

David Clary runs a sleepy little dry-goods store in a sleepy little town. A vamp from the big city shows up, intent on taking Clary for everything he's worth by a combination of seduction and blackmail. But the day is saved by the ingenuity of David's corset model.

Plateau(en)

After the death of his mother, Kareem decides to write a screenplay based on the lives of him and his friends.