Beat Hotel Trailer

8th December 2011

Copenhagen

The world premiere of  Alan Govenar’s 2011 documentary, The Beat Hotel, will screen at 8:00PM December 8 at Cinematheque, Copenhagen,  as part of a month-long film series dedicated to ‘all things Beat’.  Click on the words in red above for “Beat Hotel Trailer”.  Here is a description of The Beat Hotel from the film’s website:

The Beat Hotel, a new film by Alan Govenar, goes deep into the legacy of the American Beats in Paris during the heady years between 1957 and 1963, when Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky and Gregory Corso fled the obscenity trials in the United States surrounding the publication of Ginsberg’s poem Howl. They took refuge in a cheap no-name hotel they had heard about at 9, Rue Git le Coeur and were soon joined by William Burroughs, Ian Somerville, Brion Gysin, and others from England and elsewhere in Europe, seeking out the “freedom” that the Latin Quarter of Paris might provide.

The Beat Hotel, as it came to be called, was a sanctuary of creativity, but was also, as British photographer Harold Chapman recalls, “an entire community of complete oddballs, bizarre, strange people, poets, writers, artists, musicians, pimps, prostitutes, policemen, and everybody you could imagine.” And in this environment, Burroughs finished his controversial book Naked Lunch; Ian Somerville and Brion Gysin invented the Dream Machine; Corso wrote some of his greatest poems; and Harold Norse, in his own cut-up experiments, wrote the novella, aptly called The Beat Hotel.

The film tracks down Harold Chapman in the small seaside town of Deal in Kent England. Chapman’s photographs are iconic of a time and place when Ginsberg, Orlovsky, Corso, Burroughs, Gysin, Somerville and Norse were just beginning to establish themselves on the international scene. Chapman lived in the attic of the hotel, and according to Ginsberg “didn’t say a word for two years” because he wanted to be “invisible” and to document the scene as it actually happened.

In the film, Chapman’s photographs and stylized dramatic recreations of his stories meld with the recollections of Elliot Rudie, a Scottish artist, whose drawings of his time in the hotel offer a poignant and sometimes humorous counterpoint. The memories of Chapman and Rudie interweave with the insights of French artist Jean-Jacques Lebel, author Barry Miles, Danish filmmaker Lars Movin, and the first hand accounts of Oliver Harris, Regina Weinrich, Patrick Amie, Eddie Woods, and 95 year old George Whitman, among others, to evoke a portrait of Ginsberg, Burroughs, Corso and the oddities of the Beat Hotel that is at once unexpected and revealing.

Here’s a quick rundown of all films showing:

THE BEAT HOTEL   also 12/16   730pm
Alan Govenar, 2011 / 82 min.

WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS: A MAN WITHIN 12/15   5pm    12/21, 7pm
Yony Leyser, 2010 / 87 min.

ONE FAST MOVE OR I’M GONE: KEROUAC’S BIG SUR   12/10 445pm,  12/18 7pm
Curt Worden, 2008 / 98 min.

FERLINGHETTI  12/13 730pm  12/28 815pm
Christopher Felver, 2009 / 80 min.

WORDS OF ADVICE + LOWELL CELEBRATES KEROUAC 12/14  730pm  17/18 730pm   12/27   715pm
Lars Movin & Steen Møller Rasmussen, 2007 & 1998 / 74 min. + 35 min.

THE SOURCE    12/9    730pm    12/29      615pm
Chuck Workman, 1999 / 88 min.

A SELECTION OF SHORT BEAT FILMS:

PULL MY DAISY (Robert Frank & Alfred Leslie, 1959 / 30 min.)      12/17   215pm  and    12/30  745pm
TOWERS OPEN FIRE (Antony Balch, William S. Burroughs, Brion Gysin & Ian Sommerville, 1963 / 10 min.)
WHOLLY COMMUNION (Peter Whitehead, 1965 / 33 min.)
THE DISCIPLINE OF D.E. (Gus Van Sant, 1982 / 13 min.)
THE JUNKY’S CHRISTMAS (Nick Donkin, 1993 /