FLicKeR
FLicKeR is a Canadian documentary film directed by Nik Sheehan and produced by Maureen Judge, based on the book by John Geiger about the work of artist Brion Gysin and his Dream Machine. The film was co-produced with the National Film Board of Canada.This award-winning documentary about poet, artist, calligrapher and mystic Brion Gysin, portrays the life and legacy of an artist who believed art could revolutionize human consciousness. FLicKeR chronicles Gison’s complex ideas, friendships and influence with some of the 20th century’s key counterculture figures, such as William Burroughs, Kurt Corbain and Marianne Faithful.
Gysin was fascinated by identity. He saw himself as incarnating the 10th-century King of Assassins, trained in counter-espionage during WWII, and wrote and rewrote his name in countless permutations, as if to make it disappear – in the process, inventing the cut-up technique that his lifelong friend, Beat novelist Burroughs, would make famous.
Taking the dream machine as the basis of its explorations, FLicKeR asks crucial questions about the nature of art and consciousness, and imagines humanity liberated to explore its creativity in complete freedom.
The documentary features interviews with many prominent figures from the beat movement who had experimented with Gysin’s invention and discuss his life and ideas in the film. Notable figures include Marianne Faithfull, DJ Spooky, The Stooges, Iggy Pop, and Genesis P-Orridge. The Deluxe Canadian DVD (Iggy Pop Cover) includes: Short Films by Antony Balch featuring William S. Burroughs and Bryon Gysin (”The Cut Ups” and “Towers Open Fire”), and Archival Photo Gallery.
Visit Official Film site: http://www.flickerflicker.com Visit Nik Sheehan’s blog: http://flicker.myfilmblog.com
The film premiered in Toronto in 2008 at the international documentary film festival Hot Docs and received the festival’s Special Jury Prize for the best Canadian Feature Length Documentary. It then went on to win in the Best Film on International Art category at the 2009 Era New Horizons Film Festival in Poland, and was also nominated for a 2009 Gemini Award in the category of Best Performing Arts Program or Series or Arts Documentary Program or Series.
The rare documentary that jumps beyond informative and entertaining into the realm of mind-expanding, FLicKeR blends revelatory biography, energizing philosophy, and seductive trances.
– Michael Fox in the San Francisco Weekly
FlicKeR is steadfast in its belief that Gysin is influential… a variety of academics use Gysin as a gateway to discussions of everything from the changing nature of terrorism to iPods… [FLicKeR] energizes his enigma.
– Johnny Ray Huston, San Francisco Bay Guardian
The impressive parade of counter cultural talking heads put forth a cumulative defense of Gysin as a creative force in his own right, whose talents and insights extend far beyond Burroughs’ long shadow.
– Matt Sussman, SF360
The Beat Hotel
The Beat Hotel, a new film by Documentary Arts, 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.
Visit Official Film site: http://www.thebeathotelmovie.com
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.
