| Wholly Communion | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Directed by | Peter Whitehead |
Release date |
|
Running time | 33 minutes |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
Wholly Communion is a short documentary film made in 1965 by British filmmaker Peter Whitehead. [1] It was filmed at the Royal Albert Hall, London, and documents a poetry event held on 11 June 1965 called the International Poetry Incarnation. It features poetry readings by Beat poets from the UK and U.S. [2] [3] [4]
The Monthly Film Bulletin wrote: "As a record of that celebrated meeting of poets which packed the Royal Albert Hall last June, Wholly Communion certainly has its points: here, preserved for the curious and the social historian, are the narcissistically mumbling poets (Logue, Ferlinghetti and Mitchell are notable exceptions), and the huge audience, which came expecting one knows not what, listening reverentially (did they enjoy themselves?). Aside from its interest as a document, unfortunately, the film is a clumsy piece of work. The single camera, rather uncertainly doing its best to give an overall coverage, wobbles and shudders, zooms in to a target, misses, tries again and re-focuses, in a poor approximation to the much more professional American cinéma-vérité approach. A good deal of the framing is also ugly, and there is an interminable sequence in which the camera seems to be hypnotised by a girl in the audience who is waving her arms about like a third-rate interpretative dancer in time to Ginsberg's poetical mutterings." [5]
Irwin Allen Ginsberg was an American poet and writer. As a student at Columbia University in the 1940s, he began friendships with Lucien Carr, William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, forming the core of the Beat Generation. He vigorously opposed militarism, economic materialism, and sexual repression, and he embodied various aspects of this counterculture with his views on drugs, sex, multiculturalism, hostility to bureaucracy, and openness to Eastern religions.
"Howl", also known as "Howl for Carl Solomon", is a poem written by Allen Ginsberg in 1954–1955 and published in his 1956 collection Howl and Other Poems. The poem is dedicated to Carl Solomon.
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Gregory Nunzio Corso was an American poet and a key member of the Beat movement. He was one of the youngest of the inner circle of Beat Generation writers.
City Lights is an independent bookstore-publisher combination in San Francisco, California, that specializes in world literature, the arts, and progressive politics. It also houses the nonprofit City Lights Foundation, which publishes selected titles related to San Francisco culture. It was founded in 1953 by poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Peter D. Martin. Both the store and the publishers became widely known following the obscenity trial of Ferlinghetti for publishing Allen Ginsberg's influential collection Howl and Other Poems. Nancy Peters started working there in 1971 and retired as executive director in 2007. In 2001, City Lights was made an official historic landmark. City Lights is located at 261 Columbus Avenue. While formally located in Chinatown, it self-identifies as part of immediately adjacent North Beach.
The term San Francisco Renaissance is used as a global designation for a range of poetic activity centered on San Francisco, which brought it to prominence as a hub of the American poetry avant-garde in the 1950s. However, others felt this renaissance was a broader phenomenon and should be seen as also encompassing the visual and performing arts, philosophy, cross-cultural interests, and new social sensibilities.
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Performance poetry is poetry that is specifically composed for or during a performance before an audience. During the 1980s, the term came into popular usage to describe poetry written or composed for performance rather than print distribution, mostly open to improvisation. From that time performance poetry in Australia has found new venues, audiences and expressions.
Michael W. Horovitz was a German-born British poet, editor, visual artist and translator who was a leading part of the Beat Poetry scene in the UK. In 1959, while still a student, he founded the "trail-blazing" literary periodical New Departures, publishing experimental poetry, including the work of William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and many other American and British beat poets. Horovitz read his own work at the 1965 landmark International Poetry Incarnation, at the Royal Albert Hall in London, deemed to have spawned the British underground scene, when an audience of more than 6,000 came to hear readings by the likes of Ginsberg, Burroughs, Gregory Corso and Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
The International Poetry Incarnation was an event at the Royal Albert Hall in London on 11 June 1965.
Howl and Other Poems is a collection of poetry by Allen Ginsberg published November 1, 1956. It contains Ginsberg's most famous poem, "Howl", which is considered to be one of the principal works of the Beat Generation as well as "A Supermarket in California", "Transcription of Organ Music", "Sunflower Sutra", "America", "In the Baggage Room at Greyhound", and some of his earlier works. For printing the collection, the publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti, another well-known poet, was arrested and charged with obscenity. On October 3, 1957, Judge Clayton W. Horn found Ferlinghetti not guilty of the obscenity charge, and 5,000 more copies of the text were printed to meet the public demand, which had risen in response to the publicity surrounding the trial. Howl and Other Poems contains two of the most well-known poems from the Beat Generation, "Howl" and "A Supermarket in California", which have been reprinted in other collections, including the Norton Anthology of American Literature.
Jane Arden was a British film director, actress, singer/songwriter and poet, who gained note in the 1950s. Born in Pontypool, Monmouthshire, she studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. She started acting in the late 1940s and writing for stage and television in the 1950s. In the 1960s, she joined movements for feminism and anti-psychiatry. She wrote a screenplay for the film Separation (1967). In the late 1960s and 1970s, she wrote for experimental theatre, adapting one work as a self-directed film, The Other Side of the Underneath (1972). In 1978 she published a poetry book. Arden committed suicide in 1982. In 2009, her feature films Separation (1967), The Other Side of the Underneath (1972) and Anti-Clock (1979) were restored by the British Film Institute and released on DVD and Blu-ray. Her literary works are out of print.
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Harry Fainlight (1935–1982) was a British/American poet associated with the Beats movement.
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Howl is a 2010 American film which explores both the 1955 Six Gallery debut and the 1957 obscenity trial of 20th-century American poet Allen Ginsberg's noted poem "Howl". The film is written and directed by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman and stars James Franco as Ginsberg.
Poetry film is a subgenre of film that fuses the use of spoken word poetry, visual images, and sound. This fusion of image and spoken word creates what William Wees called the "Poetry-film" genre. He suggested that "a number of avant-garde film and video makers have created a synthesis of poetry and film that generates associations, connotations and metaphors neither the verbal nor the visual text would produce on its own".
"It's So Far Out, It's Straight Down" is an episode of the 1960s Granada Television news/documentary series Scene at 6.30. It aired in the Granada region of the British Independent Television network on 7 March 1967. The episode focuses on the burgeoning London underground movement and psychedelic music scene of the time. It features interviews with Paul McCartney of the Beatles and leading underground figures connected to the International Times newspaper and Indica Bookshop, such as Barry Miles. It was directed by John Sheppard and produced by Jo Durden-Smith. The episode also includes footage of the band Pink Floyd performing at the UFO Club.
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