Two: Creeley/McClure

Martin Scorsese's documentary intertwines footage from The Band's incredible farewell tour with probing backstage interviews and featured performances by Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison, Eric Clapton, and other rock legends.

Traces the Beats from Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac's meeting in 1944 at Columbia University to the deaths of Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs in 1997. Three actors provide dramatic interpretations of the work of these three writers, and the film chronicles their friendships, their arrival into American consciousness, their travels, frequent parodies, Kerouac's death, and Ginsberg's politicization. Their movement connects with bebop, John Cage's music, abstract expressionism, and living theater. In recent interviews, Ginsberg, Burroughs, Kesey, Ferlinghetti, Mailer, Jerry Garcia, Tom Hayden, Gary Snyder, Ed Sanders, and others measure the Beats' meaning and impact.

Three actors in Hollywood live and love together. A director comes from New York to make a movie about actors and Hollywood.

"Human qualities migrate through light and shadow... Like flames and waves, the dead and the living course through this world... without weight through space and time."

Harry Collings returns home to his farm after drifting with his friend, Arch. His wife, who had given up on him, reluctantly allows him to stay, and soon believes that all will be well again. But then Harry has to make a difficult decision regarding his loyalties and priorities.

Jonas Mekas assembles 160 portraits, appearances, and fleeting sketches of underground and independent filmmakers captured between 1955 and 1996. Fast-paced and archival in spirit, the film celebrates the avant-garde as its own “nation of cinema,” a vital community existing outside the dominance of commercial film.

During the 1970s I shot, helped to make, or commissioned about ten document films, mainly about film-makers. This film is one of them. It was made with Dan Ochiva, who acted as cameraman on about half of the footage. I shot the rest, and then edited the film. It is a record of a conference held at the State University of New York at Buffalo on March 22-25, 1973. Among the participants filmed were Gerald O'Grady (who organized the conference), Will Hindle, Stan Brakhage, Jonas Mekas, Robert Creeley, Bruce Baillie, Scott Bartlett, Hollis Frampton, Ken Jacobs, Ed Pincus, Stan Vanderbeek, Ed Emshwiller, Sally Dixon, James Cox. This footage will eventually become part of my film PEOPLE, PLACES, THE 1970S. –R. H.

Jim Morrison considered himself first a Poet, and subsequently a Rock Star and sex symbol. “ROCK POET” tells his story. He was far more than the hell-raiser, infamous for his arrest in Miami for exposing himself on stage, another rock casualty- dead by the age of just 27. “Classic Artists” meets with legendary Beat Poets Michael Horovitz, Michael McClure, Pete Brown of “Cream” fame, about the movement and what it meant to the burgeoning tide of Rock and Roll, more specifically, to Jim Morrison, and finds the admiration and respect for his talent as a poet and writer amongst his Beat Poet predecessors and also contemporaries to be unquestionable. This film includes revelations from those that were present in the final days and final hours of Jim Morrison, including an eye witness . A vigorously captivating insight of a time in rock history , a time in the life of the man, both rock star and poet.

Takes place over the course of one feverish night in a Manhattan police precinct and neighboring bar.

Sepia toning lends a romantic (even wistful) quality to Larry Jordan's film Visions of a City, which he shot in San Francisco in 1957 and edited in 1978. The pace is un-irritating, in contrast to the San Francisco of today; but unlike the equal weight Helen Levill gives to all her subjects, there is an internal evolutionary development in the Jordan film that ultimately delivers a story. Until the introduction of the human protagonist, poet Michael McClure, we are treated to an extravagant display of visual delights.

Over a booze-fueled, increasingly hectic five-day shoot in East Hampton, Norman Mailer and his cast and crew spontaneously unloaded onto film the lurid and loony chronicle of U.S. presidential candidate and filmmaker Norman T. Kingsley debating and attacking his hangers-on and enemies. This gonzo narrative, “an inkblot test of Mailer’s own subconscious” (Time), becomes something like a documentary on its own making when costar Rip Torn breaks the fourth wall in one of cinema’s most alarming on-screen outbursts.

Colin Still's BLACK MOUNTAIN BLUES invites Robert Creeley to reflect on his life and work with patience and unobtrusive guidance. The film provides an invaluable view of Creeley in the last years of his life, with commentary from Charles Bernstein and Susan Howe, two of Creeley's closest colleagues, and from poet, musician, artist, and teacher Bobbie Louise Hawkins, who was married to Creeley for nearly 20 years. Vincent Ferini figures prominently, having put Olson in touch with Robert Creeley, shaping midcentury American writing.

More than 20 contemporary North American poets recite, sing, and perform their work. Early in the film, Charles Bukowski talks about the energy of poets and of a poem. These poets are the children of Walt Whitman and of Charles Olson, incantatory and oratorical, radical, sometimes incorporating contemporary political imagery. Black Mountain poets, the Beats, minimalists like John Cage, the wordless Four Horsemen, Tom Waits, and others capture aspects of poets as troubadours.

Made for the 20th anniversary of London’s Close-Up Film Centre, Close Up was created as part of a programme inviting fifty filmmakers to respond to a place dedicated to cinema. Rivers’ two-minute 16mm miniature becomes an intimate reflection on the cinema as both a physical space and a shared experience – a place for looking, gathering and keeping film culture alive.