- Drugstore Cowboy
In this week’s paper J.R. Jones has a review of Howard Brookner’s 1983 documentary of William S. Burroughs, the aptly titled Burroughs: The Movie, which is enjoying a brief run at the Gene Siskel Film Center this week. As the review notes, the film has been out of circulation for a while, but Burroughs has been a prominent fixture in film for decades. Though he’s obviously best known as a key member of the Beat literary scene, the writer had plenty of strong ideas about cinema. During the mid-60s, he was more of a multimedia artist than a writer, working with experimental film and sound recordings modeled after his fragmentary prose. (Jack Sargeant’s 1997 book Naked Lens: Beat Cinema offers a quality rundown of Burroughs’s filmmaking ethos, as well as a thorough examination of the Beat generation’s influence on underground cinema, and vice versa.) Below, you can find my five favorite examples of Burroughs on film.
- Towers Open Fire (dir. Anthony Balch/William S. Burroughs, 1963) The first film in which Burroughs, in collaboration with English filmmaker Anthony Balch, applied his cut-up technique to cinema. Following Dadaist poetry and constructivist film theory, Burroughs and Balch “cut up” and stringed together seemingly incongruous imagery to form a fragmented whole, a filmic representation of Burroughs’s cut-up prose style. The film explores many of the same themes Burroughs was interested in during that time, but it isn’t technically a “cut up” film, at least not in the formal sense. Really, it’s a lead-up exercise to . . .
