TamTam Books News Sunday, August 22, 2004: This is from today's Guradian newspaper in the U.K. It concerns the films made by William Burroughs, Brion Gysin and Anthony Balch. In the cut William Burroughs's radical films are finally on DVD. Tim Cumming hears how they upset audiences - and had to be saved from a skip Monday August 23, 2004 The Guardian Genesis P-Orridge is talking about the day he was asked to rescue a series of radical movies made by William Burroughs, artist Brion Gysin and film-maker Anthony Balch from a skip. It was 1980 and P-Orridge was living on the dole in Hackney, east London, fronting art-punk band Throbbing Gristle. "Brion called me from Paris," recalls P-Orridge. "Anthony had died, and all the films they had made in the 1950s and 1960s were about to be destroyed. 'Here's the address,' he said. 'Do what you can to save them. Go and get them, and they're yours. You'll know what to do with them.' " The address led to the small, cramped office of a film distribution company in Soho. The rent hadn't been paid and the offices were being torn down. It was already late in the afternoon, and P-Orridge's only means of raising money was cashing a housing benefit cheque. "So I got my rent money, a black cab and a slip of paper, and went down to Soho. Sure enough there was an old building and these burly workmen were picking up the cans of 35mm film to throw them into the dumpster. Minutes later they would have been destroyed. I gave them £5 to put them in the cab, and went back to Hackney." The films on which Burroughs, Gysin and Blach collaborated - among them The Cut Ups and Towers Open Fire - have been cult objects for years. The Cut Ups was first shown in the mid-1960s at the Cinephone on Oxford Street, where the manager begged for a change of programme on account of the keys, coats, bags, underwear, and other strange items left behind by the disorientated audience. For years they lay in a stack of dusty film cans in Soho, until P-Orridge salvaged them. Once they had been catalogued and processed, he gave the films their first showing for years, in London and Manchester. Since then, snatched scenes from the movies have cropped up in various documentaries, including Klaus Maeck's Commissioner of Sewers, which combines footage from The Cut Ups with interview material and inimitable readings from 1986. For the most part, though, they have been excluded from the cultural record. "Life is a cut-up," insists Burroughs in Maeck's film. "As soon as you walk down a street your consciousness is being cut by random factors. The cut-up is closer to the facts of human perception than linear narrative." The techniques began when Gysin sliced through several layers of newspaper while cutting a mount in his room at the Beat Hotel in Paris. "I laughed so hard," he recalled later of the chance juxtapositions thrown up by the scalpel, "my neighbours thought I'd flipped." His neighbours included Burroughs. "You've got something big here," he told Gysin excitedly. Indeed, cutting through the word - disrupting the reality tapes, as Burroughs called it - was the most extreme face-lift writing ever got. Experiments with the new technology of home recording followed, with Gysin, Burroughs and electronics genius Ian Sommerville pioneering the world's earliest examples of sampling and tape manipulation. And with the arrival of film-maker Anthony Balch, who had cut his teeth making TV commercials, film became the logical conclusion for their experiments. When Burroughs produced his script for Towers Open Fire, Balch started filming in Paris and London. The film opens with Burroughs as the voice of control ("white, white, white as far as the eye can see ...") and ends with pages of Egyptian hieroglyphs blown by the wind down a country track. Though not strictly a cut-up movie, the film is full of the chance juxtapositions of the method, and filming for The Cut Ups soon followed, continuing over a period of years in Paris, Tangier, New York and London. Once it was finished, Balch assembled the footage on to four reels and gave them to his editor, instructing her to cut a foot from each reel - just enough time to see an image without absorbing its narrative details - and splice them together sequentially, sight unseen. "They edited everything mathematically," says P-Orridge of The Cut-Ups. "Regardless of any narrative or linear sense, in order to erase the concept of the author, and so that what they called The Third Mind would kick in and become the driving force of whatever happened. Which to this day is an incredible idea." The soundtrack comprised Burroughs and Gysin permutating phrases from a Scientology auditing test. The result is by turns hypnotic and disturbing; a kind of undiluted cerebral caustic. The Cut Ups runs counter to our essential conditioning, and provokes strong reactions because of it. "It's unusual to find someone working outside the satisfaction of people's vicarious needs," says P-Orridge. "It's always more of the same, the instant gratuitous pleasure, rather than erasing the ownership of the narrative. That's the big difference. The audience always wants to feel that they have power over the unfolding of the story. As soon as that's blocked, it's like any other craving. You get an aggressive response." The Cut Ups remains as refreshing and startling as ever - a radical re-visioning that shows us how we view and approach reality is more than a passive, reactive sport, but a continually creative enterprise. P-Orridge has just returned from showing the films to an art-world audience in Basle. "Though we feel we're very sophisticated now, culturally and aesthetically, the impact on this audience was still immense," he says. "They were entranced and completely silent." "There's a certain mythology that has grown up around the films, and around William and his work," he adds. "People have a great trust in the method and the process, which has become so all-pervading in popular culture and the mass media that it's vital future generations understand and are aware of the source material, and the original thinking behind what may now be mundane." · Thee Films, a collection of Burroughs' movies, and Commissioner of Sewers are available from Screenedge.com. Tosh // 11:54 PM ______________________ Comments: Post a Comment
This is from today's Guradian newspaper in the U.K. It concerns the films made by William Burroughs, Brion Gysin and Anthony Balch. In the cut William Burroughs's radical films are finally on DVD. Tim Cumming hears how they upset audiences - and had to be saved from a skip Monday August 23, 2004 The Guardian Genesis P-Orridge is talking about the day he was asked to rescue a series of radical movies made by William Burroughs, artist Brion Gysin and film-maker Anthony Balch from a skip. It was 1980 and P-Orridge was living on the dole in Hackney, east London, fronting art-punk band Throbbing Gristle. "Brion called me from Paris," recalls P-Orridge. "Anthony had died, and all the films they had made in the 1950s and 1960s were about to be destroyed. 'Here's the address,' he said. 'Do what you can to save them. Go and get them, and they're yours. You'll know what to do with them.' " The address led to the small, cramped office of a film distribution company in Soho. The rent hadn't been paid and the offices were being torn down. It was already late in the afternoon, and P-Orridge's only means of raising money was cashing a housing benefit cheque. "So I got my rent money, a black cab and a slip of paper, and went down to Soho. Sure enough there was an old building and these burly workmen were picking up the cans of 35mm film to throw them into the dumpster. Minutes later they would have been destroyed. I gave them £5 to put them in the cab, and went back to Hackney." The films on which Burroughs, Gysin and Blach collaborated - among them The Cut Ups and Towers Open Fire - have been cult objects for years. The Cut Ups was first shown in the mid-1960s at the Cinephone on Oxford Street, where the manager begged for a change of programme on account of the keys, coats, bags, underwear, and other strange items left behind by the disorientated audience. For years they lay in a stack of dusty film cans in Soho, until P-Orridge salvaged them. Once they had been catalogued and processed, he gave the films their first showing for years, in London and Manchester. Since then, snatched scenes from the movies have cropped up in various documentaries, including Klaus Maeck's Commissioner of Sewers, which combines footage from The Cut Ups with interview material and inimitable readings from 1986. For the most part, though, they have been excluded from the cultural record. "Life is a cut-up," insists Burroughs in Maeck's film. "As soon as you walk down a street your consciousness is being cut by random factors. The cut-up is closer to the facts of human perception than linear narrative." The techniques began when Gysin sliced through several layers of newspaper while cutting a mount in his room at the Beat Hotel in Paris. "I laughed so hard," he recalled later of the chance juxtapositions thrown up by the scalpel, "my neighbours thought I'd flipped." His neighbours included Burroughs. "You've got something big here," he told Gysin excitedly. Indeed, cutting through the word - disrupting the reality tapes, as Burroughs called it - was the most extreme face-lift writing ever got. Experiments with the new technology of home recording followed, with Gysin, Burroughs and electronics genius Ian Sommerville pioneering the world's earliest examples of sampling and tape manipulation. And with the arrival of film-maker Anthony Balch, who had cut his teeth making TV commercials, film became the logical conclusion for their experiments. When Burroughs produced his script for Towers Open Fire, Balch started filming in Paris and London. The film opens with Burroughs as the voice of control ("white, white, white as far as the eye can see ...") and ends with pages of Egyptian hieroglyphs blown by the wind down a country track. Though not strictly a cut-up movie, the film is full of the chance juxtapositions of the method, and filming for The Cut Ups soon followed, continuing over a period of years in Paris, Tangier, New York and London. Once it was finished, Balch assembled the footage on to four reels and gave them to his editor, instructing her to cut a foot from each reel - just enough time to see an image without absorbing its narrative details - and splice them together sequentially, sight unseen. "They edited everything mathematically," says P-Orridge of The Cut-Ups. "Regardless of any narrative or linear sense, in order to erase the concept of the author, and so that what they called The Third Mind would kick in and become the driving force of whatever happened. Which to this day is an incredible idea." The soundtrack comprised Burroughs and Gysin permutating phrases from a Scientology auditing test. The result is by turns hypnotic and disturbing; a kind of undiluted cerebral caustic. The Cut Ups runs counter to our essential conditioning, and provokes strong reactions because of it. "It's unusual to find someone working outside the satisfaction of people's vicarious needs," says P-Orridge. "It's always more of the same, the instant gratuitous pleasure, rather than erasing the ownership of the narrative. That's the big difference. The audience always wants to feel that they have power over the unfolding of the story. As soon as that's blocked, it's like any other craving. You get an aggressive response." The Cut Ups remains as refreshing and startling as ever - a radical re-visioning that shows us how we view and approach reality is more than a passive, reactive sport, but a continually creative enterprise. P-Orridge has just returned from showing the films to an art-world audience in Basle. "Though we feel we're very sophisticated now, culturally and aesthetically, the impact on this audience was still immense," he says. "They were entranced and completely silent." "There's a certain mythology that has grown up around the films, and around William and his work," he adds. "People have a great trust in the method and the process, which has become so all-pervading in popular culture and the mass media that it's vital future generations understand and are aware of the source material, and the original thinking behind what may now be mundane." · Thee Films, a collection of Burroughs' movies, and Commissioner of Sewers are available from Screenedge.com. Tosh // 11:54 PM
