Documentary examines Paris hotel where the Beat Generation came to live and play between 1957 and 1963 (photo by Harold Chapman, 1960)
THE BEAT HOTEL (Alan Govenar, 2011)
Cinema Village
22 East 12th St. between University Pl. & Fifth Ave.
Opens Friday, March 30
212-924-3363
www.thebeathotelmovie.com
www.cinemavillage.com
Between 1957 and 1963, a group of American Bohemians moved to Paris in the wake of obscenity trials against the publication of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, settling into a cheap, dirty, nameless hotel in the Latin Quarter run by a woman known as Madame Rachou. Soon christened the Beat Hotel, the site became home to such writers, artists, and poets as Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, Gregory Corso, William S. Burroughs, Ian Somerville, and Brion Gysin. “The Beat Hotel was a temple of the mind,” resident and artist Elliot Rudie says early on in Alan Govenar’s The Beat Hotel, a new documentary that examines the history and influence of that time. “Once you went through the door into the hotel, you were in another world,” adds photographer Harold Chapman, who took subtle pictures that capture the flavor and essence of what went on at the hotel, where Burroughs finished Naked Lunch, Corso wrote Bomb, and Ginsberg began Kaddish. The eighty-two-minute film features recollections from some of the hotel’s former residents, including Chapman, artist Jean-Jacques Lebel, and Rudie, whose art inspired animations used in the documentary, in addition to book dealers Cyclops Lester and George Whitman, who hung out with the Beats while they were in Paris. Govenar fills in the details with talking heads and reenactments of important scenes, supplemented by Chapman’s photographs. Among the more entertaining stories is one of Corso cutting off Marcel Duchamp’s tie at a party. Although the film never quite achieves the liveliness of the Beat Generation that it seeks to evoke, it is still an interesting look inside a wonderfully creative and fascinating period in twentieth-century literature and the counterculture movement.
One of the craziest movies ever made, Nobuhiko Obayashi’s 1977 cult classic, House (Hausu), is truly one of those things that has to be seen to be believed. House is a psychedelic black horror comedy musical about Gorgeous (Kimiko Ikegami) and six of her high school friends who choose to spend part of their summer vacation at Gorgeous’s aunt’s (Yoko Minamida) very strange house. Gorgeous, whose mother died when she was little and whose father (Saho Sasazawa) is about to get married to Ryoko (Haruko Wanibuchi), brings along her playful friends Melody (Eriko Ikegami), Fantasy (Kumiko Oba), Prof (Ai Matsubara), Sweet (Masayo Miyako), Kung Fu (Miki Jinbo), and Mac (Mieko Sato), who quickly start disappearing like ten little Indians. House is a ceaselessly entertaining head trip of a movie, a tongue-in-chic celebration of genre with spectacular set designs by Kazuo Satsuya, beautiful cinematography by Yoshitaka Sakamoto, and a fab score by Asei Kobayashi and Mickie Yoshino. The original story actually came from the mind of Obayashi’s eleven-year-old daughter, Chigumi, who clearly has one heck of an imagination. Oh, and we can’t forget about the evil cat, a demonic feline to end all demonic felines. The film was released theatrically in 2010 prior to its appearance on DVD from Janus, the same company that puts out such classic fare as Federico Fellini’s Amarcord, Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon, Jacques Tati’s M. Hulot’s Holiday, François Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player, Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game, and Jean-Luc Godard’s Vivre sa Vie, so House has joined some very prestigious company. And who are we to say it doesn’t deserve it?
Citizen Kane is the best-made film we have ever had the pleasure to watch — again and again and again — and it is even more brilliant on the big screen. A young, brash, determined Orson Welles created a masterpiece unlike anything seen before or since — a beautifully woven complex narrative with a stunning visual style (compliments of director of photography Gregg Toland) and a fabulous cast of veterans from his Mercury radio days, including Everett Sloane, Joseph Cotten, Ray Collins, Paul Stewart, and Agnes Moorehead. Each moment in the film is unforgettable, not a word or shot out of place as Welles details the rise and fall of a self-obsessed media mogul. The film is prophetic in many ways; at one point Kane utters, “The news goes on for twenty-four hours a day,” foreseeing today’s 24/7 news overload. And it doesn’t matter if you’ve never seen it and you know what Rosebud refers to; the film is about a whole lot more than just that minor mystery. Like every film Welles made, Citizen Kane was fraught with controversy, not the least of which was a very unhappy William Randolph Hearst seeking to destroy the negative of a film he thought ridiculed him. Kane won only one Oscar, for writing — which also resulted in controversy when Herman J. Mankiewicz claimed that he was the primary scribe, not Welles. The film lost the Oscar for Best Picture to John Ford’s How Green Was My Valley, but it has topped nearly every greatest-films-of-all-time list ever since. Citizen Kane will be screening March 30 at 9:30 as part of the Rubin Museum series “You Must Remember This,” focusing on memory in conjunction with its current 
