Franco La Polla, curator of the And the Beat Goes On programme, talks to Geoffrey Macnab about this very strange retrospective
This is a very strange retrospective, curator Franco La Polla observes of The Beat Goes On: Fifty Years of Counterculture. It's peculiar, but I hope in a positive sense. It's the first retrospective I know in which you have premieres as well as old films. These premieres, he is at pains to point out, aren't restored classics retrieved from oblivion by some assiduous archivist, but movies that were on the editing table just one week ago. For instance, Paul Davids' Timothy Leary's Dead, a profile of the legendary Harvard professor-turned-high-priest of LSD, was completed only recently. Leary collaborated fully with Davids, but ended up taking that great trip to the sky halfway through shooting. It was called Timothy Leary's Dead even when he was still alive. Then he went and died. Very strange.
The original idea came from festival director Gillo Pontecorvo. Dissatisfied with the slender tributes to long forgotten filmmakers that pass for retrospectives at most festivals, he wanted something huge, no matter what the topic. Once he'd chosen Beat culture as his topic, he assigned La Polla and his assistants to track down the appropriate films. This proved a Herculean task. There are over 60 titles in the retrospective, and many more that La Polla would have liked to include. He speaks with enormous frustration of the way in which the Warhol Foundation stonewalled him. For some reason, they have blocked the screening and distribution of Warhol films all over the world. These days, it seems, no one can screen a Warhol film anywhere.
Of course, sceptics might argue that including Warhol in a Beat season is a bit like screening Burt Reynolds movies in a tribute to the French New Wave. On the surface, Warhol, Paul Morrissey and the effete, sybaritic New York subculture they helped to create have nothing in common with the world of the Beats: the world of Kerouac, Neal Cassady and On The Road. However, La Polla points out that if he had had to stick a strict definition of 'Beat', I could only have shown about 10 films, Pull My Daisy and a few others. Instead, he set out to explore a mood, a culture. He wanted to search for possible links, if there were any, between 'Beat experience' and what followed.
I was keen to see how counter-culture had evolved in time. For instance, I believe the flower chil-dren are the children of the Beats - there wouldn't have been any flow-er children without the Beats. He also sought to show how the Beats were perceived by the outside world - in newsreels and in Hollywood. All too often, they're seen as criminals, serial killers, rapists. (The execrable George Peppard vehicle, The Subterraneans, is included in the season. Also screening is Roger Corman's 1959 horror comedy, Bucket of Blood, which features a hilarious spoof of 'Beat Culture' complete with Allen Ginsberg cameo.)
La Polla's choice of movies encompasses everything from the experimental work of Harry Smith in the late 1930s to William Tyler Smith's The Coney Island of Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1996). There's also plenty of exposure for key US underground filmmakers like Jonas Mekas, Stan Brakhage and Shirley Clarke. Although a keen admirer of Hollywood, La Polla believes the work of Mekas and co shows another, all too often hidden, side of American filmmaking. Not all his choices have been predictable. For instance, he has not included Cronenberg's adaptation of Williams Burroughs' The Naked Lunch. It's easily available elsewhere, on video and in the cinema. I wanted to screen films that were normally hard to see.
The Beat generation gorged themselves on alcohol and drugs. That's part of what gives them their mystique. But it didn't make La Polla's job any easier when it came to attracting special guests to Venice. As a result of their hedonistic lifestyle, most of the key Beat protagonists are either dead or in chronic ill health. Only a few weeks ago, the seemingly indestructible Herbert Huncke (drug addict, vagabond and patron saint of Beat culture) joined the long list of casualties. We've included a couple of videos about his life. He was never successful, he never had money - but he's the other side of the coin. You can be a Kerouac or a Ginsberg, but you can also be a Huncke if you choose the Beat way.
La Polla has managed to lure The Doors' keyboardist Ray Manzarek to the Lido. (As every Doors fan knows, Jim Morrison was a huge fan of Kerouac.) He also organised a round-table discussion in which various academics and biographers pondered the Beats' legacy. But the real richness of the retrospective lies in its extraordinarily diverse selection of films; the way it slips between documentary and fiction and straddles half a cen-tury of alternative American cinema.
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