Anne Waldman

Resurrected through UK-led archival restoration NOVA 78' shows never-before-seen footage of the legendary Nova Convention where William Burroughs, Patti Smith, Zappa, Ginsberg and more collided in an explosion of ideas, art and rebellion.

Open details →

Outrider is a portal into fast-speaking poet Anne Waldman and her six decades birthing vibrant communities of poets, performers, and activists—from Greenwich Village, St. Mark's Poetry Project, and Naropa University 'Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics,' onwards to Mexico City, Casablanca, and more. Guided by ancestors of the Beat generation and poetic kinships with radical female musicians—Patti Smith, Laurie Anderson, Cecilia Vicuña, Meredith Monk—Outrider celebrates Waldman's role as a visionary word-worker and a transcendent presence, singing out in the ancient, bardic tradition the thunderous power of poetry.

Open details →

Step outside yourself, look back at yourself, whom do you see? That’s the question Bob Holman asks in his poem “Beside Myself.” A small band of Bob's friends voice the poem in alternating identities for this meditative reflection on A.I. and the life cycle of the creative process.

Open details →

Structured as a labyrinth-like game and inspired by Jorge Luis Borges, Aleph is a travelogue of experience, a dreamer's journey through the lives, experiences, stories and musings of protagonists spanning ten countries and five continents.

Open details →

Part documentary, part concert film, part fever dream, this film captures the troubled spirit of America in 1975 and the joyous music that Dylan performed during the fall of that year.

Open details →

To celebrate the 100th birthday of America's most audacious writer, William S. Burroughs, Chicago Humanities Festival brings together a motley crew of poets, writers, and musicians. William Seward Burroughs (1914 - 1997) was an American writer and visual artist. He was a primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodernist author whose influence is considered to have affected a range of popular culture as well as literature. Burroughs's needs took him across the United States, down into Mexico, to Europe and beyond. On his travels, he meets up with various members of the underground drug and "outcast" cultures.

Open details →

Documentary about Charles Olson, exploring his life and the significance of Gloucester, Massachusetts.

Open details →

This film documents the 1990 World Heavyweight Championship Poetry Bout between Ann Waldman and Victor Hernandez Cruz.

Open details →

Maria Beatty's documentary exploring the insights and influences of the American Beat Poets. The film conveys their consciousness and sensibility through interviews with William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Diane Di Prima, among others. Also weaves in additional commentary from contemporary musicians, poets and writers such as Marianne Faithfull, Richard Hell, Lydia Lunch and Henry Rollins. Also expands upon how the poets reached new levels of creativity and inspired social change.

Open details →

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.

Open details →

After World War II a group of young writers, outsiders and friends who were disillusioned by the pursuit of the American dream met in New York City. Associated through mutual friendships, these cultural dissidents looked for new ways and means to express themselves. Soon their writings found an audience and the American media took notice, dubbing them the Beat Generation. Members of this group included writers Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg. a trinity that would ultimately influence the works of others during that era, including the "hippie" movement of the '60s. In this 55-minute video narrated by Allen Ginsberg, members of the Beat Generation (including the aforementioned Burroughs, Anne Waldman, Peter Orlovsky, Amiri Baraka, Diane Di Prima, and Timothy Leary) are reunited at Naropa University in Boulder, CO during the late 1970's to share their works and influence a new generation of young American bohemians.

Open details →

Filmed in the autumn of 1975 prior to and during Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder Revue tour – featuring appearances and performances by Ronee Blakley, T-Bone Burnett, Jack Elliott, Allen Ginsberg, Arlo Guthrie, Ronnie Hawkins, Roger McGuinn, Joni Mitchell, Mick Ronson, Arlen Roth, Phil Ochs, Sam Shepard, and Harry Dean Stanton – the film incorporates three distinct film genres: concert footage, documentary interviews, and dramatic fictional vignettes reflective of Dylan's song lyrics and life.

Open details →

A road movie whose journey intersects with and extends the events of the International Counter-Culture Meeting that took place in 1975 in Montreal. This meeting, at the heart of the film, features several important figures of the counterculture in Quebec. Throughout the film, these individuals, often through their creative endeavors, question the evolution of their society and counterculture itself.

Open details →

Set in a nightmarish Bardo, a place between death and rebirth, a tormented writer faces down demons of his own making. Forced to confront the darkest moment in his life, he mines fractured and repressed memories for a way out. A woman is at the center of all the writer’s afterlife encounters. She is the subject of his life’s greatest regret, and she materializes everywhere in this Otherworld. The writer cannot detach any thoughts of his life from her.

Open details →

The confluence of words and movement propels this multi-layered collaboration by Atlas, choreographer Douglas Dunn, and poets Anne Waldman and Reed Bye. Dunn's athletic choreography is performed to the rhythms, cadences, and associative meanings of the poets' "cascade of words," which function as music. Atlas introduces narrative references, ironically staging the dance in unexpected locations, including domestic interiors and vehicles. In a self-referential deconstruction that punctures the theatrical illusion, the poets are seen reading their texts and interacting as self-conscious performers within the dance. Atlas and his collaborators intersect the language of words with the language of the body.

Open details →