Wholly Communion: Films and Filming Review 1966

Ever since the schoolmarm spirit succeeded in misrepresenting the rebellious passions of the romantic poets as inoffensive "uplift," poets have been caught between, on the one hand, appealing to a public educated enough to appreciate their complexities, but withdrawn in a kind of blind distaste from everyday realities and vulgarities, and, on the other hand, touching the more numerous public which was healthily less snobbish but lacked that cultural background without which most modern, or, for that matter, ancient, poetry is to all intents and purposes so incomprehensible as to be an enigma. The new wave of "beatnik" poets, however eccentric and way-out and their contemporaries, at least represent a coming-together of the poetry medium and some popular attitudes. It's no accident that through such figures as Donovan, Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, this kind of poetry is beginning to link up with "pop" music; and some highly profitable cultural collisions and mixings seem imminent.

A first and highly encouraging eruption occurred when a poets' cooperative hired the Royal Albert Hall on June 11 last year, and, against all expectations, all but filled the huge auditorium. Indeed, they would probably have filled it completely had the management not deliberately turned away latecomers, under the pretence, which it must have known to be false, that no seats remained. One suspects that their real objection was to a poet's use of that four-letter word because of the harm which the word would do to their moral characters. But the Establishment's hostility is a backhanded compliment, and the event is for poetry what the success of Look Back in Anger was for the modern English theatre.

A great deal of the night's excitement is caught in Peter Whitehead's film (a twin to the paperback of the same name); it is all more astonishing in being made by a one—repeat, one-man unit. Some roughnesses of reporting, concentrated mainly in the first half of the film, help to recapture the actual atmosphere of the occasion, which was as improvised as a jam-session; and the film is not just a newsreel so much as a piece of cinéma-vérité, as it penetrates, through the "event," to feelings and hopes, as in the spirited exchanges between the chairman (Alexander Trocchi), a heckling spectator, and the poet Harry Fainlight, anguishedly [sic] persevering in reading his brilliant and nightmarish anti-epic of LSD visions, "The Spider."

One regrets that one's attention is ruinously distracted from Gregory Corso's reading by the camera's trying to look past, or through, two bobbing heads in the foreground; one develops a certain sporting interest in the pas-de-trois between heads and camera but personally I could have done without this sequence. On the other hand, there is a long, astonishing sequence where Allen Ginsberg's reading is accompanied by the strange, writhing, haunting movements, something between hand-jive and Swan Lake, performed by an anonymous, lovely girl in the audience, movements which, more eloquently than any ballet, because of their very naturalness, are terrifying in their quiet revelation of anguish, beautiful in their abstruse, serene generosity, and poignantly eerie in their combination of the two moods. In an atmosphere encouraging of wild effects, the camera is admirably restrained; there are no unnecessary zoom-shots (except one or two where the photographer was having to guess what would...