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W.S.Burroughs, Cut-Up Films (2 disc)
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Written by William S. Burroughs Directed by Antony Balch |
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| Apparently, cinema was not a great
passion in William S. Burroughs’ life and work. Even if in actual
fact, the times this great American writer used this artistic medium
were not few, as a scriptwriter and as an actor. There are not many
films based on Burroughs’ literary works and this is because his work
is not really cinematographic in the classic sense of the term, due
to the little importance the writer gives to the narrative plot. His
visual style is not linear but fragmentary. His writing style is narrative
and slang with constant visual associations. It is logical therefore,
that the film version of his writing cannot avoid having an “experimental”
style and uses the cut-up, a chaotic and random method which derives
from the Dadaist collages. It consists of cutting up and sticking
pieces of text together in order to find new meanings. Burroughs worked, as we know, on this method from 1959 together with Brion Gysin, a unique experimental painter and novelist who actually discovered it first; Gysin and Burroughs used the cut-up method for several different artistic formations. From paper to canvas, from magnetic tape – working on recorders and tapes with the same look as contemporary cyberpunk – to film. In the cinematographic field, the results were a series of short films grouped under the title Thee Films, made with the Englishman Antony Balch between the end of the 50’s and the end of the 60’s. The first two short films, Towers Open Fire (1963) and The Cut-Ups (1966) have a rather similar structure and the same images are seen with a different but fast serial and confusing editing accompanied by a musical collage which is just as obsessive. In both, for example, we see the Dreamachine, a device which produces dream-like and hypnotic images, adjusted by Gysin and Ian Sommerville in 1960. This machine, made up a fretworked cylinder which creates strobostrofic effects and permits Balch and Burroughs to deconstruct and reconstruct reality to the point of anguish. In actual fact, the Dreamachine represents cinema itself, vision in its purest state, as it reminds us of the inventions of the pre cinematographic era and in particular the Zootrope. In this sense, Burroughs and Balch’s operation is a return to the origins of movement, from both the perceptual and conceptual point of view.
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