No More to Say & Nothing to Weep For: An Elegy for Allen Ginsberg

Public Information Film on the dangers of solvent abuse.

The first feature-length film documenting the life and work of Pulitzer Prize-winning poet/activist Gary Snyder. A participant in the famed 1955 Six Gallery poetry reading in San Francisco that launched the Beat era (and the careers of Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac), Snyder later lived and studied in Japan, becoming a Zen teacher. He is the model for the character of Japhy Ryder in Jack Kerouac’s bestselling novel, The Dharma Bums.

Colin Still's BLACK MOUNTAIN BLUES invites Robert Creeley to reflect on his life and work with patience and unobtrusive guidance. The film provides an invaluable view of Creeley in the last years of his life, with commentary from Charles Bernstein and Susan Howe, two of Creeley's closest colleagues, and from poet, musician, artist, and teacher Bobbie Louise Hawkins, who was married to Creeley for nearly 20 years. Vincent Ferini figures prominently, having put Olson in touch with Robert Creeley, shaping midcentury American writing.

Working outside the mainstream, the wildly prolific, visionary Stan Brakhage made more than 350 films over a half century. Challenging all taboos in his exploration of “birth, sex, death, and the search for God,” he turned his camera on explicit lovemaking, childbirth, even autopsy.