New documentary The Beat Hotel explores the scene swirling around a Parisian crash pad where Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs and other members of the Beat Generation forged their mythologies in the late ’50s. Those mythologies were built quite hilariously upon the foundation laid down by surrealist luminaries like Andre Breton and Marcel Duchamp, as Wired’s exclusive clip below illustrates.
Premiering Friday in New York before rolling to parts outward, director Alan Govenar’s 82-minute head-trip back to 1957 fleshes out the Beat Generation‘s back pages with historic photographs by Harold Chapman and hand-drawn animation by Elliot Rudie. Color commentary arrives courtesy of influential hipsters like author Barry Miles and first-hand accounts from scenesters like the excellently named book dealer Cyclops Lester.
The documentary serves as a primer on how an unassuming Parisian dive, run by a smart woman named Madame Rachou and stuffed with a bunch of lit geeks, eventually helped give birth to Naked Lunch, Kaddish, Burroughs and Gysin’s cut-up technique and other Beat wonders. Punch up First Run Features’ photography above and Wired’s clip from The Beat Hotel below for the CliffsNotes version.
