Christopher MacLaine
Beat films
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Add rightsFormat DVD Interzone
Original format 16mm
Year 1953-1958
Language(s) English
Artist(s) Christopher MacLaine
Running time 61 min
Films
THE END (1953) 35'
THE MAN WHO INVENTED GOLD (1957) 14'
BEAT (1958) 6'
SCOTCH HOP (1958) 6'
Description
"This 1953 film, inventive and ahead of its time, can be considered the first authentically Beat film. Maclaine, with his desperate point of view and rudimentary technique, creates a delightfully inept yet glorious work. Cinema has rarely evoked the Cold War and its consequences on the collective psyche with such force; set in the Beat scene of 1950s San Francisco, this film speaks directly to generations of lost souls."
— Mark Webber
"With Maclaine, we return to the source of the Beat movement; he was the filmmaker who chronicled the movement as it was emerging, who created one aspect of the Beat myth eight years before the Beat epic became nationally known with Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. (...) I've seen this film more than fifty times and there are still moments when the psychological blockages and absolute terror it provokes make me tremble. It is without a doubt Maclaine's masterpiece."
— Stan Brakhage