Allen Ginsberg — Actor (43)
Ballad of the Skeletons (1997) [Movie] TMDB IMDb
Ballad of the Skeletons
director: Gus Van Sant actor: Allen Ginsberg
A close-up of Allen Ginsberg reciting his “skeletons” poem is bluescreened and dissolved against archival film and video clips, and backed by musicians to create a sort of song that becomes an American anthem.
Chappaqua (1966) [Movie] TMDB WikiData IMDb
Chappaqua
director: Conrad Rooks actor: Jean-Louis Barrault / Conrad Rooks
Semi-autobiographical story of Conrad Rooks, who travels to France to undergo a drug-withdrawal cure. Flashbacks to the beginings of psychedelia in San Fran. Though initially confusing, as Rooks blends drug-illusion with reality, and cuts color with black-and-white and monochrome tinted shots, "Chappaqua" is conventionally constructed with a beginning, middle, and end.
The Cockettes (2002) [Movie] WikiData TMDB IMDb
The Cockettes
director: Bill Weber / David Weissman actor: Larry Brinkin / Dusty Dawn
Documentary about the gender-bending San Francisco performance group who became a pop culture phenomenon in the early 1970s.
Wholly Communion (1965) [Movie] WikiData TMDB IMDb
Wholly Communion
director: Peter Whitehead actor: Gregory Corso / Harry Fainlight
A short film documenting what was referred to as "The International Poetry Incarnation". It was billed as Great Britain's first full-scale "happening", with the world's leading Beat poets together under one roof at the Royal Albert Hall on June 11, 1965, for an evening of near-hallucinatory revelry. It came to be seen as one of the cultural high points of the Swinging Sixties.
La marche gaie (1980) [Movie] IMDb TMDB
La marche gaie
director: Lionel Soukaz actor: Allen Ginsberg / Guy Hocquenghem
Documentaire sur la Gay Pride de 1979, apogée du mouvement gay à Washington.
Silence = Death (1990) [Movie] TMDB IMDb WikiData
Silence = Death
director: Rosa von Praunheim actor: Bern Boyle / Emilio Cubeiro
other title: Die Aids-Trilogie: Schweigen = Tod - Künstler in New York kämpfen gegen AIDS / Schweigen = Tod
1990 film by Rosa von Praunheim
Johnny Minotaur (1971) [Movie] TMDB IMDb
Johnny Minotaur
director: Charles Henri Ford actor: Yiannis Koutsis / Nikos Koulizakis
Johnny Minotaur is a lyrical explosion of taboos: incest, intergenerational desire, pansexuality and autoeroticism are a few of the issues Charles Henri Ford grapples with through mythopoeic, sensual imagery, recitations of his diaries and a philosophical debate featuring an impressive narration by such artists as Salvador Dali, Allen Ginsberg, Warren Sonbert and Lynne Tillman.
Good Morning, Mr. Orwell (1984) [Movie] TMDB IMDb
Good Morning, Mr. Orwell
director: Nam June Paik / Emile Ardolino actor: George Plimpton / Claude Villers
In his book "1984", George Orwell saw the television of the future as a control instrument in the hands of Big Brother. Right at the start of the much-anticipated Orwellian year, Paik and Co. were keen to demonstrate satellite TV's ability to serve positive ends-- Namely, the intercontinental exchange of culture, combining both highbrow and entertainment elements. A live broadcast shared between WNET TV in New York and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, linked up with broadcasters in Germany and South Korea, reached a worldwide audience of over 10 or even 25 million (including the later repeat transmissions).
Couch (1964) [Movie] TMDB IMDb WikiData
Couch
director: Andy Warhol actor: Bingingham Birdie / Rufus Collins
The couch at Andy Warhol's Factory was as famous in its own right as any of his Superstars. In Couch, visitors to the Factory were invited to "perform" on camera, seated on the old couch. Their many acts-both lascivious and mundane-are documented in a film that has come to be regarded as one of the most notorious of Warhol's early works. Across the course of the film we encounter such figures as poets Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso, the writer Jack Kerouac, and perennial New York figure Taylor Mead.
Pickup's Tricks (1973) [Movie] TMDB IMDb
Pickup's Tricks
director: Gregory Pickup actor: Allen Ginsberg / Hibiscus
Pickup's Tricks is a beat documentary of Hibiscus and the Cockettes, who were pioneers of San Francisco’s underground queer theater in the early '70s. It is a multifarious blend of sexual anarchy; a raucous and unscripted mix of liberation and elation as rough and spirited as the lifestyle that created it. The film profiles Hibiscus, founding member of the Cockettes, the psychedelic drag queens that performed midnight musicals at the Palace Theater in San Francisco. The film includes a rare screen appearance of Allen Ginsberg, clean-shaven and costumed in "acute drag" as a Yiddishe Mama with a painted-on third eye. (pickupstricks.com)
Breathing Together: Revolution of the Electric Family (1971) [Movie] TMDB IMDb
Breathing Together: Revolution of the Electric Family
director: Morley Markson actor: Don Cox / Buckminster Fuller
The title of this Canadian documentary may have some relation to Canadian Marshall McLuhan's theories. It combines interview with famous U.S. militants of the '60s, such as Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman, with reenactments of their Chicago trials (i.e., the "Chicago Eight," etc.). Other figures of cultural interest from the time, including Alan Ginsberg and Buckminster Fuller, are interviewed or featured. The filmmaker indicates his belief that powerful forces in the U.S. government worked together to suppress American radicals. This view, widely disbelieved at the time, has since been confirmed.
Fried Shoes Cooked Diamonds (1979) [Movie] TMDB IMDb
Fried Shoes Cooked Diamonds
director: Costanzo Allione actor: Allen Ginsberg / Peter Orlovsky
After World War II a group of young writers, outsiders and friends who were disillusioned by the pursuit of the American dream met in New York City. Associated through mutual friendships, these cultural dissidents looked for new ways and means to express themselves. Soon their writings found an audience and the American media took notice, dubbing them the Beat Generation. Members of this group included writers Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg. a trinity that would ultimately influence the works of others during that era, including the "hippie" movement of the '60s. In this 55-minute video narrated by Allen Ginsberg, members of the Beat Generation (including the aforementioned Burroughs, Anne Waldman, Peter Orlovsky, Amiri Baraka, Diane Di Prima, and Timothy Leary) are reunited at Naropa University in Boulder, CO during the late 1970's to share their works and influence a new generation of young American bohemians.
Happy Birthday to John (1997) [Movie] IMDb TMDB
Happy Birthday to John
director: Jonas Mekas actor: John Lennon / Yoko Ono
On October 9, 1972, the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse hosted an exhibition of John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s work, designed by Fluxus artist George Maciunas. That same day, friends including Ringo Starr, Allen Ginsberg, and Paul Krassner gathered to celebrate Lennon’s birthday. Jonas Mekas’s film records the event in both image and sound, capturing the spirit of the moment and the community around Lennon and Ono.
Stockhausen's Originale: Doubletakes (1964) [Movie] TMDB IMDb
Stockhausen's Originale: Doubletakes
director: Peter Moore actor: Karlheinz Stockhausen / Allan Kaprow
This fascinating film documents the U.S. premiere production of Originale, a Happening by German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen. Filmed at the "2nd Annual Avant Garde Festival of New York," which was produced by Norman Seaman and Charlotte Moorman, the stage production was directed by Allan Kaprow. Performers include Nam June Paik, Moorman, Jackson Mac Low and Allen Ginsberg, among many others.
Renaldo and Clara (1978) [Movie] TMDB WikiData IMDb
Renaldo and Clara
director: Bob Dylan actor: Bob Dylan / Sara Dylan
other title: Renaldo e Clara / Renaldo und Clara
Filmed in the autumn of 1975 prior to and during Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder Revue tour – featuring appearances and performances by Ronee Blakley, T-Bone Burnett, Jack Elliott, Allen Ginsberg, Arlo Guthrie, Ronnie Hawkins, Roger McGuinn, Joni Mitchell, Mick Ronson, Arlen Roth, Phil Ochs, Sam Shepard, and Harry Dean Stanton – the film incorporates three distinct film genres: concert footage, documentary interviews, and dramatic fictional vignettes reflective of Dylan's song lyrics and life.
Joan of Arc (1967) [Movie] TMDB
Joan of Arc
director: Piero Heliczer actor: Ira Cohen / Tony Conrad
The story of Joan of Arc as applied to the present revolution in arts and more. The Gothic is applied to the War in Vietnam. The film is experimental in the sense that in it the visual becomes tactile.
The Fall (1969) [Movie] TMDB IMDb WikiData
The Fall
director: Peter Whitehead actor: Peter Whitehead / Alberta Tiburzi
"The Fall" depicts certain scenes in New York City between October 1967 and March 1968, shot by the independent filmmaker, Peter Whitehead. It is a very personal documentary, and Whitehead appears in a large number of scenes, and we hear his lengthy ruminations on the state of the United States and the war in Vietnam.
No. 18: Mahagonny (1980) [Movie] TMDB IMDb
No. 18: Mahagonny
director: Harry Smith actor: Patti Smith / Allen Ginsberg
Harry Smith’s final film; an epic four-screen projection. Smith worked on this cinematic transformation of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s opera Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (1929) for over ten years and considered it his magnum opus. The film was shot from 1970 to 1972 and edited for the next eight years. The “program” of the film is meticulous, with a complex structure and order. The Weill opera is transformed into a numerological and symbolic system. Images in the film are divided into categories— portraits, animation, symbols and nature— to form the palindrome P.A.S.A.N.A.S.A.P. The film contains invaluable cameos of important avant-garde figures such as Allen Ginsberg, Patti Smith, and Jonas Mekas, intercut with installation pieces from Robert Mapplethorpe’s studio, New York City landmarks of the era, and Smith’s visionary animation.
Me and My Brother (1969) [Movie] WikiData IMDb TMDB
Me and My Brother
director: Robert Frank actor: Julius Orlovsky / Peter Orlovsky
Julius Orlovsky, after spending years in a New York mental hospital, emerges catatonic and must rely on his brother Peter, who lives with poet Allen Ginsberg. When Julius wanders off in the middle of filming, Frank hires and actor (Joseph Chaikin) to play the character and begins a fictional version of his psychological portrait. Then, as suddenly as he vanished, Julius turns up in an institution where he and Peter must face their relationship.