It's difficult to assess the long term power of William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin's collaborations during the early 60's: countless writers, artists, and thinkers directly met or were affected by their calmly rebellious and even 'heretical' approach to art and life. Burroughs paid for this in many ways, fleeing the US, facing trial for obscenity with the publication of his book Naked Lunch, and facing many more personal trials dealing with the ramifications of his rampantly experimental nature. Fellow writer Gysin saw through rote form, reconstructing it and applying it to unlikely disciplines, "dancing about architecture" as it were. A soul searcher, he sought new ways of approaching art and life, and was able to convey those ideas in constructive ways.
Burroughs and Gysin met European underground filmmaker Anthony Balch at the Beat Hotel in Paris, who began a series of collaborations with them resulting in "Towers Open Fire," (a phrase taken from The Nova Express), "The Cut-Ups," and "Bill & Tony", the three of which were screened together, following with the excellent and bizarre "William Buys a Parrot." These works bypass traditional plot elements, using strong and enigmatic themes, employing repeated and permuted figures, and with an experimental and essentially musique concrète soundtrack. A notable settings for Towers Open Fire is The Beat Hotel itself.
As radical and ground-breaking as these films were, after initial infamism the films drifted into relative obscurity, through to the death of Balch in 1980. When another relentless explorer, Throbbing Gristle's Genesis P.Orridge, then broke and on the dole, was alerted that Balch's films were about to be destroyed by the film distribution company, he paid the workers throwing the films into a dumpster 5 pounds to put them in a cab instead, rescuing these amazing cultural works.
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