The Cut-Ups, Towers Open Fire and William Buys a Parrot: A William S. Burroughs Triple Feature

We chose these because the Netflix description made them seem like really avant garde, really really independent short films.
Good god they were.

William S. Burroughs was an author of the beat generation famous for such novels as Naked Lunch and Junkie. He collaborated with artist Brion Gysin and director Anthony Balch to create these shorts to make visual representations of the god knows what in Burroughs' mind. Gysin is "famous" for coming up with a concept called called "the cut-up technique." Burroughs wanted to use cut-up in his writing, and Gysin used it in his art. They would cut and paste and mix and match pieces of a whole in no particular order to find a truer new meaning in something regular. ( if you are really interested...) In the films, it manifested as very very quick jump cuts between three or four different story lines, if you can call them that, where the scene would vary maybe 3 times in 5 seconds between random moving symbols, a man and woman walking down the street, a man staring at a whirling lamp, and other strange things.

Emily: They eschewed conventional narrative form. They eschewed it in every way possible.

Kamala: We wanted to watch this to show that people were thinking intellectually about the films they were making and while it would have been difficult to watch this in 1963, I guess it is good to know that films like this were out there pushing the cinematographic envelope. That said, it was tedious and difficult to watch.

Emily: Here is a list of films Anthony Balch distributed:
Do You Like Women?
The Kinky Darlings
Lot in Sodom
Secrets of Sex (he also directed this one)
The Importance of Being Sexy
18 Year Old Schoolgirls

Both he and William S. were into appalling Sadean horror and exploitation film, and hints of this fascination are present in the short films in this compliation. The first movie, "William Buys a Parrot" is fairly straightforward, but "Towers Open Fire" had some creepy imagery, with soldiers. And the cut-ups feature close-ups on faces, people walking, and repetition of the words "Yes" "Hello" "Thank you" and the phrase "Does it seem to be persisting?" Not going to lie-we stopped maybe half-way through The Cut-Ups. It's all on youtube if you're interested: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAxUWfe_PJY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oc3bp7s0378&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oc3bp7s0378&feature=related