The Source

You may not recognize Chuck Workman’s name, but if you’ve watched the annual Academy Awards show on tv, you’re familiar with his work — he made many of the film clip montages used to review an artist’s career for a special award or to summarize a theme in movie history. For his feature-length documentary on the Beat generation writers and their continuing influence in our cultural history, Workman spent many years collecting footage and interviewing Beat generation writers, using the same collage method to create a fast-moving film that is dense with information and infused with the feel of the memories it evokes.

The Original Beats

The Source proceeds in chronological order; its first section is devoted to the post World War II period in which the core of the original Beat generation, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, met in New York. A fast-cut collage conveys the period’s consumerist, conformist culture, backdrop for their individualist, bohemian rebellion. Workman has pulled together a great deal of footage of the Beats as young men, the most memorable sequence featuring Beat icon Neal Cassady dancing, shirtless, with a wonderful energy and abandon, in front of the Magic Bus. There’s also a clip from Pull My Daisy (1959), the short film written by Kerouac and featuring Ginsberg and Corso that has come to epitomize the Beat ideals of bohemianism and spontaneity. (You can see a video of Pull My Daisy in its entirety at UbuWeb.)

The focus is definitely on the young men — only the barest mention is made of women associated with the Beats, and that is of Jan Kerouac, Jack’s estranged daughter, rather than Diane di Prima or other women writers. But The Source covers so many characters, conveys such a vast and varied quantity of historical detail, and condenses so many memorable images into a single coherent film, that cries of “You left so&so out!” are both inevitable and irrelevant. In addition to the early footage, Workman has collected fascinating interviews with an amazing array of Beat figures, including Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, Ken Kesey, Jack Micheline and many more — some all the more precious because the people are no longer with us.

The Beats’ Influence on Later Times

Later sections of The Source elucidate the many ways in which the Beat generation’s values seeped into the culture — in parody (like Fred Flintstone as a bearded, bereted beatnik), and for real (in the hippie and youth movements of the 1960s). The vision of an aged Ginsberg wandering in Times Square and reading lines from his own poems on the theater marquees is a moving emblem of this lasting influence.

The Actors’ Interpretations of Beat Literature

One element of The Source that has caused some consternation is the injection of several sequences in which actors are filmed reciting selections from the Beat writers’ work. Some viewers have accused Workman of straying from documentary form and “going Hollywood” in doing this, but I think it works because the performances are good, and because it’s all about the words themselves, the root of the film’s material. Johnny Depp gives compelling readings of passages from Kerouac’s work, Dennis Hopper is less successful impersonating Burroughs (probably because he is such a distinctive, well-known character himself), and John Turturro gives us a controlled, but deeply felt version of Ginsberg’s Howl, filmed overlooking the mental hospital where Carl Solomon was kept.

The Source is a wonderful introduction to the Beat generation, richly textured and so packed with images and information that you will want to watch it more than once. I rented it from Netflix, but I’m going to end up putting it back on my request list so that I can see it again — if you’re interested in the Beats, you may well want to own a copy (it’s available in VHS and DVD).