Ginsberg’s Animating Typewriter : Mixing Senses and Media in Howl (2010)

• Epstein and Friedman’s 2010 movie Howl is partly a portrait of Allen Ginsberg, author of the poem ‘Howl’, and partly a documentary about the 1957 obscenity trial against his publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti. The film thus follows the ‘biopic’ trend of the last decades, where authors and their work are made the subject of feature films (Finding Neverland, Becoming Jane, Capote, Bright Star, etc.). This particular case, however, is more complicated and perhaps more demanding than the conventional biopic, because the movie also adapts Ginsberg’s Howl from poetry to animation film. Consequently, the beat poem exists in several medial forms in the film: it is represented through poetry reading as performance; it is read aloud as evidence in court; it is shown as written text; and, finally, it is transformed into the visual animation work of artist Eric Drooker. This article demonstrates how complex media relations in cinema, in this caseHowl, can be discussed using perspectives developed in intermedial theory. By way of a formal and sensorial analysis of selected scenes the article also discusses the views on the artist and artistic creation constructed in the film, in order to reframe the formal analysis as an ideological interpretation.

Subject headings

HUMANIORA  -- Konst -- Filmvetenskap (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Arts -- Studies on Film (hsv//eng)

Keyword

intermediality

Ginsberg

Howl

cinema

documentary

Film Studies

Filmvetenskap

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

art (subject category)