The Cut Ups

This is the zenith of Burroughs's collaborations with Antony Balch. The visuals are a mix of footage of Burroughs wandering New York, Brion Gysin working on paintings, and miscellaneous nonsense images. The audio is the real feature here ... Burroughs and Gysin recite variations on "Yes", "Hello", "Thank You", "Look at the picture" and "Does it seem to persist?" in various combinations for 20 minutes. The topic is Gysin's Dream Machine (which is pictured briefly), but really, the experience is a sort of trance inducing meditation on how these words evolve and devolve into nonsense. I expect people with either adore or despise it. I could watch it for hours.

A collaborative near 20 minute short by legendary Beat writer William S. Burroughs and British film director and distributor Antony Balch, "The Cut-Ups" finds the Avant-Garde mavericks employing the "cut-up" method of art in film. Lifting a page off Tristan Tzara's Dadaists from decades before Burroughs cut pieces of text and randomly formed sentences out of the jumbled words resulting in a surreal melange of imagery which the reader stamps his interpretation on. Translated to film "The Cut-Ups" delivers.

Starting off with a mundane greeting of exchange with "Yes"? "Hello", that intro serves as a near endless loop that dominates and highlights the experimental absurdity of the film. Brief jumpy fleetingly repetitive moving images of Burroughs in his trademark hatted trench-coated attire walking in urban environments, rummaging in a room and doing a physical test on a young man with fittingly homoerotic overtones are juxtaposedly collaged with scenes of a young man who looks either stoned or gay, a naked (?) man moving around executing some seemingly Action Art Pollock-style painting, walls, edifices, streets, cars, people, skies and more - the urban mid-20th Century in one amusing and tedious dream-like journey of warped and slightly jarring immediacy.

One of the more interesting and memorable films in the world of off-beat cinema, "The Cut-Ups" will wither enthrall or appall, as the unsuspecting viewers of its London premiere in 1967 can attest to. A film to challenge, divide and appreciate this one's for the adventurous and open-minded.

"The Cut-Ups" is a 20-minute experimental film from 1966 made by Antony Balch, who also made the 1963-film "Towers Open Fire".

Basic about this movie: The film has little to no plot, we see a man doing some paintings and calligraphic designs, while an another man is packing a suitcase, having a phone call etc. The soundtrack is nothing more than repeated words like "yes, "hello", "look at that picture", "thank you" and some more words. The editing itself is very quick.

The above mentioned repeated words might be enough to either make you amazed or crazy/annoyed. I even mentioned briefly about this film to my big sister; she would have gone crazy just after a few minutes. I was more of the "amazed" ones, and laughed throughout this short flick.

So basically, this is not your typical British film ala products from BBC, Channel 4, UK Film Council and similar companies, due to the fact this is an avant-garde film. Well worth a look if you find this film. Also worth checking out "Towers Open Fire".

Here is an experimental short that is guaranteed to try the patience of most folk that manage to catch it. It's a (nearly)20 minute short of William S.Burroughs & Bryon Gysin in a disconnected series of images, with a soundtrack consisting of the phrases "Yes", "Hello","Look At That Picture", and a few others. At times, it seems to have a (kind of) Andy Warhol like texture to it. Either way, it's going to either amuse or irritate some people who do manage to see it. Like 'Towers Open Fire', 'Ghosts At Number Nine', and some others, this film seems to feel like an extended dream sequence (probably something to do with Gysin/Burrough's cut up technique,first applied to Gysin's paintings, then Burrough's writing,then tape recordings,then film,itself).

The spoken words in this are mostly limited, with many variations, to "Yes, hello" and "Look at that picture. Does it seem to be persisting? Good. Thank you."

It's composed of many short clips of Brion Gysin and of WIlliam Burroughs, sometimes together. Gysin walks through the street wearing a sweater with some of the calligraphic characters he created on it. In some of the early shots, Burroughs seems to be rifling through things, or packing. Many of the shots are sped up, and the editing is very, very quick.

There are a number of shots of Gysin's Dreamachine, and also of him working on various paintings and calligraphic designs. Many of these start with a paint roller rolling out a rough sort of grid, sometimes some of which is shaded and then repeatedly written over.

As with Towers Open Fire, this can be found on the videotape Towers Open Fire and Other Films by Antony Balch, and as a special feature on the DVD of the horror anthology film Bizarre, also directed by Balch. (The Cut Ups is far more bizarre.)

What does it all mean? Who knows?