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Outgoing festival director Rutger Wolfson opens his final Iffr; War Book screened to packed theatre.

The 44th International Film Festival Rotterdam (Jan 21-Feb 1) launched last night with a screening of Tom Harper’s political drama, War Book.

At a packed opening ceremony, festival director Rutger Wolfson - in his final year at the helm - welcomed some well known names to the Festival, among them South Korean director Jang Jin (subject of a special focus), Canadian artist and filmmaker Michael McClure and Romanian artist Irina Botea. Both McClure and Botea will also be the subjects of special programmes.

Wolfson used his speech to highlight the key themes in his final festival programme. In particular, he drew attention to the subject of propaganda, which is being explored in Iffr’s Everyday Propaganda sidebar of screenings and talks.

He said: “In these times of social unrest and digital revolution, it seems almost everyone is eager to produce, receive and spread...

Chicago – One of most important counterculture novels in American literature history is “On the Road,” by Jack Kerouac. First published in 1957, the film rights were purchased at the time, but it took over fifty more years to get it onto the screen. Director Walter Salles (“The Motorcycle Diaries”) took on the adaptation.

The history of adapting the book to film is as much of a journey as the characters take in the story. After late 1950s Hollywood couldn’t interpret the radical morality in the book (Marlon Brando was attached to play the lead role at one point), and the rights were reacquired by Francis Ford Coppola in the late 1970s. Problems with several screenplay versions occurred, and it wasn’t until the mid-2000s that the team that produced “The Motorcycle Diaries” – screenwriter Jose Rivera and director Walter Salles – took their own journey with the classic novel, and the...

The movie trailer for Kerouac's Big Sur has been released, and it looks like the film will be worth catching.

The book by Jack Kerouac is a classic novel in the series of fictionalized autobiographies written by the beat author in the 1950s and 60s. This one is about how Kerouac struggled to cope with being feted as an author, and escaped with friends to a cabin in Big Sur, CA.

The film, starring Jean-Marc Barr as Kerouac's alter ego Jack Duluoz and Kate Bosworth as Billie, is expected to be released later this year.

The trailer really seems to capture the rhythm of Kerouac's speech and writing. Following last year's fairly lackluster adaptation of On The Road, perhaps this time a filmmaker has finally managed to capture something of that elusive beat spirit.

However, as David L. Ulin of the La Times points out,

the film appears to have...

Garrett Hedlund fell in love with Kerouac's electric prose as a teenager. Now aged 28, he plays Dean Moriarty, the free-thinking spirit at the heart of On the Road. Here, he discusses drugs, his love of the 50s – and the appeal of America's backroads

Did you know much about the beat generation, Jack Kerouac and his novel On the Road before you made this film?

Yes. I was 17 when I read the book. I was such a literature freak, I was doing world literature, creative writing and photojournalism at the time. I fantasised about F Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby – I loved it, and then I read everything Jd Salinger had to offer. Then I was turned on to Kerouac, and his spontaneous prose, his stream of consciousness way of writing. I admired him so much, and I romanticised so much about the 40s and 50s.

So you weren't always going to be an actor?...

Taylor Mead, the love child of Bette Davis and Peter Lorre, is one of the truly great comic geniuses of underground films, theater, poetry, cabaret, and cable TV of the Sixties and beyond. He was and is still quite hilarious, even if just stumbling down an East Village Street by himself, his traipse being a sort of Danse Macabre as envisioned by Pee Wee Herman.

An Andy Warhol Superstar, possibly best known for his hysterical “gunslinger” in Lonesome Cowboys, Mead’s brilliance never shined brighter than when he took on the title role in Michael McClure’s outrageous off-off-Broadway play, Spider Rabbit, in which he essayed a bunny who adored eating human brains.

But Taylor didn’t need a lead role to be unforgettable. In Rosa von Praunheim’s documentary Tally Brown New York, the constantly morphing star stole his scenes from Ms. Brown, who was no slouch herself when it came to commanding attention.

Given that the source material was once described by Truman Capote with the immortal epithet "That's not writing, that's typing," and has generally been considered as "unfilmable," it's not surprising that it's taken the best part of half-a-century to make a film of Jack Kerouac's beat classic "On the Road." Plans were in the works as early as the publication date in 1957 (Kerouac wanted to co-star in the film with Marlon Brando), and documentarian D.A. Pennebaker came close, but it's Francis Ford Coppola who's been the driving force, developing the project since the release of "Apocalypse Now" in 1979.

And finally, the film has been finished, premiering at the Cannes Film Festival last week, thanks to Coppola, who ended up producing the film, and Walter Salles, the director of "The Motorcycle Diaries." The helmer has assembled an impressive cast, including Sam Riley as Sal Paradise, Garret Hedlund as Dean Moriarty,...

Larry Jordan, occasionally known in more formal circles as Lawrence Jordan, has been making experimental and animation films for half a century now. He grew up in Denver, won a scholarship to Harvard, then dropped out to start a theater back in Colorado with his high school friend, Stan Brakhage. "Stan was always the director," Jordan wrote in a remembrance in the Millennium Film Journal in 2003. "He seemed to have far-reaching radar for locating people and works in the art world. Five of our gang came out to San Francisco in about 1954. (Stan came first — always the avant-garde.) When I arrived, he was living in the basement of poet Robert Duncan and painter Jess Collins. We had one old car, a flatbed trailer for our gear, and about five films between us. So naturally we started out to tour California, showing our wares."

They eventually wound up in New York,...

From John Gall, art director for Vintage and Anchor Books, comes word that legendary publisher and film distributor Barney Rosset has passed away at the age of 89. Gall points us to a lively profile by Louisa Thomas that ran in Newsweek in late 2008: "Rosset's publishing house, Grove Press, was a tiny company operating out of the ground floor of Rosset's brownstone when it published an obscure play called Waiting for Godot in 1954. By the time Beckett had won the Nobel Prize in 1969, Grove had become a force that challenged and changed literature and American culture in deep and lasting ways. Its impact is still evident — from the Che Guevara posters adorning college dorms to the canonical status of the house's once controversial authors. Rosset is less well known — but late in his life he is achieving some wider recognition. Last month, a black-tie crowd gave Rosset a standing ovation...

It's more than half a century since Allen Ginsberg's poem Howl landed like a bombshell in the staid world of 1950s America. But what was the poet really like? Friends and colleagues remember him

When Allen Ginsberg performed at the Six Gallery reading in San Francisco 1955, he was a fretful, unpublished poet, a man approaching his 30th birthday with a nagging sense that time was running out. The poet Gary Snyder predicted the night would be a "poetickall bomshell". He was right, but really, the bombshell was Howl itself. Ginsberg's poem was an incantatory epic – emotionally and sexually explicit and intent on exploding the anxieties of the atomic age. It helped jump-start the counter-cultural revolutions of the next decade and its author was hailed as the voice of the Beat Generation.

He may have been the most important American writer of the last century. He certainly thought he could be.

Dennis Hopper: actor, artist, filmmaker, Hollywood survivor.

Just days after remembering the loss of Sydney Pollack two years ago, we awaken to mourn the loss of another Hollywood icon, Dennis Hopper, less than two weeks after his 74th birthday. Hopper had been on my short list of "dream interviews" during my tenure at Venice Magazine. When I was lucky enough to finally sit down with him in November of 2008, I was thrilled, and didn't know quite what to expect.

What I found while smoking cigars with Hopper in his Venice home-studio, was a thoughtful man with a gentle demeanor, who spoke in measured tones and loved telling stories. Gone was the wild-eyed "enfant terrible" that Hopper had made his name playing, and sometimes living. What I saw instead was a man who seemed to be at peace with himself and his life, who loved his children, art, film and new ideas.

The first production from recently formed "Kerouac Films" is a documentary on the Kerouac's retreat from society and the writing of his novel Big Sur. This same production company also has feature versions of both Big Sur and Dharma Bums in development, and this is along with news that UA is backing an adaptation of On the Road while MGM is supposedly backing The Subterraneans. Jeez, let's hope they don't kill the legend. Apparently this doc has been playing a few fests since last year but I can't find a dvd release on the horizon. There is, however, an audio cd release coming up of the readings.

He was called the vibrant new voice of his generation -- the avatar of the Beat movement. In 1957, on the heels of the triumphant debut of his groundbreaking novel, On The Road, Jack Kerouac was a literary rock star, lionized by his fans and devotees.