{"id":10065,"date":"2011-09-29T03:14:26","date_gmt":"2011-09-29T02:14:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/?p=10065"},"modified":"2024-04-09T13:23:35","modified_gmt":"2024-04-09T12:23:35","slug":"brion-gysins-walk-1966","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/2011\/09\/29\/brion-gysins-walk-1966\/","title":{"rendered":"Brion Gysin’s walk, 1966"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"gysin.jpg\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The Cut-Ups (1966).<\/em><\/p>\n

More of the present preoccupation. Choosing Brion Gysin as a subject seems like a detour but the shots above are from Antony Balch’s 1966 film The Cut-Ups<\/em> which also features William Burroughs, Ian Sommerville and someone-or-other’s cute boyfriend of the time who’s only ever credited as “Baby Zen”, a person about whom I know nothing at all.<\/p>\n

I first saw The Cut-Ups<\/em> in video form projected on the screens of the Ha\u00e7ienda nightclub in Manchester during their Final Academy<\/em> evening<\/a> in 1982, an event at which Burroughs and John Giorno both gave readings. The film on that occasion was mixed with some of the other Antony Balch shorts including Towers Open Fire<\/em>, and together they made a strong (and bewildering) impression. The Cut-Ups<\/em>, as noted a few days ago, may have inspired some of the flash edits in Performance<\/em><\/a>, although Nicolas Roeg had been cinematographer on Petulia<\/em><\/a> for Richard Lester the year before, a film which uses similar Resnais-like flashbacks and flash-forwards. In Balch’s film several sequences each a foot in length are cut together at random, a process which was a lot more radical in 1966 than it looks today. The opening sequence shows Brion Gysin walking out of a shop, along a street, down an alley and into the Rue Git le Coeur where the Beat Hotel was located at no. 9, and into whose door he disappears. I visited the street the last time I was in Paris, and took a few snaps whilst there, but it wasn’t until I rewatched The Cut-Ups<\/em> a couple of years later that I realised I’d made the same walk as Gysin, having inadvertently discovered the narrow passage (the Rue de L’Hirondelle) which connects Git le Coeur with the Boulevard Saint-Michel.<\/p>\n

\"saintmichel1.jpg\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The corner of the Boulevard Saint-Michel where Gysin’s walk begins.<\/em><\/p>\n

The route can be traced (after a fashion) using Google’s Street View where the photos have the usual drawbacks of being positioned high in the air and with a field-of-view which makes narrow spaces look a lot more cramped than they seem when you’re there. For those who can’t visit Paris, however, you at least get a sense of the Latin Quarter, even though the area is a lot more gentrified today than it was in 1966. The Beat Hotel, as I’ve noted before<\/a>, is now the expensive Hotel du Vieux Paris<\/a> whose website makes no mention of their establishment having once been cheap lodgings for depraved writers, artists and junkies. As for the Gysin film, I still wonder where he began his walk: was it at the Tabac Saint-Michel or elsewhere? You can judge for yourself at Ubuweb<\/a> which has a copy of The Cut-Ups<\/em> in its Burroughs film collection.<\/p>\n

\"saintmichel2.jpg\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Rue de L’Hirondelle from the Boulevard Saint-Michel.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"saintmichel3.jpg\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Rue de L’Hirondelle from Rue Git le Coeur.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"saintmichel4.jpg\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Rue Git le Coeur looking towards the Seine. The former Beat Hotel is down the street on the right.<\/em><\/p>\n

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
\n\u2022 The William Burroughs archive<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Cut-Ups (1966). More of the present preoccupation. Choosing Brion Gysin as a subject seems like a detour but the shots above are from Antony Balch’s 1966 film The Cut-Ups which also features William Burroughs, Ian Sommerville and someone-or-other’s cute boyfriend of the time who’s only ever credited as “Baby Zen”, a person about whom … Continue reading “Brion Gysin’s walk, 1966”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[42,28,7,5,12],"tags":[2921,968,3876,1457,2898,517,306,2922,7569,119,1190],"class_list":["post-10065","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-burroughs","category-film","category-gay","category-photography","tag-antony-balch","tag-brion-gysin","tag-hacienda","tag-ian-sommerville","tag-john-giorno","tag-manchester","tag-nicolas-roeg","tag-richard-lester","tag-the-hacienda","tag-ubuweb","tag-william-burroughs"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pq7rV-2Cl","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10065","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10065"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10065\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10065"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10065"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10065"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}