Howl: A Poetry-Movie Bridging Spontaneous Poetry and Avant-Garde Film

Abstract

 In the 1950s, McCarthyism, characterized by anti-Communist and anti-foreign policy, was rampant throughout the United States of America. The public recitation of the poem “Howl” marks the beginning of the Beats’ rebellion against McCarthyism. As a successful poetry-movie, the film Howl bridged the gap between vision and hearing through a series of diversified presentation forms, such as documentary reenactments, archival photos, and the reconstruction of court trial scenes, thus breaking the boundary between poetry and film. As a kind of displaying the authorship of Ginsberg, the close-up pictures of typewriters repeatedly appear in the film to vividly interpret the Beat writers’ style of spontaneous composition. most you heard he was was the carriage slamming back again and again. The little would bing-bang, bing-bang, bing-bang! incredibly fast, faster than a teletype … Then he’d make a mistake, and this would lead him into a possible part of a new paragraph, into a funny riff of some kind that he’d add while he was in the process of copying. maybe he’d a page of the notebook and he’d look at that page and it was no good and he’d X it or maybe part of a little bit and turn another the whole thing, and from something would—again, he would and laugh and