The Cut-Ups

Antony Balch – 1966 – England

The last of three collaborations with author William S. Burroughs, this is a brazenly disjointed 20-minute montage of very brief and unrelated shots – often of artist Brion Gysin at work or walking the streets – backed by a relentless loop of non sequiturs  uttered by Burroughs and Gysin.  The format is presumably a visual extension of Burroughs’ “cut-up” technique that he had lately been using in his novels.  What may have been revolutionary in literature doesn’t necessarily mean anything equivalent in cinema, though, and the film – while hypnotic in a strange way – suffers in comparison to far more rigorous abstract works of the same era, such as those by Kenneth Anger and Stan Brakhage.  I certainly applaud the urge to experiment, and I’m a huge fan of Burroughs, but it’s very hard to separate something like this from other attempts by non-cinematic people to make films.  There’s something about the assumption that anybody can master this lesser art form that strikes me as arrogant.  I’m reminded of how other brainy literary types have made the same mistake and failed horribly to become auteurs; Norman Mailer, Bob Dylan, Susan Sontag, no name just a few.  “One cannot trifle with the cinema…”; so says Jean-Luc Godard.