William S. Burroughs & Antony Balch - The Cut Up Films

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Homenaje a Fitz y sus ripeos #4

Apparently, cinema was not a great passion in William S. Burroughs' life and work. Even if in actual fact, the times this great American writer used this artistic medium were not few, as a scriptwriter and as an actor. There are not many films based on Burroughs' literary works and this is because his work is not really cinematographic in the classic sense of the term, due to the little importance the writer gives to the narrative plot. His visual style is not linear but fragmentary. His writing style is narrative and slang with constant visual associations. It is logical therefore, that the film version of his writing cannot avoid having an “experimental” style and uses the cut-up, a chaotic and random method which derives from the Dadaist collages. It consists of cutting up and sticking pieces of text together in order to find new meanings. Burroughs worked, as we know, on this method from 1959 together with Brion Gysin, a unique experimental painter and novelist who actually discovered it first; Gysin and Burroughs used the cut-up method for several different artistic formations. From paper to canvas, from magnetic tape – working on recorders and tapes with the same look as contemporary cyberpunk – to film. In the cinematographic field, the results were a series of short films grouped under the title Thee Films, made with the Englishman Antony Balch between the end of the 50's and the end of the 60's. The first two short films, Towers Open Fire (1963) and The Cut-Ups (1966) have a rather similar structure and the same images are seen with a different but fast serial and confusing editing accompanied by a musical collage which is just as obsessive. In both, for example, we see the Dreamachine, a device which produces dream-like and hypnotic images, adjusted by Gysin and Ian Sommerville in 1960. This machine, made up a fretworked cylinder which creates strobostrofic effects and permits Balch and Burroughs to deconstruct and reconstruct reality to the point of anguish. In actual fact, the Dreamachine represents cinema itself, vision in its purest state, as it reminds us of the inventions of the pre cinematographic era and in particular the Zootrope. In this sense, Burroughs and Balch's operation is a return to the origins of movement, from both the perceptual and conceptual point of view.

This is the full Burroughs dvd from rarovideo

If you dont know who William Burroughs is, then you should reconsider your life has a human being.

Bill & Tony

Video: Xvid at 1281 kb/s
Duration: 00h 05m 16s
Audio: Mo3 at 128 kb/s
Size: 53.2MB

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Comissioner of Sewers

video: XviD at 1815kb/s
Duration: 00h 28m 43s
audio: Mp3 at 128 kb/s
Size: 400MB

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Ghost at Nº9 Paris

Video: XviD at 1637kb/s
Duration: 00h 43m 27s
audio: Mp3 at 128kb/s
Size: 550MB

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Thot n' Fal (extras with the dvd di Brakhage)

video: XviD at 1598kb/s
duration: 00h 13m 58s
audio: no audio
Size: 160MB

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The Cut-Ups

video: XviD at 1724kb/s
Duration: 00h 18m 49s

audio: Mpe at 128kb/s
Size: 250MB

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Towers Open Fire

video: XviD at 2349kb/s
Duration: 00h 09m 35s
audio: Mp3 at 128Kb/s
Size: 170MB

 William.Burroughs.&.Antony.Balch.Towers.Open.Fire[fitz].avi

William Buys a Parrot

video: Xvid at 6894kb/s
audio: Mpe at 128kb/s
Duration: 00h 01m 30s
Size: 75.7 MB

 William.Burroughs.&.Antony.Balch.William.buys.a.Parrot[fitz].avi

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