First Friday Film Club

First Friday Film Club takes place on the first Friday evening of every month. PLEASE NOTE CHANGE OF TIME IN 2014 (doors open at 7 pm, film starts at 7.30 pm)

EMAIL: [email protected]
LOCATION: Old Fire Station, 84 Mayton Street, London, N7 6QT
DATE: First Friday of every month. Doors open at 7 pm, film starts at 7.30 pm.
COST: £5 (2.50 conc.) unless otherwise stated. Free refreshments available.

Friday 7th February 2014

HOWL


US 2010 Dir. Rob Effstein, Jeffrey Friedman, 84 mins. (15)

‘I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn
looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly
connection to the starry dynamo in the machin-
ery of night’

Allen Ginsberg (James Franco) talks about his life and art as his most famous poem is illustrated in animation against the backdrop of the obscenity trial. Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman’s film reproduces a sense of what Ginsberg’s poem might have sounded and felt like at the moment of its creation, which is presented both as a specific point in recent history and an episode of transcendence. Not quite a biopic, not really a documentary and only loosely an adaptation, “Howl” does something that sounds simple until you consider how rarely it occurs. It takes a familiar, celebrated piece of writing and makes it come alive.