I'm back in North Carolina but still recovering from the trip. So much information to take in and process. So while I get my Carolina heels under me, I give you something to enjoy, something to leave you scratching your head (or someone else's if you're not careful). I give you the Cut-Up Films of William Burroughs:
Following this brief exposition of what was to come, in The Cut Ups, instead of rendering Burroughs' writing, [Antony] Balch reinterprets it as a pure cinematic technique. After Towers Open Fire, Balch was to film a 23-minute silent documentary of Gysin and Burroughs at the Beat Hotel in 1961, the Muniria Hotel in Tangier and the Hotel Chelsea in New York in 1963. The film was to be entitled Guerrilla Conditions. The subject matter can be compared to Towers Open Fire as parts of Burroughs' novels and documents of his life at that period. It also contains several sequences that are rumored to be Balch's attempt at filming The Naked Lunch, an ongoing project that was eventually shelved as appropriate financing could not be raised. Guerilla Conditions was in fact never realized, but the footage was shot and it became the basis for The Cut Ups.
The Cut Ups was conventionally edited and then cut into four approximately equal lengths. It was then assembled into its final state by taking one-foot lengths from each of the four sections that were cut together with mathematical precision — 1,2,3,4,1,2,3,4 etc. Variations to this structure occur randomly when a shot change occurs within one of the already edited one-foot lengths.
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