Day 2 - Howl

 

What a howler!

The first competition movie, always disadvantaged like the first entrant in a talent show, also went and started at the impossible hour of 8:30. On top of that it was in that most difficult of genres, the Poetry Film. In this semi-biopic of Allen Ginsberg, culminating in one of those quaint 'obscenity trials' they used to have in the olden days, they solve the poetry on screen problem by the old trick of animation. Ginsberg's epic, and epically dated, poem 'Howl' becomes a stream-of-consciousness cartoons that look a bit like a mobile phone advert.

Charming though the Ben-Whishaw-type main actor is, (he's called James Franco), this movie was not crying out to be made. The struggles of the 'beat' people, now seem so irrelevant to us, and with Ginsberg it seems as if it was fairly irrelevant then too - the obscenity charge against Howl was thrown out! So much for the big us vs. them moment. People knew what a poem was in the sixties too, even if they didn't like them.

But what the film does show really well, and what is kind of an insight, is what a hit 'Howl' was - the kids loved it as much as they did the Stones. And the scenes depicting Ginsberg's early readings in San Francisco are exactly like a successful poetry slam in Berlin in 2010. People all wrapped up in it, or cheering and laughing. But a period piece is still a period piece.