One of America’s most celebrated literary figures is a man who shot his wife in the head, abandoned his son and had a heroin habit which spanned five decades.
William S Burroughs, one third of the Beat generation’s literary tripartite (with Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac), is the subject of a new feature-length documentary, screened this week at the BFI London Film Festival, seeking to shed new light on the author through previously unseen Super 8 home movies and VHS tapes donated by his friends.
“I called the film William S Burroughs: A Man Within because Burroughs used the term ‘a man within’ twice in Naked Lunch,” Yony Leyser, the film’s 26-year-old director, explains, adding: “I wanted to look at the man, not the writing.”
The 90 minute documentary is divided into segments reflecting Burroughs’ various obsessions - cats, guns, drugs, rent boys etc- , and only briefly mentions the writer’s huge back catalogue, the most famous of which are Naked Lunch, Queer and Junkie.
"Drunk at the matinee" is a collection of candid poetry about stupid shit that we all experience from day to day.
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