Burroughs Live: Films

13 — 14 December 2008

Part of Collision Course

Film screenings supporting the Burroughs Live exhibition.

Saturday December 13:

6pm: The Source (C Workman)
Certificate U

Chuck Workman tracks the Beat generation from the mid-‘40s until the present day, documenting its meeting points with other movements such as bepop and John Cage’s music. With Johnny Depp as Jack Kerouac, Dennis Hopper as Burroughs and John Turturro as Allen Ginsberg. The film is screened with the kind permission of Calliope Films and Chuck Workman.

9pm: Drugstore Cowboy (G Van Sant)
Certificate 18

Gus Van Sant's Drugstore Cowboy is a portrait of drug addiction and its inevitable avalanche of personal catastrophes, combined with the decay of the image of ‘unlimited success’. It stars Matt Dillon as the main character and Burroughs himself as a defrocked priest recovering from drug addiction.

Sunday December 14:

6pm: Naked Lunch (D Cronenberg)
Certificate 18

WIN a copy of 'The Cinema of David Cronenberg'

David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch is based on the book of the same name by Burroughs, originally published in 1959. William Lee, a reporter, exterminator and actor struggles with drug dependency and obsessive paranoia, only to kill his wife, Joan Lee, as a consequence of a mysterious assignment. The book’s structure as a series of vignettes was translated by Cronenberg into individual segments that merge Burroughs’ novel and his biography to investigate the limits between fiction and the man.