Ginsberg's Words Get Animated in New Film

Via Wall Street Journal:


By PIA CATTON


"Howl," the new film about Allen Ginsberg and his controversial poem, is no simple narrative. The action flits among the titular poem's first public reading—at San Francisco's Six Gallery on Oct. 7, 1955—to the obscenity trial that followed in 1957 to an interview with the poet (played by James Franco). Meanwhile, soaring in and around all this are long stretches of animation depicting the text's urban, surrealist visions.

"We wanted the poem to be a character in the film," said the film's co-director, Rob Epstein. "It is there as spoken by Allen, as evidence in the trial, then as illustrated."

The man behind the design of the illustrations is Eric Drooker, who collaborated with Ginsberg on a later book, "Illuminated Poems," and whose paintings have graced the cover of the New Yorker magazine more than a dozen times. Mr. Drooker was born in Manhattan and lived two blocks away from Ginsberg in the East Village for years.

For the film's directors, Mr. Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, the idea to animate a portion of the film, which arrives in theaters on Friday, came after looking through a copy of "Illuminated Poems" together. "We had to find a form that made sense to approach that subject," Mr. Friedman said.

In the initial meetings, the directors were looking for some visual elements—but the project expanded quickly, recalled Mr. Drooker. "The next thing I knew, they were proposing animating "Howl." I thought, 'Are you nuts? Why don't you just animate Dante's 'Inferno'?" he said. "But then I realized Dante's 'Inferno' would have been easier to illustrate. It's a guided tour, and it's very linear. 'Howl' is anything but linear."

The creative process took several years, but it started with Mr. Drooker creating characters and storyboards inspired by Ginsberg's text. Then a team of animators, led by animation producer John Hays, transformed the drawings into moving images.

"It's so labor-intensive that one artist can't really do it," Mr. Drooker said. "It's like being in a band where you need other musicians. I just had to keep feeding them." He added that there is also a companion piece to the animations. "Once the film was in the can, I continued to work on a graphic novel."

Mr. Drooker's "Howl" illustrations tend to feature elongated figures and sweeping, richly colored landscapes—making up a fantastical world that reflects the text. "You could call it a cubist poem," the illustrator said. "The whole poem was kaleidoscopic."

Mr. Drooker's friendship with Ginsberg (1926-1997), which resulted "Illuminated Poems" in 1996, gave him a firm understanding of what the poet would have liked. "It felt like a collaboration, and I felt like he was giving me encouragement," he said. "There was a natural harmony there between us. So that's what gave me the confidence to do the animation."

But Dante's "Inferno" did play a role, too. In re-reading that text, Mr. Drooker imagined a visual of Dante and Virgil—"these two robed figures going through hell"—and transposed that image onto the reality that Ginsberg described in "Howl" to refer to his friend Carl Solomon, whose institutionalization partly inspired the poem ("I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked..."). "They are being led through this hellish landscape of the mental hospital where Solomon was committed and receiving electro-shock treatment," Mr. Drooker said.

Other inspirations for the illustrations came from jazz, Greek mythology (especially the "Moloch" figure, which has a bull's head and human's body) and from William Blake, who illustrated his own poems. "The angel-heading hipsters we see flying though the night were inspired by Blake," he said.

And while "Howl" was written in the political context of a much different era, Mr. Drooker made one element more topical: the addition of oil fields, which was aimed at more recent international events. In all, the animation emphasizes the varied ways in which the viewer interacts with the film—and the poem. "We come back and forth into different realities," Mr. Epstein said of the film. "This was the—imagined—internal reality of the poet."