Flicker.

The 2008 film, ‘Flicker’, is a look at the life of Brion Gysin. Born in 1916 in England to Canadian parents may have given Gysin something of an identity problem. Or perhaps he was naturally rootless. He grew up in western Canada and later attended Downside School near Bath, Somerset. In 1934 he moved to Paris where he studied La Civilisation Francaise, an open course at the Sorbonne. Whilst there he became attracted to the Surrealists but he got in a fight with Andre Breton and was expelled from the movement. This event is not given much weight in the film but it must have driven drove him further in on himself. Then came the legendary meeting with Burroughs in Tangers, the cut-ups, and the years they spent in the Beat Hotel, Paris.

There are comments from people like Kenneth Anger, Iggy Pop, Marianne Faithful, Jean-Jacques Lebel and Genesis P. Orridge. Various intrepid cultural icons record their experiences in front of the machine. They talk about amazing colours etc. but any long-term effects on perception are unclear. Some of the most illuminating comments are hidden between the lines. Gysin comes across as a complex character. Prickly, knowledgable and obtuse. An outside outsider. Not bitter or anti-social particularly but isolated from the mainstream avante garde. He appears to have genuinely wanted to transcend himself, much more than Gertrude Stein or even Joyce and Beckett ever did. A rose is a rose…I am that I am that.

Apart from his collaboration with Burroughs nothing seemed to go right for him. He invented a dream machine but failed to interest any companies in the commercial possibilities. It wasn’t even seen as a second Lavalamp and he couldn’t get an article about it into Rolling Stone. The lack of success or recognition must have weighed heavily on him. It’s harder to dismiss Gysin’s paintings. There the main concern is language itself. The paintings represent many different attempts to become the ‘other’ and to isolate the essence of language. Robert Palmer in his introduction to ‘The Process’ talks about Gysin’s paintings being written in Japanese from top to bottom with Arabic across it from right to left.

His book ‘The Process’ has been reprinted perhaps as part of a general reassessment of his legacy. Was he an important cultural figure? What’s the book like? Well, it’s not very good. The basic idea is a pot-smoking black American professor is hired by a Foundation to cross the Sahara. This involves him in a personal journey into the self. It’s hard not to read the book as autobiography. Gysin wasn’t black but he did have an academic background. The book is a quest. The trouble is he’s not much of a writer. He comes up with some good sentences but he can’t string them together.

In spite of William Burroughs glowing endorsement the writing is flowery and pretentious for the most part; almost as if Gysin set out to write something mysterious and druggy along the lines of Carlos Castaneda (publication of the ‘Teachings of Don Juan’ predates ‘The Process’ by a year). None of this makes the book unreadable. The attempts at humour don’t come across well, Gysin doesn’t seem to have had much time for self-deprecation, but there are some interesting details about traveling in the Sahara. There’s also something fascinating about watching a self-obsessed individual trying to get away from his own self.

http://www.flickerflicker.com/flash/index.html

http://realitystudio.org/interviews/john-geiger/