The Source

The documentary follows the Beat generation from the meeting of Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac at Columbia University in 1944 to the deaths of Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs in 1997. Three actors perform the writing of these three men. The account takes up their friendships, their travels, their arrival in American public awareness and Ginsberg’s turn to politics. The movement’s connections to bebop, to the music of John Cage and to abstract expressionism are drawn as well. In later interviews the people who knew them weigh what the Beats meant. The account treats this generation not merely as literary history but as the beginning of every counterculture that followed. Chuck Workman’s eighty eight minute American documentary was completed in 1999.