The Beat Bomb: Story of a friendship between poetry and "counterculture"
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By Annalisa Nicastro
Lawrence Ferlinghetti was more than a poet and a publisher: he was the symbol of a generation that challenged the system with art and speech.
In this exclusive interview, director Ferdinando Vicentini Orgnani, director, producer, executive producer, writer, screenwriter, shares his personal recollections of a friendship that spanned continents and decades, reflecting on the legacy of one of the Beat Generation's most charismatic figures.
Ferdinando signs the direction of The Beat Bomb, the docufilm-tribute dedicated to Ferlinghetti where he outlines an intimate portrait of him, the result of fifteen years of friendship and collaboration, between San Francisco, Lawrence's hometown, and Italy, where he always loved to return.
Ferlinghetti, poet-reporter of a world in crisis, left us a lesson that goes beyond words: resist, create, denounce. His spirit lives on today in verse, film and in the hearts of those who continue to dream of a different world. What are poets for? Poets still represent the last bastion of resistance in our time
Tell us about the exact moment when you met Lawrence Ferlinghetti? What was the energy there?
In 2006, while filming a documentary produced by Cinecittà-Luce (Sixty-eight - The Utopia of Reality) I left for San Francisco with the intention of telling something about the roots of the student movement of 68. Hippies, Black Panthers, Beat, they anticipated the climate of the Vietnam War protests in universities, which later expanded to an attempted revolution against the system halfway around the world.
Through mutual friends I was able to contact Jack Hirshman (another prominent poet who when he taught at UCLA had Jim Morrison among his students) and through him Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
In North Beach, the neighborhood around the bookstore founded by Ferlinghetti in the 1950s, there was still a very special atmosphere in 2006 that no longer exists today. Around the corner, on Vallejo street, is still the club where Janis Joplin first performed. Ferlinghetti was a touchstone for the entire community of artists, musicians, poets, and intellectuals who gravitated around Café Trieste, City Lights, and Café Vesuvio, and with his death a key catalyst has been lost. It was already difficult to hold out against the exponential growth of rents and the cost of living in San Francisco (among the highest in the world), but the absence of the "dinosaur of the Beat Generation" delivered the coup de grace. Now only tourist landmarks remain with the Beat Museum, which is nevertheless an interesting place: in the film I visited it following Joanna Cassidy (the replicant Zora from Blade Runner) who, in her golden years, before she was an actress, was married to a doctor and lived in the neighborhood.
The City Lights bookstore is not only a physical place but a symbol of cultural resistance. When Ferlinghetti brought you to his office, how did you experience that moment?
It was exciting to enter a place where so many mythical figures of that culture had passed (from Jack Kerouac to Bob Dylan) but even more so the great helpfulness of Ferlinghetti (who was already 87 years old at the time). At that moment I never imagined that we would become friends, that Lawrence would live until February 22, 2021 (almost 102 years old), that I would film him on many other occasions between San Francisco and Rome, and that eventually, with all this material, I would make a film about him.
Your friendship has spanned continents, cultures and decades. How has your relationship evolved over time? What was the most valuable lesson he left you?
I think I was sympathetic to him early on because of my chronic curiosity and then because of my willingness to bridge with his great Italian friend in Verona, the collector of Fluxus art, Francesco Conz.
Since that first meeting in 2006 I have continued (as I have always done since I was a child) to go to the U.S. and Latin America often, including for work, and I would always try to stop by San Francisco, where I would always try to arrange some filming with him, but sometimes he didn't really feel like it and so I didn't insist. Not surprisingly, the material collected between 2006 and 2013 is very diverse and quite random. After 2013 (he felt he was too old) he no longer agreed to let me film him, but I still continued to go to San Francisco and film his friends and the significant places in North Beach that can be seen in the film. I met him for the last time on March 24, 2019, his 100th birthday.
If I have to think of the most important thing that my friendship with Ferlinghetti has left me (beyond the privilege of having spent so many good times with him over the years) I think it is his lessons about reading reality. What is often referred to as fantapolitics or conspiracy is instead a very clear analysis of the horror of a reality that is based on economics, corruption, and the prevarication of the weakest. In just a few decades our world has changed to the point that, with the advent of social and more or less occult powers that dominate and control almost everything, a cultural vanguard as the Beat Generation was is no longer conceivable. The only real vanguard possible is that of the world's poor, the disenfranchised who are not part of the system and therefore escape control. There is nothing more detestable and ideological than the "denialism" that is now the order of the day. Those who think differently than the "single thought" that power seeks to impose are not tolerated; they are seen as an enemy to be fought, in "democratic" countries with the weapon of excoriation and media mud-slinging, through increasingly widespread control of information. Ferlinghetti in one of his beautiful poems (which concludes the film) "History of the airplane" talks about the arms lobby, "the military industrial complex." I think the exponential increase in military expenditures around the world and the sacrifice of millions of people every year for the many ongoing wars (the silent ones and the ones on the front pages) speaks very clearly. In the face of the miraculous profits from wars, human life has no value.
By now when I hear politicians or the leaders of international organizations that run the real power speak, my only question is, "But how do they lie so blatantly?" It seems clear to me that the ultimate goal is the exploitation and control of the masses as in Orwell's prophecy, which today, albeit in different forms, can now be said to be fully realized.

In the documentary The Beat Bomb you wanted to avoid an "anecdotal" portrait of the Beat Generation. How did you find the balance between the personal narrative of your journey and the immensity of the Ferlinghetti character?
My journey into the lost world of the Beat Generation is not that of a historian, or a literary scholar (since there is also a lot of talk about poetry) but very simply that of a filmmaker who happened to be in the right place at the right time and tried to follow the thread of a beautiful story that perhaps could have been told, as it turned out to be.
When I met great characters in my life, I always had the confirmation that their greatness, in some way, corresponded to their willingness to be in the world alongside their fellow human beings, never thinking that they were superior, but that they simply brought a contribution, more or less important. Otherwise the "greatness" of the character for me is not there, or at any rate is irreparably obscured.
I want to mention just three that I have known very well and frequented over the years: Lawrence Ferlinghetti (poet), Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada (entrepreneur and politician, twice president of Bolivia), Jannis Kounellis (artist).
Ferlinghetti lived his entire existence opposing oppressive systems, such as the "military industrial complex," which you mentioned earlier. How current do you feel this vision of his is still today, and how did you try to convey it in the documentary?
More current than ever but, unfortunately, now part of a "counterculture" that has less and less space. In my 30-plus years of work, I have almost always chosen this part, even paying the consequences, but the value now lies in the sharing of a few and the possibility that this counterculture spreads by any means possible by word of mouth, whether real or virtual. There are many moments in the film (besides the grand finale) where I try to get Ferlinghetti's message across, partly because otherwise the film would not make sense. If you think about it, the definition "counterculture" is a paradox: the dominant culture has such power and such an increasingly widespread ability to control, that it is even able to shift the semantic meaning of words. It is the dominant culture that should be called "counterculture" because it is against culture, in the systematic falsification of its most important values.
Ferlinghetti envisioned poets as "space reporters" to respond to the apocalyptic challenges of our times. How do you translate this image into your vision as a filmmaker?
As a filmmaker, I just did my best to enhance the voice of the poet, in this case through an excellent live reading by Michele Placido. Unfortunately, more and more, poetry, with the great analytical capacity that great poets know how to synthesize in a few lines, is a language followed by a small minority, even smaller in the new generations.
Looking now at the documentary, do you see it as a tribute, a political manifesto, or perhaps a poetic legacy of Ferlinghetti?
A tribute, a political manifesto that I constructed in line with Ferlinghetti's poetic legacy, which contains many decades of critical analysis of a constantly changing world.
Paolo Fresu's music and the collected testimonies have great evocative power in your documentary. How did you orchestrate these elements to shape Ferlinghetti's soul?
Among the sequences that appear in The Beat Bomb you also devote space to a performance staged at Teatro India with Michele Placido and Giorgio Albertazzi.
With Paolo Fresu I started collaborating in 2002 with the film on Ilaria Alpi and since then we have done many things together, The Beat Bomb marks our 20 years of collaboration. We are currently working on a new documentary on contemporary art. In twenty years we have found a method to work best in a mutual contamination that has always worked so far. Paul is a great musician, a valuable man, a friend who always gets involved with enthusiasm: his contribution
is always important and inspiring. In this particularly successful soundtrack, the musical spirit seems to be perfectly in tune with Beat prose poetry, which surely originated precisely from the improvisation of jazz. Sometimes, when we rely confidently on instinct, with a little luck it all comes together in the end.
The performance Not Like Dante at the India Theater in May 2008 with Ferlinghetti and live translation by Albertazzi and Placido, was filmed in its entirety, and as this film is also a great homage to poetry and its expressive power, it seemed a worthy finale.
Ferlinghetti has often been referred to as the "catalyst of the Beat Generation," but his vision went far beyond that. What makes him a universal figure, able to speak to new generations as well?
His ability to analyze in synthesis the changing world, which he lived intensely, from the ruins of Nagasaki a few days after the dropping of the atomic bomb, to the incredible season of the Beats, to his countercultural charges to Obama's policy that, unable to counter the "military industrial complex," continued Bush's wars, despite his promises.
An independent voice, always lucid and original, aware by culture of many of the prophetic reflections of the great thinkers who preceded him. Not surprisingly, Ferlinghetti was a translator, editor and great admirer of Pasolini's thought.
If Ferlinghetti could see your documentary today, what do you think he would say?
I think (I hope) that he would appreciate it for its honesty first of all, but also for a rigorous and elegant construction (I compliment myself) that always tries not to betray its spirit. That was my intent.
For Ferlinghetti, words had the power to change the world. How can cinema echo this transformative power?
It might seem that words have lost their cathartic power in the confusion of all the excesses that use them, such as that of information, the self-celebrating individualism of social or fake news... but instead we must hope that something extraordinary awaits us, if not to us to our great-grandchildren or their descendants. Perhaps the artificial intelligence that will one day take power will not be an evil force as literature and cinema have predicted (think Blade Runner or Terminator) but will work to restore the values of culture and civil coexistence. In 2097, an out-of-control Chief Programmer, instead of setting the new global Artificial Intelligence program on the lines of Mein
Kampf (as he was ordered to do), will decide on an unthinkable revolutionary gesture, taking up the thought of Jesus Christ, Marcus Aurelius, Emperor Hadrian, or otherwise drawing from the ruins of some ancient enlightened thought.
Comments
Masterful and enlightening interview