Allen Ginsberg reads poetry to a crowd in Washington Square Park, 1966. Photograph: AP
New technologies allow us to scuba dive into the recent past. Episodes of personal history, through accidental capture on film, can be given a digital kiss-of-life.
It was a little unnerving to re-witness, in glorious Ektachrome, 29 minutes and 15 seconds of July 1967, the Summer of Love, Allen Ginsberg as its titular spirit. Generous, charismatic, hairy, deep-voiced, chanting, priapic and predatory.
The self-appointment agent and prophet of the counter-culture, expelled from Prague, invited to leave Cuba, spiritually revitalised in India and Japan, had jetted into London to investigate the avatars of pop stardom, Mick Jagger and Paul McCartney, to blag his way into parties and poetry readings, universities and millionaire pads on Regents Park. And to lend his presence to cannabis legalisation rallies in Hyde Park and conferences of the alternative society, notably The Dialectics of Liberation at the Roundhouse in Camden Town. He also had time and attention for random documentarists, such as myself and my Dutch colleague, Robert Klinkert.
It was that old thing, 40 years ago, of being in the right place (lower slopes of Haverstock Hill) at the right moment: when the circus rolled into town. The antipsychiatrists RD Laing and David Cooper lived in these streets, in rooms without furniture - as they contemplated the voyage into madness. "All you can do is state the truth," said Laing. "It seems that what is most realistic, most sensible, most obvious, most sane, appears to most people to be starry-eyed idealism, absolutely unrealistic, and completely crazy and mad."
I was 24, newly married, perching with wife, passers-through, in a large, sunny room. WDR TV (Cologne) commissioned a film on the back of a postcard synopsis. Ah! Sunflower, the maelstrom of the Dialectics conference, was the result. There were technical disasters, human dramas, as well as lengthy sessions with Ginsberg, Laing, Cooper and the young Barry Miles (who was running Indica bookshop).
The film, this record of a time and a place, came and went. Ginsberg was dubbed into German. But now, in the age of the archive, it returns, refreshed - with additional chapters of contemporary interviews, in the splendidly refurbished Roundhouse. It can be viewed, along with a programme of other subterranean London films, on January 28 at midday, in the Renoir, Bloomsbury. At which time the new DVD will be launched by The Picture Press.
The nub of this experience was to understand from Ginsberg and the other Beat poets that the way forward was to take responsibility for your own work. "Never forget, never renege, never deny," Ginsberg said. When the witnesses are alive, talk to them. When they're gone, don't hang up.
The film became the prompt for my first prose book, self-published in Hackney, The Kodak Mantra Diaries, the background story of the film and the people involved in its making. This document is also being re-launched by Beat Scene Press of Coventry. So now, for the first time, book and film co-exist in a city they would barely recognise. Ghostly echoes affirming a road that was taken, a few weeks that put down the markers for the convoluted, grafting and grinding years ahead.
