Antony Balch

Antony Balch Nickname The Abominable Showman ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Mini biography A legendary figure in British film distribution of the Sixties and Seventies, Anthony Balch was renowned for buying up European art/exploitation films and giving them catchy new English titles ('Weird Weirdo', 'Don't Deliver Us From Evil'), as well as being responsible for the legendary sound version of Benjamin Christensen's silent documentary classic 'Witchcraft Through The Ages', where the intertitles were replaced with a commentary by his friend William S.Burroughs, with whom he started his film career with the shorts 'Towers Open Fire' and 'Cut Ups', both extensions of Burroughs' writing technique. His only two features were the surreal Burroughs-influenced 'Secret of Sex' (1969) and the comedy 'Horror Hospital' (1973) WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS - THEE FILMS Directed by Anthony Balch. 1961-1967 120 Minute The films also feature Brion Gysin, Ian Sommerville and Antony Balch. Burroughs and Gysin met Sommerville and Balch during their Beat Hotel days in Paris, 1958-59, an amazingly fertile period that saw the publication, and attempted suppression, of Burroughs' "Naked Lunch." These films (which also include THE CUT-UPS, BILL & TONY, and WILLIAM BUYS A PARROT) convey the consciousness of the period in the visual language of four of the artists who defined it. With their reshufflings of identity, jumping juxtapositions, fragmented narrative and witty insinuations of mind control and detox techniques, the films defy rational apprehension, scattering and thereby reorienting the viewer's mental processes and perceptions. Experimental Hi-Jinks of the first order, a lexicon of future strategies. Like the Marx Brothers let loose in the alchemical laboratory, Burroughs and Gysin, in collaboration with Antony Balch, demonstrate the real meaning of cutting up. This is how it was, the Bardo Hotel, the Left Bank, Paris in the 60's. Hassan-I-Sabbah lives! - Ira Cohen "Scripted by Burroughs, TOWERS OPEN FIRE displays the tenets, humor, and dry persona for which he has become famous. TOWERS OPEN FIRE is a straightforward attempt to find a cinematic equivalent for William Burroughs' writing: an 11-minute collage of all the key themes and situations in the books, accompanied by a Burroughs soundtrack narration. FIRE, THE CUT UPS & DECODER, and Burroughs rea Society crumbles as the Stock Exchange crashes, members of the Board are raygun-zapped in their own boardroom, and a commando in the orgasm attack leaps through a window ... Burroughs as junkie (his long-standing metaphor for the capitalist supply-and-demand situation) breaks on through to the hallucinatory world of the Brion Gysin's Dream Machines. THE CUT-UPS is the actual breakthrough in the gray room. Instead of rendering Burroughs' writing, Balch reinterprets it as cinema." - Cinema Rising . In "Towers Open Fire," filmmaker Antony Balch tackles key themes and ideas from the writing of William S. Burroughs in a unique, cinematic style. The video also features "The Cut-Ups," "Bill & Tony," and "William Buys a Parrot" -- three other films by Balch that reflect the consciousness of the Beat Hotel Days in Paris (1958-1959) of Burroughs, Balch, Brion Gysin and Ian Sommerville.