LIFE & TIMES OF ALLEN GINSBERG – Now Streaming & On DVD!

Visionary, radical, spiritual seeker, renowned poet, founding member of a major literary movement, champion of human rights, Buddhist, political activist and teacher – Allen Ginsberg’s remarkable life shaped the very soul of American counterculture.

For 25 years, Academy Award®-nominated director Jerry Aronson accumulated more than 60 hours of film on Ginsberg, resulting in this comprehensive portrait of one of America’s greatest poets, author of Howl and other groundbreaking poems.

The Life and Times of Allen Ginsberg premiered at the 1993 Sundance Film Festival and went on to enjoy success at theaters around the country. Now, the film has been digitally remastered in 16:9 HD (pillarboxed at 4:3, the film's original aspect ratio) and is available to stream for the first time. In all, the film reveals the last 70 years of American culture beginning with the Beat era in the post-war Forties and Fifties, continuing through the revolutionary Sixties and concluding with the uncertainty and possibility of current times.The Deluxe Two-Disc DVD includes the remastered feature film and over six hours of bonus materials including never-before-seen materials made public because of the warm friendship that developed between subject and director, as well as exclusive and revealing interviews with his friends, family and contemporaries such as Bono, Johnny Depp, Philip Glass, Ken Kesey, Timothy Leary, Paul McCartney, Yoko Ono, Patti Smith, Andy Warhol and many others.

THE LIFE AND TIMES OF ALLEN GINSBERG

Directed by Jerry Aronson

84 minutes | color | English | 1993/2005
(*updated in 1997 after Allen's passing, and again in 2005)

Featuring Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Timothy Leary, Ken Kesey, Norman Mailer, Joan Baez, Abbie Hoffman and many more

Streaming platforms include Amazon, Apple TV, OVID & Kanopy

Deluxe Two Disc DVD set containing the feature film and over six hours of bonus materials including Allen reading additional poems, the making of the film,
Allen walking through the Solomon Gallery describing his photos, Tribute Memorial at St. John the Divine, Allen and Bob Dylan at Jack Kerouac's grave, Gus Van Sant directing the music video for Ballad of the Skeletons, 30 exclusive interviews and more!

Director Biography: Jerry Aronson

Jerry is an independent, award-winning filmmaker and photographer. Over the last six decades he has established his reputation as a producer, director, film professor and photographer.

He started taking still photos in 1960 when, at the age of 15, he photographed President Eisenhower in Detroit, Michigan. In high school, he was the top winner in the National Kodak Scholastic Magazine photography awards. Later he studied with Aaron Siskind and Wynn Bullock at the Institute of Design in Chicago.

He began teaching photography at South Shore High School in Chicago in 1970 and by 1972 his students were also top winners in the same National Kodak Scholastic awards. He also started freelancing as a photographer for Creem magazine and various concert promoters in Chicago and Denver, which began his rock photography career. He moved to Boulder and established the Cherry Creek High School photography department in Denver. He continued photographing for Creem and became the head photographer for the Rocky Mountain Musical Express. His still photographs from 1960 to 1980 cover a broad range of subjects in music and politics.

In the period following, he concentrated on filmmaking.

Jerry's many films include the 1978 Academy Award-nominated The Divided Trail, which follows the lives of four Native Americans who lived in the urban heart of Chicago. The film premiered at the Telluride Film Festival in 1977 and was broadcast on PBS in a special series, Matters of Life and Death, in 1980. The film has been deemed "culturally and historically significant" by the United States Library of Congress. Jerry was also chosen to be a Directing Fellow at the American Film Institute in 1981.

Jerry first completed The Life and Times of Allen Ginsberg in 1993, when it had its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival. The feature-length documentary had a US theatrical run and has since been exhibited at over 60 film festivals and has also had a world-wide television and DVD release. The Ginsberg film also won the prestigious International Documentary Association Award of Excellence in 1994. The film was revised after Ginsberg's passing and the final cut was completed for the tribute DVD, including over 6 hours of Extras, which was released in 2007.

In 2009 he began producing Chasing Ice, a documentary on the melting glaciers in Alaska, Greenland and Iceland. The film was accepted into the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. It had theatrical distribution and went on to be broadcast by National Geographic Television world-wide and was also purchased by Netflix. It screened for Congress, the White House, and the United Nations; received an Academy Award nomination for Best Original song; and won a 2014 News and Documentary Emmy award for Outstanding Nature Programming.