Broken Meat

The 52 year old Alan Granville is often compared to the writers William S. Burroughs and Charles Bukowski. Like them, Granville lives on the fringes of society: he is addicted to drugs, homeless, destitute, and schizophrenic, to mention only a few of his characteristics. Rapaport draws a portrait of Granville in a sober and rough film. The soundtrack, with Granville's poetry, in combination with images of desolated, unknown districts of New York, creates an atmosphere that reminds us of the fifties. The third-rate hotels, the seedy streets round Times Square, and the cold highways that reach the city-border. New York seems to be heading straight for its ruin. At the same time, the decay is illustrated by detailed nude photographs of the ageing poet. His body becomes abstract in an alienating, perhaps even aesthetic way. By making broken meat, Rapaport has sketched a nihilistic, but also a melancholy portrait of New York, and of the poet Alan Granville as an inhabitant of that city. In plain black and white images, the loneliness of city life is shown. (International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam)