Gordon Ball

Gordon Ball (born Paterson, New Jersey, grew up Tokyo, Japan) began work in film when given a regular 8mm movie camera by Jonas Mekas on a 1966 college visit. Ball worked for Mekas and Filmmakers’ Cooperative in New York 1966-1967, a period detailed in his ’66 Frames (Coffee House Press, 1999). He hitchhiked across the U.S. and Mexico to live in a jungle-sea-mountain village, was arrested without charge entering Puerto Vallarta at a time of gringo hippie round-up by federales, and shot what would become MEXICAN JAIL FOOTAGE from the inside. Returning to the U.S., Ball worked several years as manager of a small farm retreat for artists and poets established by Allen Ginsberg, with whom he’d work on books and photography over coming decades. The first part of FARM DIARY (1968-1969) is available through Filmmakers’ Cooperative. Having entered graduate school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1973, he told his life story under a magnolia tree on Franklin Street in the summer of 1977; made film elegies FATHER MOVIE (1978) one year after father’s death and ENTHUSIASM (1980) five years after mother’s. MILLBROOK (1985) recaptures a personal psychedelic experience at Timothy Leary’s upstate redoubt. For the United States Information Agency (USIA) he taught two summers (1986 and 1988) in Poland shortly before glasnost, making DO POZNANIA (1991). In 1980 he adopted a phrase from Yeats, “technical sincerity,” as touchstone for his first-person filmmaking: “Fine or rough, heavy or ethereal, there is always at base an unregretful uncompromising heart and consciousness. It is negligent of all but its own earnest rhythmic awareness: and that, after all, may be what we were looking for–what one person and no other can give us.” In recent years he’s exhibited and published some of the many photographs he took of Ginsberg and Beat colleagues over three decades. His DVD Films by Gordon Ball was released at the end of 2010, and is carried by Canyon Cinema, Filmmakers’ Cooperative, and Re:Voir Video. He teaches literature, composition, and film in the Department of English and Fine Arts, Virginia Military Institute (VMI), Lexington, Virginia.

Works by Gordon Ball

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