This article wants to fill in a gap in Beat studies around Taylor Mead’s films and writing. Most frequently celebrated as an actor-performer associated to the late fifties and early sixties’ film underground, and noted for his lifestyle and public persona rather than for his creative work, Mead was also a significant writer and filmmaker, but the bibliography on these facets of his output is practically non-existent. This essay broaches primarily his films. They are examples of the experimental home movie and travel film of the sixties, but, in their casualness, irony, and overt queerness, they differ from those of better-known contemporaries such as Jonas Mekas, Stan Brakhage or Andrew Noren. Mead’s films are in dialogue with contemporary film poetics—particularly for their use of single frames and extremely brief shots—but they are, at the same time, visual counterparts of his synoptic, often elusive, diaristic writing. They dwell on ephemeral and transient impressions, combine the factual with the oneiric and hallucinatory, and put forward singular figurations of queer embodiment, temporality, and memory. While they are fully inserted in sixties’ experimental visual cultures, they are also original contributions whose singularity remains to be acknowledged.
Juan Antonio Suárez (Wed,) studied this question.