An Evening for Allen Ginsberg: A Screening, Reading, and Performance

Image: Allen Ginsberg in Vilnius, Lithuania, 1985. Photo: Algimantas Žižiūnas.

Join us at e-flux Screening Room for an evening dedicated to Allen Ginsberg, bringing together a live performance, poetry reading, and screening of two works by Jonas Mekas, the 1997 Scenes from Allen’s Last Three Days on Earth as a Spirit along with an untitled video portrait of Ginsberg. Guest-curated by Conor Williams, the evening reflects on how Ginsberg’s voice continues to move across music, cinema, and contemporary literary and artistic communities.

The program will open with a live performance of Ginsberg’s punk composition “Capitol Air,” interpreted by Emily Greenberg, Daniel Cooke, and Williams. Written in the early 1980s and later performed with The Clash, the song underscores Ginsberg’s presence as both poet and musician. The performance will be followed by Ginsberg’s poems read by Hannah Beerman, Lynne Sachs, Terrence Arjoon, and A. S. Hamrah. The program will conclude with a screening of two works by Jonas Mekas: Scenes from Allen’s Last Three Days on Earth as a Spirit, filmed at Ginsberg’s East Village loft in the days immediately following his death in April 1997; along with an additional video portrait of Ginsberg by Mekas, bridging footage recorded with Ginsberg in 1987 and Mekas's reflections in 1997.

Films
Jonas Mekas, Scenes from Allen’s Last Three Days on Earth as a Spirit (1997, 66 minutes)A video record of the Buddhist Wake ceremony at Allen Ginsberg’s flat. One can see Ginsberg, now asleep forever, in his bed; some of his close friends; the wrapping up and removal of his body, and the final farewell at the Buddhist temple. Mekas also describes his last conversation with Ginsberg.

Jonas Mekas, Untitled Ginsberg video (1997, 22 minutes)
Allen Ginsberg records Jonas Mekas, his wife Hollis Melton, and son Sebastian Mekas in their loft apartment.

Allen Ginsberg was a poet, performer, and activist whose work became central to postwar American literature and the international counterculture. Born in Newark and raised in Paterson, New Jersey, he emerged in the 1950s as one of the principal figures of the Beat Generation, alongside Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs. Ginsberg’s breakthrough poem Howl (1956) brought both national attention and an obscenity trial, establishing him as a leading voice of experimental poetics and political dissent. Over the following decades, he published works including Kaddish(1961), Reality Sandwiches (1963), Planet News (1968), and The Fall of America (1973), which received the National Book Award. Ginsberg was deeply engaged in civil rights, anti-war, and gay liberation movements and maintained collaborations with artists, musicians, and filmmakers across several generations. Beginning in the 1970s, he studied and later taught Tibetan Buddhist practice, which became central to his writing and public life. He taught at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa Institute, which he co-founded with Anne Waldman and Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. Ginsberg lived in New York City for most of his adult life and remained active as a writer and performer until his death in 1997.

Jonas Mekas was a filmmaker, poet, teacher, and archivist. After escaping a Nazi labor camp in Germany with his brother Adolfas (1925–2011), Mekas attended the University of Mainz, where he studied philosophy. In 1949, the brothers were given status as United Nations refugees and were relocated to New York City, where before long Mekas would start making films, soon becoming a part of the film community and one of the major influences in a culture that he would dub New American Cinema. In 1954, together with his brother, Mekas started the landmark Film Culture magazine, and in 1958 began his legendary Movie Journal column in the Village Voice. In 1962 he founded the Film-Makers' Cooperative, and in 1964, the Film-Makers' Cinematheque, which eventually grew into Anthology Film Archives, a screening venue and one of the world's largest and most important repositories of avant-garde cinema. Throughout his life, Mekas made over sixty films and film installations that have been shown in museums and festivals worldwide, and he is largely credited for developing the diaristic forms of cinema. He is the author of more than twenty-five books of prose and poetry, which have been translated into over a dozen languages and are considered classic works of literature in his home country, Lithuania. On January 23, 2019, Mekas passed away at the age of 96 at his home in Brooklyn.

Conor Williams is a filmmaker and critic who has contributed interviews and essays to publications including Bookforum, Interview Magazine, Reverse Shot, and elsewhere. He currently works as a cinema worker at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

Daniel Cooke is a research scientist at Columbia University, where he investigates the use of quantum dots for brain imaging. He is also a multi-instrumentalist with a lifelong passion for music. He played with Austin-based band Misdirect and recorded guitar for their debut EP, Quin.

Emily Greenberg is a filmmaker and musician. She studied film at Bard College and works as Film & Public Programs Manager at Museum of the Moving Image.

A. S. Hamrah is the author of The Earth Dies Streaming and Algorithm of the Night (both n+1 Books), and Last Week in End Times Cinema (Semiotexte). He is the film critic for n+1 and writes for a number of other publications, including Harper’s, Bookforum, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, Fast Company, and the Criterion Collection. He produced the documentary feature film Bunker, directed by Jenny Perlin, which was the opening night film at the Museum of Modern Art’s Doc Fortnight in 2022.

Terrence Arjoon is a writer, an editor-in-chief at The Brooklyn Review, an editor at 1080press, a co-founder of Your Name Here, the founder and editor of Villon Bootlegging Corp, and a co-host of the Pete’s Candy Store Reading Series.

Lynne Sachs is a filmmaker and poet living in Brooklyn. Her films embrace archives, diaries, letters, poetry and music to take us on a critical journey through reality and memory. Working from a feminist perspective, Lynne investigates the connections between the body, the camera, and the materiality of film itself. Her new feature length essay film Every Contact Leaves a Trace had its world premiere in the IDFA International Documentary Festival Amsterdam in their “Signed” Section in November of this year. Her most recent book Hand Book: A Manual on Performance, Process and the Labor of Laundry (co-authored by Lizzie Olesker) was published by punctum books in 2025.

Hannah Beerman is a painter based in Brooklyn, who holds an MFA in Painting from CUNY Hunter College of Art (2019). Since receiving her BA from Bard College in 2015, she has had close to ten solo shows. Interviews and reviews have appeared in Cultured Magazine, BOMB, The Brooklyn Rail, The Observer, Interview, and The New York Times, to name a few, and a MacDowell Fellowship was awarded to her in 2023/24. She currently has a show at Thomas Erben (NYC) through the end of December 2025.

For more information, contact cHJvZ3JhbSB8IGUtZmx1eCAhIGNvbQ==.

Accessibility
–Two flights of stairs lead up to the building’s front entrance at 172 Classon Avenue.
–For elevator access, please RSVP to cHJvZ2FtIHwgZS1mbHV4ICEgY29t. The building has a freight elevator which leads into the e-flux office space. Entrance to the elevator is nearest to 180 Classon Ave (a garage door). We have a ramp for the steps within the space.
–e-flux has an ADA-compliant bathroom. There are no steps between the event space and this bathroom.

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