THE FILM
From Berlin and Vienna in the 1930s; from New York to Chicago, New Orleans, Los Angeles and San Francisco in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s; ruth weiss, one of the great female Beat poets, has written, performed, painted, and filmed the fact that for her, ‘one more step west is the sea …’ In her 90s, her life is a grand collage that transcends the Beat. She is the cosmic refugee among the ecstatic memories of counter-culture. Beat scholar and award winning poet Thomas Antonic traces weiss’s pioneering art and her world without boundaries in his feature length documentary debut as a film director.
ruth weiss, legendary Beat poet and innovator of Jazz & Poetry, name always lower case, was born into an Austrian Jewish family in 1928. After a nurturing childhood in Berlin and Vienna she fled the Nazis with her parents and narrowly escaped the Holocaust by emigrating to the United States in 1939. In the late 1940s and early ’50s she was the first to perform her poems alongside jamming musicians in Chicago’s “Art Circle” and in New Orleans’ French Quarter, developing “Jazz & Poetry” as a form of performance in which improvisation and spontaneous interaction unfold trans-medially.
After three years of hitchhiking across the USA, initially together with her first female partner Jeri, and then after their separation accompanied only by a typewriter, she ended up in San Francisco’s bohemian quarter of North Beach in 1952, already gaining notice for her signature blue-green dyed hair, which she considers as a statement of pacifism and environmental awareness. By 1953/54, together with the then still unknown Jack Kerouac, ruth wrote haiku for nights on end in her room at the Wentley Hotel. Neal Cassady would sometimes pick them up early in the morning in a dubious “borrowed car” to watch the sunrise together on one of San Francisco’s hills. ruth waited tables at The Cellar jazz club, where she also introduced Jazz & Poetry in San Francisco and performed once a week. She published her poetry in Bob Kaufman’s BEATITUDE, Wallace Berman’s Semina and other legendary litmags. She published her first four volumes of poetry between 1958 and 1960, and in 1961 produced The Brink, now considered a major cult underground film.
Until the 1990s, a hot dog and a chocolate bar were often the only meal for a day – and beer, which was her favorite drink. ruth had to reach nearly the age of 70 to finally receive the recognition she deserved. The turning point in her career was in 1996, when she was featured in Brenda Knight’s landmark book Women of the Beat Generation. After that, she gave performances across the US and Europe, taught at the Vienna Poetry School, had successful exhibitions at SFMOMA, the Whitney Museum New York, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and others. She also received the Medal of Honor of the City of Vienna.
In 2012 Thomas Antonic met ruth weiss in Vienna. Over the next years they met again on several occasions in Austria and California. By 2016, the concept of a documentary film on ruth began to take shape. Encouraged by film historian and producer Robert Dassanowsky and strongly supported by weiss, Antonic and his camera accompanied her over a period of two and a half years. He conducted lengthy interviews with weiss who open-heartedly shared her life story. Antonic filmed several of her Jazz & Poetry performances in the San Francisco Bay Area and on the coast of Northern California, including one of her last shows on her 90th birthday at the Beat Museum in San Francisco. Antonic subsequently followed her 1950s hitchhiking route from New Orleans to San Francisco, armed with a camera, interviewing, among others, weiss’ saxophone player Karl Schoen and her first husband, Sojun Roshi Mel Weitsman, abbot of the Berkeley Zen Center.
ruth weiss provided an enormous amount of documents from her private archives for this film, including unreleased audio and video recordings, never before seen artworks, and even her school dictation book from 1938, in which she records the Nazi annexation of Austria to Germany from a child’s perspective. Moreover, weiss invited Antonic to stay with her and her last long-time partner and percussionist Hal Davis in their secluded house under huge, old redwood trees at the Mendocino coast of Northern California. As a result, One More Step West Is the Sea is not only a collage of biographical retrospection of one of the original West Coast Beat poets, but also an intimate portrait of the relationship between weiss and Davis, two bohemians and extraordinary free spirits continuing to create and perform in their advanced age.
THE FILMMAKER AND PRODUCER
Thomas Antonic, award winning poet, musician, writer, filmmaker, multimedia artist, PhD in German Literature and Philosophy. He works mainly in the fields of multi-media intersections of poetry, film, music, visual arts, cut-up, improvisation, spontaneous prose and other principles of coincidence. Numerous publications in German and English, most recent books: Disco Bible (together with Janne Ratia, poetry, 2023), United States of Absurdia (poetry and prose, German, 2022), the edited volume ruth weiss: Beat Poetry, Jazz, Art (together with Estíbaliz Encarnación-Pinedo, 2021), and Amongst Nazis: William S. Burroughs in Vienna 1936/37 (essay, 2020). A biography about ruth weiss is in progress. Antonic was Visiting Researcher at Stanford University 2013 and Research Fellow at the University of California in Berkeley 2014/15. He lives and works mostly in Vienna, Austria, and Point Arena, California.
THE CO-PRODUCERS
Robert Dassanowsky, independent film producer, film historian and literary-cultural critic. CU Distinguished Professor of Film and Languages and Cultures at the Unversity of Colorado, Colorado Springs, he specializes in Austrian Studies, with more than 80 articles and book chapters, and nine books to his credit, including: Austrian Cinema: A History (2005); New Austrian Film, ed. (2011); Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds: A Manipulation of Metafilm, ed. (2012); World Film Locations: Vienna, ed. (2012); Screening Transcendence: Film under Austrofascism and the Hollywood Hope 1933–1938 (2018). He is a delegate of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts, a Fellow of the UK Royal Historical Society, a member of the Austrian Academy of Film, and voting member of the European Film Academy (EFA).
Anthony Jacobson is a Producer, Director and Actor from Vienna, Austria. After studying media in Vienna and acting at the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute in Los Angeles he started his own production company Perdurabo Film in Vienna, producing documentaries, such as The Gypsy Baron (2014), for TV and cinema. As a director he works on commercial film projects of any kind as well as on various music video projects. As an actor Anthony played leading roles in various videoclips, comedy formats, theatre shows and TV shows such as Gute Nacht Österreich. With his rock band Rammelhof he tours around Europe. www.perdurabofilm.com
VOICES
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“ruth weiss has many admires. Thomas Antonic erects a monument for the Jazz & Poetry pioneer, assembles an anarchic portrait, creates a film collage as colorful as ruth weiss’ hair. A personal encounter in the woods of Northern California with one of the leading women of the Beat Generation.” (Diagonale, Festival of Austrian Film, 2021)
“Jazz-poet-performer ruth weiss has lived the lore of many of her associates in the Beat literary-arts movements. She’s a tenacious survivor and anomaly.” (Anne Waldman)
“No American poet has remained so faithful to jazz in the construction of poetry as has ruth weiss. Her poems are scores to be sounded with all her riffy ellipses and open-formed phrasing swarming the senses … Others read to jazz or write from jazz. ruth weiss writes jazz in words.” (Jack Hirschman)
“A life, a modern European-Jewish and Beat-troubadour American life, managed against initial odds but always with huge creative resilience. A truly singular life lived inside truly singular history. Some career. Some presence.” (A. Robert Lee, author of The Beats: Authorships, Legacies)
“ruth weiss, my poet and tragedian. Her eyes tell you she knows all. Part Édith Piaf, part Giulietta Masina, truly one of the most important women on the planet.” (Steven Arnold, filmmaker)
“Few poets – male or female – can be said to embody Beat to the extent of the San Francisco jazz performance poet ruth weiss. And few embody in that Beat such a sweep of twentieth-century aesthetic philosophies and practices. […] weiss is progenitor and mirror of the interdisciplinary and mixed-media constructions, discourses, and epistemologies that have emerged as standards of modernism, Beat, and postmodernism.”
(Nancy M. Grace, Wooster College, Ohio)
“ruth weiss’s work stands in direct challenge to [Jack Kerouac’s] male-centered model of Bohemian art. She is a prolific, eclectic artist, and her publicly exhibited work includes film, video, and watercolor haiku. […] weiss’s journeys, her border-crossing life experiences and artistic performances, remind us that women Beats thrived as writers and artists in their own right, despite the middle-class social and cultural pressures often exerted by their male counterparts.”
(Tony Trigilio, Columbia College Chicago)
“In recent years, weiss’s work has garnered increasing critical attention that will likely develop further as time goes on, since […] weiss personifies the Beat spirit more fully than others.”
(Steven Belletto, author of The Beats: A Literary History)
