Celebrating the celluloid expression of the Beat spirit—arguably the most sustained legacy in US counter-culture—Naked Lens is a comprehensive study of the most significant interfaces between the Beat writers, Beat culture and cinema. eaturing the key Beat players and their collaborators including: William S Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Charles Bukowski, Brion Gysin, Anthony Balch, Ron Rice, John Cassavetes, Andy Warhol, Bob Dylan, Klaus Maeck, and Gus van Sant.

As well as examining clearly Beat-inspired films like "Pull My Daisy", "Chappaqua", and "The Flower Thief", Sargeant also examines verite and performance films ("Shadows", and "Wholly Communion"), B-movies ("The Subterraneans" and Roger Corman's "Bucket of Blood"), and Hollywood adaptations ("Heart Beat" and "Barfly").

The second half of the book is devoted to an extensive analysis of the films relating to William Burroughs, from Antony Balch's "Towers Open Fire" to David Cronenberg's "Naked Lunch". This book also contains the last ever interview with writer Allen Ginsberg recorded three months before his death in April 1997.

Described by The Wire as mixing the “critical apparatus of Foucault’s Language Counter-Memory Practice with the sensibilities of a Tod Browning movie” Jack Sargeant is a writer, lecturer, and curator. He confesses to an unhealthy fascination with the aesthetic, political, sexual, and philosophical challenges posed by the extremes of human behaviour. Sargeant is the author of Naked Lens: Beat Cinema, Cinema Contra Cinema, and editor / writer of the cult Suture. In addition he has edited three volumes of true crime writing and co-edited two books on cult cinema Lost Highways: An Illustrated History of the Road Movie and No Focus: Punk On Film. He has written introductory essays for Romain Slocombe's Tokyo Sex Underground and Joe Coleman's The Book of Joe, and contributed essays on topics ranging from medical fetishism to car crash pop songs for books including Car Crash Culture, Underground USA, Addicted, Body Probe, Autopia, and others.

He has appeared in numerous documentary films, including Llik You Idols, Russ Meyer: King of Sexploitation, Fear Panic and Censorship, Love & Anarchy, and New Apocalyptic Literature. He teaches at the University of the Arts, London and periodically at the Australian Film Television & Radio School, Sydney.
Currently Sargeant divides his time between Australia and England.

From the Introduction

Beat cinema - in common with beat literature - has no common singular style, rather it shares an attitude that demands self expression, exploration, poetic visions, mysticism, radical ideas, liberation and the belief that art and life can not be separated. Beat filmmakers vary from animators such as Harry Smith - whose bebop influenced alchemical images, collectively titled Early Abstractions (circa 1939 - 1956), explored the potentialities of abstract colour and light, creating images of transmogrification that are characterized by a haunting beauty - to the personal, naturalistic films of directors such as Jonas Mekas (Guns of the Trees, 1961) and Shirley Clarke (The Connection, 1961) - both of whom presented believable quasi-biographical narratives as unmediated literary-cinematic flow.

In late '50s and early '60s America the beat experiment in film was primarily linked to the emergence of underground film (a.k.a. New American Cinema). Perhaps the most famous beat film was created by two young artists, the painter Alfred Lesley and the photographer Robert Frank, who began to collaborate with Jack Kerouac on an idea for a film adaptation of a short play by Kerouac entitled The Beat Generation or The New Amaraen Church. The film - eventually entitled Pull My Daisy (1959) - was cast with leading members of the beat literary scene: Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and Peter Orlovsky, alongside Delphine Seyrig, jazz musician David Amram, and artist Larry Rivers. Kerouac narrated the film, producing undoubtedly the best audio recording of his career. The film was hailed by Jonas Mekas - the leading exponent of the emerging New York underground film scene - as "the first truly Beat film" and a "free improvisation", whilst J. Hoberman described the inaugural screening - on a bill with Cassavetes' Shadows (1959) - as the moment at which "the underground announced itself".