Wallace Berman

[5] He moved from Los Angeles to San Francisco in late 1957 where he mostly focused on his magazine Semina, which consisted of poetry, photographs, texts, drawings and images assembled by Berman.

[10] His art embodied the kind of interdisciplinary leanings and interests that, in time, would come to help characterize the Beat movement as a whole.Berman created Verifax collages, which consist of photocopies of images from magazines and newspapers, mounted onto a flat surface in collage fashion, mixed with occasional solid areas of acrylic paint.

[7] To make them, Berman used a Verifax copier (Kodak) machine to copy images which he often juxtaposed in a grid format, creating what the critic Will Fenstermaker called "psychedelic typologies.

After the opening, the L.A. vice squad got a telephone tip from an anonymous caller and during the raid they found what was deemed to be a pornographic image by Cameron Parsons titled Peyote Vision[14] at the bottom of one of Berman's assemblage works called Temple.

Semina consisted of collages mixed with poetry by writers Michael McClure, Philip Lamantia, David Meltzer, Charles Bukowski, William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Jean Cocteau, John Kelly Reed[16] and Berman, which he published under the pseudonym Pantale Xantos.

Investigating officers claimed that Peyote Vision, which featured two copulating figures, was pornographic and indecent, thus legitimizing their actions.

Berman began work on Aleph soon after the release of the first issues of Semina, and the film incorporated techniques carried over from collage and painting.

The film includes hand coloring, Letraset symbols, and collage portraits of pop-culture icons, which Berman superimposed on images of a Sony transistor radio.

The film was named Aleph by Berman’s son Tosh, after the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet which had been adopted by his father as a monogram.