Pull My Daisy

Robert Frank & Alfred Leslie – 1959 – USA

A central and highly influential work of the emerging “New American Cinema” that loosely encompassed underground, documentary and abstract film in the 1960s.  In its way, Pull My Daisy is as important as more well-known works of the same time, such as John Cassavetes' Shadows (1959) and Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1959), in terms of inspiring a more personal kind of filmmaking that was achievable under threadbare conditions.  The movement was intended to represent an honest and artistic counterpart to the numbing blandness of mainstream movies.  Robert Frank was already known and successful as a photographer; he is considered one of the greatest of his era.  His film work is impressive but not substantial; only because he is clearly dabbling in film, never truly becoming a filmmaker.  This puts him more in league with someone like Norman Mailer, though Frank’s films are certainly more interesting.  Though always associated with Frank, the film owes as much to co-director Alfred Leslie, and apparently the arrangement was much more a case of Leslie directing and Frank shooting.  The plot involves several beatnik poets – (Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and Peter Orlovsky) – scandalizing a priest who has been invited to dinner by one of their wives.  Though conventionally planned and shot, the soundtrack is comprised of an improvised narration by author Jack Kerouac and a jazz score by David Amram.