Pull My Daisy
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Pull My Daisy
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This film has been preserved in the National Film Registry in 1996.
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Pull My Daisy is a 1959 American short film directed by Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie, and adapted by Jack Kerouac from the third act of his play, Beat Generation.
Why It Rocks
- The defining film of the late 1950s counterculture, Pull My Daisy collected the leading "Beat" figures in a Bowery loft to play out the final act of an unproduced Jack Kerouac play called The Beat Generation. Pull My Daisy is unmatched as a document of an era which at the time was rapidly disappearing. As a film, it is an oddity, a curio defended by a shrinking number of beatnik fans.
- For plot, Pull My Daisy offers the misogynistic, anti-social antics of four dropouts who pride themselves on mocking propriety. Their targets include long-suffering wives and ministers, precisely the people who least needed criticizing. In his dispassionate direction, Frank may be mocking “free spirits’ who drink, take drugs, pretend to play music, and repair to the nearest bar at the first sign of trouble. Or he may be endorsing it. The philosophy Kerouac, Ginsberg, and the others were promoting had already entered into the mainstream. In fact, their attitudes had been ridiculed in cartoons, and twisted into melodramas about juvenile delinquency, B-movie fodder for drive-ins.
- The artistic community was driven by an activism, a powerful consciousness of its own significance, an element that runs through Beat literature. Pull My Daisy developed in part from this sense of cultural self-importance. Moreover, during the 1950s, Hollywood was making fewer films and making a place in the theaters of the United States for an art cinema composed of foreign films and small-scale, independent, domestic productions. So, although the film has an aspect of the home movie, it was conceived both for its value as a cultural work and as a film for a modern commercial cinema - just as Kerouac's novels, at the same time they document his life and times and are important works of imaginative literature, inserted themselves into the established system of book publication.
- One of the best examples of the film's creative treatment of sound originated in Kerouac's fascination during the recording session with smoke wafting up from his cigarette. The phrase, "Up you go, little smoke,” for example, refers in the film first to smoke rising from an ashtray. It then makes for one of the single most touching moments in the film as it repeats, in Kerouac's singsong voice, when Milo lifts up his little boy Pablo.
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