G E O R G E KO U VA R O S
By his own admission, the move from photography to film did not come
easy to Robert Frank. Ten years after the release of his first film, Pull My
Daisy (1959), he looked back on his transformation from photographer to
filmmaker in a column written for Creative Camera:
Since being a filmmaker I have become more of a person. I am
confident that I can synchronise my thoughts to the image, and that the
image will talk back – well, it’s like being among friends. That
eliminated the need to be alone and take pictures. I think of myself,
standing in a world that is never standing still, I’m still in there fighting,
alive because I believe in what I’m trying to do now.
In the same column, Frank declares:
1
For me, photography is in the past. I wish I could write about the work
of my friend Ralph Gibson or of Danny Lyon’s new book or any other
photographer whose work I like. … No, I’m glad I’ve gone too far: I
wish to be free to express my feelings and doubts which live with me.1
Robert Frank, ‘Letter from
New York’, in Robert Frank:
New York to Nova Scotia, ed. Anne
Wilkes Tucker (Göttingen: Steidl,
2005), p. 55.
With hindsight, we know that photography did not remain consigned to
the past. But the challenge for anyone writing about Frank’s career is not
to correct the filmmaker’s inability to predict the future; it is to explain
what this desire to express ‘my feelings and doubts’ means in cinematic
terms. In this essay I respond to this challenge by focusing on the
circumstances surrounding the production of Pull My Daisy. Benefiting
from the contributions of a range of individuals, this film crystallizes a set
of formal and conceptual issues that permeate the cinema of the postwar
1
Screen 53:1 Spring 2012
© The Author 2012. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Screen. All rights reserved
doi:10.1093/screen/hjr057
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‘Time and how to note it down’: the
lessons of Pull My Daisy
period. What lessons are being learned in Pull My Daisy? How might
these lessons help us to understand the significance of this extraordinary
film for the New American Cinema?
‘The Independent Film Award’, in
P. Adams Sitney (ed.), Film Culture:
an Anthology, (London: Secker and
Warburg, 1971), pp. 423–24.
3
‘The First Statement of the New
American Cinema Group’, in Sitney
(ed.), Film Culture, p. 83.
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2
The first public screening of Pull My Daisy occurred in New York City on
11 November 1959. Amos Vogel, the proprietor of Cinema 16, promoted
the film as one half of a double-bill special event, the other half being
John Cassavetes’s Shadows. Made in 1957 and first screened in Autumn
1958, Shadows had been lauded for its use of non-professional actors,
improvized storyline and sensitive depiction of mixed-race family
relationships. In a press release announcing the bestowal of Film Culture
magazine’s First Independent Film Award to Shadows, the award
committee commended the film’s presentation of ‘reality in a fresh and
unconventional manner. … The improvisation, spontaneity, and free
inspiration that are almost entirely lost in most films from an excess of
professionalism are fully used in this film.’2 The story of what happened
next is well known. After Shadows had been lauded in Film Culture,
Cassavetes decided to reedit and reshoot parts of the film. A great deal of
the new material added to the second version of Shadows consists of
dialogue and entire scenes written by Cassavetes and Robert Alan
Aurthur. Released in 1959, the second version of Shadows, with its much
stronger characterization and narrative structure, was condemned by a
number of its former advocates as a misguided attempt to appease the
demands of commercial distributors.
The upshot of all this was that the version of Shadows screened
alongside Pull My Daisy was markedly different to the one that had so
impressed Film Culture. In the days that followed the Cinema 16 special
event, the relative merits of the two versions of Shadows generated as
much column space in the pages of the Village Voice as the plaudits
devoted to Pull My Daisy. At the centre of both these discussions was the
avant-garde spokesperson, critic and filmmaker Jonas Mekas. Through
his writings in magazines such as Film Culture and the Village Voice, his
own work as a filmmaker and his tireless advocacy, Mekas helped to
define the terms of a New American Cinema radically opposed to
mainstream Hollywood filmmaking. Along with the producer Lewis
Allen, Mekas was responsible for organizing the meeting of directors,
actors, producers, distributors and theatre managers that led to the
formation of the New American Cinema Group. In a First Statement that
was published in Film Culture, the Group asserts: ‘The official cinema all
over the world is running out of breath. It is morally corrupt, aesthetically
obsolete, thematically superficial, temperamentally boring.’ The
statement committed the Group to developing a cinema based on the
principle of personal expression: ‘We don’t want false, polished, slick
films – we prefer them rough, unpolished, but alive; we don’t want rosy
films – we want them the color of blood’.3
4
Cited in P. Adams Sitney, ‘Preface’,
in Sitney (ed.), Film Culture, p. viii.
Art as an action and not as a series of plots, facts, still-lives, moving
collages and pastiches. It is a direction intimately linked with the
general feeling in other areas of life and art, with the ardor for rock-androll, the interest in Zen Buddhism, the development of abstract
expressionism (action painting), the emergence of spontaneous prose
and New Poetry – a long delayed reaction against puritanism, Aristotle,
and the mechanization of life.5
Jonas Mekas, ‘A few notes on
spontaneous cinema’, Cinema 16
Film Notes (1959/1960), np. See
also Jonas Mekas, ‘New York
letter: towards a spontaneous
cinema’, Sight and Sound, vol. 28,
nos 3/4 (1959), pp. 118–21.
In his study of postwar American culture, Daniel Belgrad argues that the
valorization of spontaneity is a defining feature of this period of creative
expression. He traces the migration of this idea from discussions dealing
with aesthetic procedures to broader debates concerned with values in
American society. For Belgrad and others, the dominant force in these
debates was a set of economic principles, beliefs and public policy
agendas referred to as corporate liberalism. ‘Corporate liberals’, Belgrad
explains,
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5
The tone and rhetoric of the First Statement bears the imprint of
Mekas’s writings on the nature and aesthetic possibilities of film art.
Published six years earlier, his first editorial as founding editor of Film
Culture bemoans a situation where ‘Cinematic creation tends to be
approached primarily as a production of commodities, and large sections
of the public – to whom film-going is still merely a mode of diversion –
remain unaware of the full significance of filmic art’. The task ahead, the
editorial opines, is to undertake ‘a searching revaluation of the aesthetic
standards obtaining both among film-makers and audiences and for
thorough revision of the prevalent attitude to the function of cinema’.4
During its first phase of publication, Film Culture promoted discussion of
a wide range of films. In his own writings, Mekas was as critical of aspects
of experimental filmmaking as he was of Hollywood’s narrow
commercial focus. It was only after Film Culture switched from monthly
to quarterly publication that it began to assume a new character and
charter as a vehicle for experimental cinema in the USA, a move that was
consolidated by the establishment of the Independent Film Awards.
Given his prominent role in debates on film, it is not surprising that the
Cinema 16 Film Notes distributed on the evening of Pull My Daisy’s
premiere contain one of Mekas’s most important statements on the New
American Cinema, ‘A few notes on spontaneous cinema’. First published
in an expanded form in Sight and Sound, these reflections position Pull
My Daisy and the first version of Shadows alongside the work of Morris
Engel, Sidney Meyers, Stanley Brakhage, Lionel Rogosin, Edward Bland,
and Denis and Terry Sanders as part of ‘a spontaneous cinema’. Existing
outside the commercial system of West Coast filmmaking and reliant on
ad hoc funding arrangements, the work of these filmmakers is informed
by a shift in aesthetic agendas also found in a range of other forms of
creative expression:
6
instituted an ‘American Way of Life’ defined by a complimentary
combination of scientifically managed work, on the one hand, and mass
leisure and consumption on the other. High wages, vacation time, and
installment buying maintained a consistently high demand for
industrial products, reversing the economic slump that had followed the
end of the First World War.6
Daniel Belgrad, The Culture of
Spontaneity: Improvisation and the
Arts in Postwar America (Chicago,
IL: Chicago University Press, 1998),
p. 3.
At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American
painter after another as an arena in which to act – rather than as a space
in which to reproduce, redesign, analyse or ‘express’ an object, actual
or imagined. What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an
event.7
Harold Rosenberg, ‘The American
action painters’, in The Tradition of
the New (London: Paladin, 1970),
p. 36.
8
Ibid., p. 37.
9
Ibid., p. 38.
10 Charles Olson, ‘Projective verse’, in
Donald Allen (ed.), The New
American Poetry 1945–1960
(Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press, 1999), p. 388.
Rosenberg goes on to characterize the abstract expressionist painter as
approaching the canvas with a specific purpose in mind: ‘he went up to it
with material in his hand to do something to that other piece of material in
front of him. The image would be the result of this encounter.’8 The
encounter between the abstract expressionist painter and the canvas is
unencumbered by history or what has come before. It is an encounter fully
responsive to the painterly event: ‘Form, colour, composition, drawing,
are auxiliaries, any of which – or practically all, as has been attempted
logically, with unpainted canvases – can be dispensed with. What matters
always is the revelation contained in the act.’9 Rosenberg’s emphasis on
the encounter between painter and canvas affirms a view of artistic
creation as essentially productive rather than simply re-productive.
Spontaneity was a way of describing how this shift in the conception and
purpose of art manifests itself in the artist’s approach. In his essay
‘Projective verse’, first published in 1950, the American poet Charles
Olson claims that a spontaneous approach necessitates an un-inhibiting of
one’s mind and ear: ‘at all points … get on with it, keep moving, keep in
speed, the nerves, their speed, the perceptions, theirs, the acts, the split
second acts, the whole business, keep it moving as fast as you can,
citizen’.10 The type of movement valorized in Olson’s essay is different
from the incessant movement of goods and services central to the
corporate liberal view of American life; in other words, the movement of
efficient mass production generating more and more goods that, in turn,
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7
Through its propagation in advertising, newspapers, magazines, television
and film, corporate liberalism gave birth to a powerful image of postwar
prosperity that left little room for alternative viewpoints.
By shifting the role and purpose of artistic activity away from mirroring
the existing order of things to creating new possibilities of expression, the
embrace of spontaneity by artists, writers and filmmakers sought to
challenge the dominance of the corporate liberal view of American life.
This change in the conception of art is evident in Harold Rosenberg’s
widely cited 1952 essay ‘The American action painters’. Rosenberg
claims that the significance of abstract expressionist art resides in the way
it overturns a fundamental tenet of modern painting:
11 Ibid.
In a state of charged reciprocity between art and life, movies were held
to suffuse reality, which in turn acquired a distinctly cinematic gloss.
Events unspooled on a mental screen, movies were a journey in time,
actual or spiritual journeys conjured or became occasions for motion
pictures. … What appeared onscreen was said to have an undeniable
immediacy of impact and enunciative address continuously couched in
the present tense.12
12 Paul Arthur, A Line of Sight:
American Avant-Garde Film Since
1965 (Minneapolis, MN: University
of Minnesota Press, 2005), p. 2.
13 Mekas, ‘A few notes on
spontaneous cinema’, np.
Evidence for Arthur’s claim can be found in Mekas’s account of the
spontaneous impulse at work in Shadows and Pull My Daisy.
Downplaying the amount of careful planning that went into the staging
and shooting of both films, Mekas draws attention to the way Shadows
and Pull My Daisy ground their fictional stories in a strong sense of
documentary reality. ‘When one is watching these films’, he claims, ‘it is
as if one was witnessing the reality itself and not the reality played back.’13
Over the past half-century, the assumptions underpinning Mekas’s
claims about the impression of documentary reality evident in Shadows
and Pull My Daisy have been critiqued by a range of writers keen to
circumvent any manifestation of a naively realist view of cinematic
representation. Mekas’s pronouncement can no doubt be criticized as
idealist; but it is also revealing of how postwar US cinema engaged with
broader debates about cinema’s distinctiveness as a medium. Exactly a
week after its premiere Mekas again wrote about Pull My Daisy, this time
in his regular ‘Movie Journal’ column published in the Village Voice. He
positions the film alongside the Living Theatre’s production of The
Connection as a signpost ‘toward new directions, new ways out of the
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generate greater demand. Instead Olson seeks to valorize a type of
movement whose purpose is to bridge the distance between perceptual
experience and the principles of poetic expression: ‘PROJECTIVE
VERSE teaches … that verse will only do in which a poet manages to
register both the acquisitions of his ear and the pressures of his breath’.11
The attempt by Rosenberg, Olson and others to charge the moment of
creative production allows us to identify another principle central to
postwar discussions dealing with the nature and value of art. Put
simply, this principle involves a striving for presentness. Olson’s
admonitions to ‘get on with it, keep moving, keep in speed’ are about
ensuring that the present counts – not just as a point of continuity with the
past, but also as the point at which newness comes into the poem.
During the decades in which spontaneity was granted an important
aesthetic and cultural purpose, the striving for presentness was evident
across a number of different areas of creative endeavour – literature,
painting, theatrical performance and, of course, film. In the case of film,
the engagement with the present went beyond an aesthetic agenda to
become the very measure of its distinctiveness as a medium. In his history
of postwar American avant-garde filmmaking, Paul Arthur claims that the
valorization of presentness achieves its apogee in the new cinematic
movements of the 1950s and 1960s:
14 Jonas Mekas, ‘Pull My Daisy and
the truth of cinema’, in Movie
Journal: the Rise of a New
American Cinema, 1959–1971
frozen officialdom and midcentury senility of our arts, toward new
themes, a new sensibility’.14 In Pull My Daisy this new sensibility
manifests in the playfulness and spontaneity of the acting as well as the
quality of the film’s photography:
(New York, NY: Collier Books,
1972), p. 5.
Nobody seems to realize that the quality of photography in cinema is as
important as its content, its ideas, its actors. It is photography that is the
midwife, that carries life from the street to the screen, and it depends on
photography whether this life will arrive on the screen still alive. Robert
Frank has succeeded in transplanting life – and in his very first film.
And that is the highest praise I can think of. Directorially, Pull My
Daisy is returning to where the true cinema first began, to where
Lumière left off.15
15 Ibid., p. 6.
the Redemption of Physical Reality,
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1997), p. xlix.
Now this reality includes many phenomena which would hardly be
perceived were it not for the motion picture camera’s ability to catch
them on the wing. And since any medium is partial to the things it is
uniquely equipped to render, the cinema is conceivably animated by a
desire to picture transient material life, life at its most ephemeral. Street
crowds, involuntary gestures, and other fleeting impressions are its very
meat. Significantly, the contemporaries of Lumière praised his films –
the first ever to be made – for showing ‘the ripple of the leaves stirred
by the wind’.17
17 Ibid.
18 Ibid., p. l.
19 Ibid., p. xlix.
Physical reality, then, is a fleeting constellation of elements and forces that
are imprinted on the surface of the film. ‘Works of art consume the raw
material from which they are drawn’, Kracauer stipulates a little further on
in the preface, ‘whereas films as an outgrowth of camera work are bound
to exhibit it’.18 This emphasis on a direct connection between film and
physical reality gives rise to a fundamental question that motivates the
book’s discussion of individual films: ‘Are all types of stories
indiscriminately amenable to cinematic treatment or are some such types
more in keeping with the spirit of the medium than the rest of them?’19 In
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16 Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film:
For Mekas, the overriding lesson of Pull My Daisy is that the way forward
for film involves a rediscovery of its past, a past in which film’s ability to
record life serves as the medium’s primary inspiration. In the decades
immediately following the end of World War II, this view of film’s
distinctiveness was echoed across a range of different contexts; its key
articulation occurs in the postwar era’s most sustained and comprehensive
work of film scholarship, Siegfried Kracauer’s Theory of Film. Published
in 1960, this book represents the culmination of a number of decades of
writing about photography, film and their mutual implication. Its
underlying assumption is spelled out in the preface: ‘film is essentially an
extension of photography and therefore shares with this medium a marked
affinity for the visible world around us. Films come into their own when
they record and reveal physical reality.’16 Kracauer explains what he
means by physical reality:
Kracauer’s view, film’s connection to physical reality makes it opposed to
the principles of tragedy:
If film is a photographic medium, it must gravitate toward the expanses
of outer reality – an open-ended, limitless world which bears little
resemblance to the finite and ordered cosmos set by tragedy. Unlike this
cosmos, where destiny defeats chance and all the light falls on human
interaction, the world of film is a flow of random events involving both
humans and inanimate objects. Nor can the tragic be evoked by images
of that flow; it is an exclusively mental experience which has no
correspondences in camera-reality.20
20 Ibid., p. l.
but reveals otherwise hidden provinces of it, including such spatial and
temporal configurations as may be derived from the given data with the
aid of cinematic techniques and devices. The salient point here is that
these discoveries … mean an increased demand on the spectator’s
physiological make-up.21
21 Ibid., pp. 158–59.
22 Jonas Mekas, ‘Call for a
derangement of cinematic senses’,
in Movie Journal, p. 1.
23 Jonas Mekas, ‘Notes on the New
American Cinema’, in Sitney (ed.),
Film Culture, p. 91.
Film’s ability to reveal ‘hidden provinces’ offers a fruitful point of
connection between Kracauer’s writings and Mekas’s vision of the New
American Cinema. Time and again, Mekas declares that a new cinema can
only be forged through a deliberate embrace of film’s ability to dislocate
our sense of the world. In February 1959 he writes: ‘We need less perfect
but more free films. If only our younger film-makers – I have no hopes for
the old generation – would really break loose, completely loose, out of
themselves, wildly, anarchically!’22 Three years after writing this
statement, Mekas looked back on how the New American Cinema had
lived up to his call. His comments traverse an extraordinary range of
filmmakers and approaches: Helen Levitt, Sidney Meyers, Willard Maas,
Hans Richter, Sidney Peterson, Lionel Rogosin, Shirley Clarke, Edward
Bland, Stanley Brakhage and Ron Rice; but, once again, the two films that
dominate his discussion are his late-1950s touchstones, Shadows and Pull
My Daisy. Mekas begins his consideration of Shadows by explicating a
decisive shift in the film’s use of improvization: ‘The content sought by
Cassavetes and his actors was no longer the surface realism alone, which
was well explored by Morris Engel and the neorealists. For the new
cinema, Shadows represented a turn inwards – a focusing upon
psychological realities.’23 Mekas’s elaboration of the psychological
realities revealed in Shadows draws directly on Kracauer’s arguments
about a distinctly cinematic form of drama:
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Kracauer’s concern with ‘an open-ended, limitless world’ and the flow of
random events means that his writings bear little resemblance to what is
conventionally associated with a realist view of cinema. The world
revealed in cinema is a world revealed anew by the camera. Moreover, this
revelation connects directly with the spectator as a physiological entity.
‘Film not only records physical reality’, he writes in his discussion of the
spectator,
The actors and the director improvised as they went along, searching
into their own experiences, listening, without forcing, without
dramatizing. It is this immediacy of the dramaless, beginningless, and
endless episode which is the most important aspect of Shadows. The
true value of the ‘immediacy’ being not its realism, but its cinematic
properties. The film’s rhythm, its temperament is not that of the ideas in
it, but, primarily, that of the people in it, their faces, their movements,
their tone of voice, their stammerings, their pauses – their
psychological reality as revealed through the most insignificant daily
incidents and situations. … Without knowing it, Cassavetes and his
actors created a work that moved freely in what Siegfried Kracauer has
called ‘camera reality’ – a film free from literary and theatrical ideas.24
24 Ibid., pp. 91–92.
‘Kracauer recognizes and
acknowledges the need for
storytelling, for structures
organizing time and space, action
and subjectivity; he even gives a
qualified approval to the convention
of “happy”, or rather “nontragic”,
provisional endings’. But, and this is
elements of improvisation and conscious planning, both in camera
work and directing. The plotless episode has never been more eloquent
than it is in this film. That feeling of ‘being there’, of which [Richard]
Leacock speaks in connection with the documentary, was achieved in
this fictional film to the highest degree.26
the key point for not only Kracauer
but also Mekas, ‘some types of
narrative are more apt than others
to mobilize the medium’s purchase
on material contingency, to
maintain an awareness of the
tensions involved in their own
construction’. See Miriam Bratu
Hansen, ‘Introduction’, in Kracauer,
Theory of Film, p. xxxii.
26 Mekas, ‘Notes on the New
American Cinema’, p. 95–96.
We can now refine the questions that will guide our engagement with
Frank’s film: How does Pull My Daisy promote and keep in check this
sense of ‘being there’? What might the copresence of fictional and
documentary agendas in this landmark film reveal about the role of
narrative in both Frank’s work and the New American Cinema more
generally?
The first thing to note is Pull My Daisy’s status as an adaptation. Frank
and his codirector, Alfred Leslie, adapted the screenplay from the third act
of Jack Kerouac’s unproduced play The Beat Generation. Kerouac based
the play on an incident that took place when he was visiting his friends
Neal and Carolyn Cassady in Los Gatos, California. After attending a
speech by a progressive bishop, Carolyn invited the clergyman to her
home. On his arrival at the Cassady home, the bishop, accompanied by his
mother and aunt, was greeted by a group of friends that included Kerouac,
Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky. In the film the location shifts to
New York, and instead of being accompanied by his mother and aunt, the
bishop arrives with his mother and sister. But the central drama involving
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25 As Miriam Bratu Hansen points out,
For both Mekas and Kracauer, camera-reality does not imply a rejection of
narrative per se. On the one hand, it is clear that too much narrative steers
cinema in the direction of literature and theatre; yet, on the other, narrative
principles of character, story and drama remain important cinematic
values in the films valorized by both writers.25 For both, it is a matter of
identifying those styles of narrative that enable, rather than negate, the
engagement with contingency and ‘endlessness’ that gives camera-reality
its distinctive quality. This issue lies at the heart both of the controversy
surrounding the two versions of Shadows and of Mekas’s championing of
Pull My Daisy. He describes Pull My Daisy as the perfect blend of
(and unmaking) of Pull My Daisy’,
Film History, vol. 2, no. 3 (1988),
p. 191.
28 Ibid., p. 195.
29 James Agee, ‘Movies in 1946’, in
Film Writing and Selected
Journalism (New York, NY: The
Library of America, 2005), p. 275.
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27 Cited in Blaine Allan, ‘The making
the interaction between the young poets and the straitlaced visitors
remains the same. The film was shot in Leslie’s Lower East Side
apartment. Apart from Delphine Seyrig, who plays the wife, and Denise
Parker, who has a small non-speaking part, the cast is made up of nonprofessional actors drawn from New York’s community of artists and
writers: Larry Rivers, a leading postwar painter, plays the role of Milo, a
railroad brakeman; Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and Peter Orlovsky are his
poet friends; Richard Bellamy, a member of New York’s 10th St
community of artists, plays the young bishop; Alice Neel, a noted portrait
painter, plays the bishop’s mother.
The decision to shoot the film silent and rely on Kerouac’s voiceover to
convey the interactions between the characters came about when Leslie
heard a tape-recording of the writer improvizing The Beat Generation.
‘You can’t act out Kerouac’s characters’, he decided, ‘because they’re all
poetry. … They’re not independent people, independent characters. Each
person he writes about is another aspect of himself.’27 As well as
signalling Kerouac’s ownership of the characters, the decision to shoot the
film silent meant that the filmmakers were freed from the technical
requirements of recording cleanly captured dialogue. The film was shot on
16mm black-and-white film and later enlarged to 35mm for distribution.
A great deal of preplanning went into the shooting. Leslie, who was
responsible for staging the action, meticulously blocked each scene.
Although it did not always eventuate, the filmmakers planned on shooting
at least three takes of each setup.28 From approximately thirty hours of
footage emerged a film with a running time of twenty-eight minutes.
With a rough cut of the film playing in front of him, Kerouac recorded the
voiceover narration three times. Each time he varied not only the tone and
intonation but also the content. The version that is used on the film’s
soundtrack is an amalgam of material from the three versions, spliced
together by Frank and Leslie.
In the publicity material that accompanied the film’s distribution, the
filmmakers use as a statement of intent a declaration by the US author,
screenwriter and critic James Agee: ‘The films I most eagerly look
forward to will not be documentaries but works of pure fiction, played
against, and into, and in collaboration with unrehearsed and uninvented
reality’.29 Published in The Nation on 25 January 1947, Agee’s
declaration was prompted, in part, by his viewing of neorealist dramas
such as Roberto Rossellini’s Roma, città aperta/Rome, Open City (1945)
and Paisà (1946) and Vittorio de Sica’s Sciuscià/Shoeshine (1946). These
works helped inspire a group of films that includes Morris Engel’s trilogy
Little Fugitive (1953), Lovers and Lollipops (1956) and Weddings and
Babies (1958), and Sidney Meyer’s The Quiet One (1948). Using real
locations and a mixture of professional and nonprofessional actors, these
films ground their stories in a tangible sense of everyday reality. In Pull
My Daisy this emphasis is evident in the opening panning shot of the
apartment. Positioned above eye-level, the camera’s survey takes in an
ornate lampshade and a two-seater sofa. Above the sofa is a small upper-
Early morning in the universe. The wife is getting up, opening up the
windows, in this loft that’s in The Bowery in the Lower East Side,
New York. She’s a painter and her husband’s a railroad brakeman and
he’s coming home in a couple of hours, about five hours, from the local.
‘Course the room’s in a mess. There’s her husband’s coat on a chair –
been there for three days – neckties and his tortured socks.
Kerouac’s opening narration confirms the location for the story,
introduces two of the main characters and fills in a little of their
backgrounds. But if we pay attention to his words, we can see that the
voiceover, as well as establishing the basis of the story, also serves a more
fundamental role of pointing to elements in the filmic world. Indeed, part
of the pleasure of the film is in listening to how Kerouac directs our eyes to
the existence of the people, places and objects on screen, while also filling
in just enough of the dialogue to maintain a sense of the story. The
husband’s coat slung over the chair, the neckties and tortured socks: these
objects are made present to us as objects by a spectator who is both part of
the film and outside it, narrating what he sees. A knock on the door signals
the arrival of Milo’s poet friends:
Gregory Corso and Allen Ginsberg there, laying their beer cans out on
the table, bringing up all the wine, wearing hoods and parkas, falling on
the couch, all bursting with poetry while she’s saying, Now you get
your coat, get your little hat and we’re going to go off to school.
Health to you this morning, Mr Hart Crane. No bridge.
He says, Look at all those cars out there. There’s nothing out there but a
million screaming ninety-year-old men being run over by gasoline
trucks. So throw the match on it.
In a short introduction to the poetry of the San Francisco Renaissance
Group, Kerouac describes the work of his peers as ‘a kind of new-old Zen
Lunacy poetry, writing whatever comes into your head as it comes, poetry
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body portrait of a man. Continuing its pan around the room, the camera
passes a large painting propped against the wall. In this painting, a man
holding a brush looks down at an easel. When the panning movement
arrives at a section of blank white wall, a cross-fade shifts our perspective
to a shot from ceiling height of a round table with four chairs. The
presence of the lampshade and the two-seater sofa at the edge of the frame
confirm that we are in the same room as in the previous shot but are
viewing it from a different angle. After a few moments, a cut takes us to
another interior space teeming with visual detail: a cot containing a
sleeping figure, a large icebox, rows of shelves filled with small tins of
paint, a pile of frames stacked in a corner. In the background of this
crowded shot, a woman is pulling back the shutters of the apartment
windows. When the camera cuts to a position closer to the woman, the
opening music fades out, and Kerouac’s voiceover commences:
30 Cited in Ann Charters (ed.), The
Portable Jack Kerouac (New York,
NY: Penguin, 2007), p. 450.
Florida’, in Charters (ed.), The
Portable Jack Kerouac, p. 504.
32 Ibid.
33 Jack Kerouac, ‘Essentials of
spontaneous prose’, in Charters
(ed.), The Portable Jack Kerouac,
p. 485.
A trailer camp … a swimming pool … Spanish moss waving from
old trees … and while prowling around to photograph a white pony
tethered by the pool we spot four frogs on a stick floating in the
cerulean pool … look closely and judge for yourself whether the frogs
are meditating. A Melody Home trailer, the canaries in the window
cage, and a little way down the road, the inevitable roadside Florida zoo
and the old alligator slumbering like a thousand years and too lazy to
shake his horny snout and shake off the peanut shells on his nose and
eyes … mooning in his gravy.31
Watching Frank move ‘like a cat, or an angry bear, in the grass and roads,
shooting whatever he wants to see’, the writer muses: ‘How I wished I’d
have had a camera of my own, a mad mental camera that could register
pictorial shots, of the photographic artist himself prowling about for his
ultimate shot – an epic in itself’.32 We need to be careful not to
misinterpret Kerouac. He is not proposing an end to writing, nor its
replacement by the camera. Rather, he is using Frank’s way of working to
identify a writing practice able to render the experience of a world
appearing before our eyes. In ‘Essentials of spontaneous prose’, he refers
to this writerly method as a form of sketching that begins not from a
‘preconceived idea of what to say about image but from jewel center of
interest in subject of image at moment of writing’; ‘Nothing is muddy that
runs in time and to laws of time’.33 Kerouac’s insistence on developing
writerly methods able to convey the temporally inflected nature of
perception affirms how deeply his work is indebted to media such as film
and photography, media in which we experience the world in and through
a direct experience of time.
Kerouac’s narration in Pull My Daisy thus marks the intersection of
Agee’s promotion of a style of cinematic fiction ‘played against and into
and in collaboration with unrehearsed and uninvented reality’ and forms
of literary experimentation central to the film’s genesis. It shows how,
during the postwar period, literature and film cross paths in their
determination to develop forms of narration able to redeem the material
conditions of everyday life. This agenda also motivates Kracauer’s
arguments in Theory of Film: ‘In recording and exploring physical reality,
film exposes to view a world never seen before, a world as elusive as Poe’s
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31 Jack Kerouac, ‘On the road to
returned to its origin, in the bardic child’. But he also links this highly
subjective form of spontaneous address to the mental discipline of
‘pointing out things directly, purely, concretely, no abstractions or
explanations’.30 The exemplar for this type of mental discipline is the
haiku, a form of poetic expression that Kerouac practised throughout this
career. Hovering in the background of these observations is the writer’s
interest in the capacity of film and photography to model a particular type
of writing. Evidence of this interest can be found in his introduction to The
Americans, as well as his less well-known account of a trip to Florida with
Frank. In both pieces of writing, Kerouac focuses on Frank’s ability to
reveal aspects of US life usually ignored by other photographers:
Ginsberg in Pull My Daisy (Robert
Frank, 1959). ©Robert Frank.
34 Kracauer, Theory of Film, p. 299.
35 Ibid., pp. 255–56.
36 Cited in Allan, ‘The making (and
unmaking) of Pull My Daisy’, p. 194.
purloined letter, which cannot be found because it is within everybody’s
reach’.34 The most effective way to bring forth this unseen world,
Kracauer proposes, is through a narrative structure that is episodic or
porous, a narrative structure, in other words, that is ‘full of gaps into which
environmental life may stream’.35 In Pull My Daisy, environmental life
incorporates all the objects and surface clutter that Frank’s camera and the
offscreen narrator point to. But we can also understand this term more
broadly, and take it to mean the moments of self-expression and social
interaction that comprise the film’s narrative. Gregory Corso’s goofing to
the Bishop about Buddhism, Peter Orlovsky’s questions about holiness
and baseball, Mezz McGillicuddy’s (David Amram) musical
interjections, even Milo’s impromptu dancing and running argument with
his exasperated wife: these activities help us grasp the individual
personalities that make up this environment, as well as something larger or
more diffuse, its spirit of place. Kerouac’s dialogue renditions and off-thecuff musings work in tandem with the camera’s scrutiny of the people and
objects in the loft to make this spirit cinematically present.
In contextualizing Pull My Daisy’s approach to narrative, we need to
consider another form of filmmaking crucial to the history of the New
American Cinema: the home movie. Leslie himself claims that the
intention behind the film was to create a ‘facsimile of a home movie’
about the way of life of the writers and artists featured in the film.36 During
the postwar period, the small-scale intimacy of the home movie helped
experimental filmmakers conceptualize cinema’s place and value outside
of an overtly commercial function. This did not rule out the use of
fictional characters or the creation of stories, but it did ensure that these
activities were grounded in social and familial networks that ran alongside
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Fig. 1. Gregory Corso and Allen
Daisy (Robert Frank, 1959). ©Robert
Frank.
37 Parker Tyler, Underground Film: a
Critical History (New York, NY:
Grove Press, 1969), p. 40.
the film. Shot between 1964 and 1968, Mekas’s Diaries, Notes and
Sketches (Walden), for example, is an accumulation of already completed
films and a vast archive of footage that records the people, places and
events of the New York avant-garde film community. The array of
individuals and events encompassed in this film contrasts with Brakhage’s
approach in films such as Wedlock House: an Intercourse (1959) and
Window Water Baby Moving (1959). In these films, the filmmaker takes as
his subject aspects of his married life with Jane, their marital tensions and
the birth of their first child. By framing their films as home movies, both
Mekas and Brakhage embed the activity of filmmaking at the very heart of
their lives; it becomes a way to make sense of the events that shape their
lives as artists, husbands and parents.
Pull My Daisy conforms to this ‘radically inspired revision of the home
movie’.37 But the decision to shoot the film silent and rely on Kerouac’s
voiceover also shows that the appeal of the home movie lies in its ability to
stage a confrontation between two forms of temporal experience central to
the cinema: the ‘now’ of viewing and the ‘then’ of filming. The
development of 16mm and 8mm film enabled amateur filmmakers to
bring the experience of making and watching movies into a domestic
environment. But in the period up until the early 1970s, at least, a
consequence of this infiltration of the domestic environment by
filmmaking was the loss of speech. The silence of the early home-movie
formats paralleled the silence that characterized cinema’s first decades:
not really a silence at all, but rather a disjunction between an image track
and a series of orchestrations occurring alongside the screening. It was this
loss of speech that, for early cinemagoers, gave motion picture images
such a ghostly quality. Even with the various forms of musical
accompaniment, the inability to restore the sounds that emanated from the
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Fig. 2. Peter Orlovsky in Pull My
mouths of the people on screen made audible, as well as visible, the noncoincidence between the present of viewing and the present brought to life
on screen. In part, at least, the role of the home-movie filmmakerprojectionist was to cover over this gap by bringing the audience up to date
with the events captured on screen.
Kerouac’s narration continues this vital task of mediating between the
moment captured in the image and the moment of viewing. His
affection for the people depicted on screen suggests the type of
personalized engagement that distinguishes home-movie narration.
But unlike home-movie narration that tends to historicize the objects,
people and activities depicted, Kerouac’s narration slides between
aligning itself with the ‘now’ of the image and giving voice to a
recognition of its pastness:
38 Jack Kerouac, ‘Belief and technique
for modern prose’, in Charters (ed.),
The Portable Jack Kerouac, p. 483.
The overt playfulness of this passage does not disguise the fact that it, too,
points to something: namely, the astonishment generated by cinema’s
ability to conflate, yet hold separate, two ways of experiencing the present:
the present as bound to the contingent here-and-now and the present as
something that once existed, that-has-been. This astonishment cannot be
divorced from the photographic properties of the images themselves. For
Kerouac, the lure of film and photography reside in their ability to remind
us of the transitoriness of all things. Concurrent with this is an activation
of memory. ‘Like Proust be an old teahead of time’, he chides other
writers. ‘Write in recollection and amazement for yourself.’38 Pull My
Daisy’s voiceover embodies just such a form of writing, located at the
crossroads of the spontaneous prose method and the heightened temporal
consciousness that distinguishes the New American Cinema.
On one level Mekas was right: Pull My Daisy does enact a way forward
for film that involves a return to cinema’s past. But the consequence of
this reengagement with cinema’s past is not, as Mekas claims, an
affirmation of cinematic immediacy but rather an affirmation of something
more contradictory: cinema’s ability to render an experience of the
present-as-past. Through a deft holding apart of image and sound, Pull My
Daisy exemplifies a style of home-movie narrative that is able to relay
stories and fictional characters while also reflecting on the temporality of
the storytelling. It is this temporal consciousness that makes the film such
an important landmark in the formation of the New American Cinema.
The more we look at and listen to Pull My Daisy, then, the more the
impression of spontaneity referred to by critics is laden with an awareness
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Yes, it’s early, late or middle Friday evening in the universe. Oh, the
sounds of time are pouring through the window and the key. All
ideardian windows and bedarveled bedarveled mad bedraggled robes
that rolled in the cave of Amontillado and all the sherried heroes lost
and caved up, and transylvanian heroes mixing themselves up with
glazer vup and the hydrogen bomb of hope.
Zero, trans. Annette Lavers and
Colin Smith (New York, NY: Hill and
Wang, 1977), p. 15.
40 Alexandre Astruc, ‘The birth of a
All thought, like all feeling, is a relationship between one human being
and another human being or certain objects which form part of his
universe. It is by clarifying these relationships, by making a tangible
allusion, that the cinema can really make itself the vehicle of thought.40
new avant-garde: la caméra-stylo’,
in Peter Graham (ed.), The New
Wave: Critical Landmarks
(New York, NY: Doubleday, 1968),
p. 20.
41 Ibid.
42 Ibid., p.18.
For Astruc, the postwar period brought a renewed sense of optimism:
‘From today onwards, it will be possible for the cinema to produce works
which are equivalent, in their profoundity and meaning, to the novels of
[William] Faulkner and [André] Malraux, to the essays of Sartre and
[Albert] Camus’.41 The development of 16mm film technology opened
the door for a new era of cinematic expression, the era of the caméra-stylo
(camera-pen): ‘I mean that the cinema will gradually break free from the
tyranny of what is visual, from the image for its own sake, from the
immediate and concrete demands of the narrative, to become a means of
writing just as flexible and subtle as written language’.42 Instead of
slavishly pursuing cinematic equivalents for the ideas found in the work
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39 Roland Barthes, Writing Degree
of things captured not in the moment of their occurrence but in and
through their belated echo. Writing as deferral, as embodying the alwaysalready past nature of apprehension; during the postwar period, this idea
of writing was used to describe forms of narration in which the telling of a
story – real or fictional – occurred hand-in-hand with an
acknowledgement of the process of telling. The genesis of this term can be
traced to the influence of two important strands of thought. The first
involves ideas and models of analysis imported from the study of
modernist literature by philosophers and literary theorists such as JeanPaul Sartre and Roland Barthes. In the early work of Barthes, especially,
writing embodies a displacement of the principles of invisibility and
seamlessness that govern realist literature and a renewed attention to the
structures and formal features of narrative activity. ‘[W]riting is thus
essentially the morality of form’, he explains, ‘the choice of that social
area within which the writer elects to situate the Nature of his language.’39
In the wake of the intense politicization of French cultural and political life
that occurred during the 1960s, the formal selfconsciousness associated
with writing took on an overtly political connotation. But while the
reiteration of this concept brought forth new meanings and associations,
what remained constant was the way writing signalled an acute awareness
of the profound philosophical and conceptual issues associated with
formal concerns. It was this emphasis that bridged the investigations into
literary form with the analysis of formal systems occurring in adjacent
media such as film.
The second strand represents a more diffuse line of critical reflection,
concerned with the idea of a specifically cinematic form of writing. In the
years immediately following World War II, the most influential rendition
of this idea was by Alexandre Astruc. In his 1948 text, ‘The birth of a new
avant-garde: la caméra-stylo’, Astruc claims that the value of considering
film as a form of writing lies in its foregrounding of a fundamental
question: how to express thought?
Film Comment, vol. 39, no. 4 (2003),
p. 44.
44 P. Adams Sitney, Eyes Upside
Down: Visionary Filmmakers and
the Heritage of Emerson (New York,
NY: Oxford University Press, 2008),
p. 90.
Dishes, toothbrushes, cockroaches, cockroaches, coffee cockroaches,
stove cockroaches, city cockroaches, spot cockroaches, melted
cheese cockroaches, flour cockroaches, Chaplin cockroaches, peanut
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43 André Bazin, ‘Bazin on Marker’,
of the great authors, filmmakers could use the caméra-stylo to express a
form of thought original to the cinema. This expansion in cinema’s
creative potential means that the director shifts from being a mere
illustrator to become, in the fullest sense of the term, an author.
During the postwar period, advances in 16mm film technology did pave
the way for new styles of filmic writing characterized by both an
expansion in the range of content and a dismantling of distinctions
between narrative and non-narrative film. But what Astruc did not foresee
was that cinema’s ability to inscribe thought would become a matter not
just of new types of images but of new types of narrative voices. In films
such as Alain Resnais’s Nuit et brouillard/Night and Fog (1955) and
Chris Marker’s Letter From Siberia (1957), an offscreen voice raises
fundamental questions about the possibility of an authoritative point of
view: how should we understand these images; what can they not show;
how might they be arranged differently? In his review of Marker’s film,
André Bazin characterizes the function of these offscreen voices as
generating a sense of verbal intelligence: ‘Better, it might be said that the
basic element is the beauty of what is said and heard, that intelligence
flows from the audio element to the visual. The montage has been forged
from ear to eye.’43
During the late 1950s these narrative voices could also be heard across
the Atlantic. But in the New American Cinema the voiceover tends to
shun the big picture reflections that characterize films such as Night and
Fog in favour of a more personalized engagement with the images on
screen. In Mekas’s Walden, for example, the rise of the antiwar protest
movement, the bed-in for peace in Montreal by John Lennon and Yoko
Ono, and the establishment of the New York independent film community
are viewed from the point of view of the filmmaker’s day-to-day travails.
Mekas’s heavily accented voiceover imbues the film with a sense of
fragility that is unassuaged by the celebration of documentary immediacy.
‘I haven’t dreamt lately’, the narrator declares at one point. ‘I don’t seem
to remember my dreams any longer. I am afraid to walk barefoot, even in
the room, as if some terrible microbes were waiting for me, or I’ll step on
glass splinters … Am I really losing slowly everything I had brought with
me from the outside?’ These reflections evoke what P. Adams Sitney aptly
describes as ‘the solitude of an observer who is seldom at home in
society’.44
Pull My Daisy established a precedent for this type of narration. The
careful editing of the three different versions of Kerouac’s voiceover by
Frank and Leslie emphasizes rather than negates the voice’s volatile
performative function. At times Kerouac’s description of the material life
of the apartment takes on the musicality that serves as a defining aspect of
his spontaneous prose method:
butter cockroaches – cockroach cockroach – cockroach of the eyes –
cockroach, mirror, boom, bang – Jung, Freud, Jung, Reich.
spontaneous prose’, p. 484.
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45 Cited in Kerouac, ‘Essentials of
In these passages, the voiceover is again pointing to something: neither
character, nor story, nor even the messiness of the loft, but rather the act of
enunciation itself.
Listening to Kerouac’s narration, Frank discovered how the voice can
be used in its own right to inscribe a film with a range of emotions and
temporal registers that both compliment and work against the time of the
image itself. The legacy of this discovery can be heard in his use of
voiceover in films such as Conversations in Vermont (1969), Life Dances
On … (1980) and Home Improvements (1985). The lesson of Pull My
Daisy, then, is the lesson that, in ‘Essentials of spontaneous prose’,
Kerouac attributes to the US poet William Carlos Williams: ‘Time and
how to note it down’.45 Nearly sixty years later, Williams’s statement
confronts us as a conundrum that requires different things from the
filmmaker, the writer and the photographer. The value of Frank’s career is
that it allows us to chart the intersection of these different responses from
the perspective of a single body of work. It suggests that the best way to
understand this intersection of media is as an activity of writing.