A wife sends her son to school; friends of her husband stop by, smoke pot and read poets; the husband arrives; then a Bishop arrives to visit the wife. The evening is ruined, and the husband leaves with his friends. This should have been the most boring movie in the world!
This short movie contains all the elements that popular culture has linked to the Beats: the rebellious poets, the drugs, the attack on a passive society represented here by religion and the American flag. Kerouac and his friends have come to split the American society in half, as shown by the disintegration of the Milo family in the movie: the husband stands for the young Beats, the wife for order.
Pull My Daisy is an interesting work of cinema: clocking in at 30 minutes only, it condenses dozens of ideas into mere impressions and so gives the appearance of having a secret world struggling to break free. I think it's a sign of talent that Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie leave everything half said. In fact the continuous voice over narrative, by Kerouac, is simply void of meaning, merely enumerating what anyone can see on the screen. I think the people involved in the movie were too clever to realise the nonsense of this: are they saying language is dead? Or that it can't reveal anything beyond our senses? I'm still trying to find an answer.
As a beat manifesto this movie works. But when it attacks icons of social control I think it falters: everyone does it so often nowadays, it doesn't mean absolutely anything anymore. Still, I guess we owe this freedom to them.
What I really love is the innovative film techniques: the redundant voice over, the long travelling shots, the feeling of improvisation in the plot, the condensation of time. Modern cinema needs more of this. Until we don't get it, we can just re-watch Pull My Daisy.
This short movie contains all the elements that popular culture has linked to the Beats: the rebellious poets, the drugs, the attack on a passive society represented here by religion and the American flag. Kerouac and his friends have come to split the American society in half, as shown by the disintegration of the Milo family in the movie: the husband stands for the young Beats, the wife for order.
Pull My Daisy is an interesting work of cinema: clocking in at 30 minutes only, it condenses dozens of ideas into mere impressions and so gives the appearance of having a secret world struggling to break free. I think it's a sign of talent that Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie leave everything half said. In fact the continuous voice over narrative, by Kerouac, is simply void of meaning, merely enumerating what anyone can see on the screen. I think the people involved in the movie were too clever to realise the nonsense of this: are they saying language is dead? Or that it can't reveal anything beyond our senses? I'm still trying to find an answer.
As a beat manifesto this movie works. But when it attacks icons of social control I think it falters: everyone does it so often nowadays, it doesn't mean absolutely anything anymore. Still, I guess we owe this freedom to them.
What I really love is the innovative film techniques: the redundant voice over, the long travelling shots, the feeling of improvisation in the plot, the condensation of time. Modern cinema needs more of this. Until we don't get it, we can just re-watch Pull My Daisy.