Made with Robert Frank.
“Caught between the socio-historical cult of itself and its Beatnik players, and the excitement of its discreet yet radical formalism, Pull My Daisy has been pawed over by the watchdogs and self-appointed guardians of avant-garde film since its first double-bill showings with John Cassavetes Shadows in the late 1950s.
It was awarded the Second Independent Film Award by Film Culture magazine in 1960 and attacked in the same publication by Parker Tyler two years later.
Based around Jack Kerouacs narration from the last section of his unproduced play The Beat Generation (itself based on an incident between Neal Cassady and his wife Carolyn), its as much a document of its own unravelling as it is footage of some of the most acclaimed writers and painters of its generation at play…
If Alfred Leslies 2001 film The Cedar Bar finds its cornerstone in his 1964 letter to Frank OHara describing an unprecedented parallelism where the spectator will be in two places or more simultaneously then both find a nascent correlate in the discretion of Pull My Daisy. With its bawdy gags and caustic, iconoclastic humour , Pull My Daisy is actually predicated on the delicacy of a subtly shifting interplay between modes of depiction, between record and fiction, self-awareness and dubious, wilfull naivete , debunking the ordinarily stable registers its surface (and our own viewing habits) would otherwise invoke.” – Ian White
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