Plot
 | This article needs a plot summary.(January 2023) |
| Pull My Daisy | |
|---|---|
| Directed by | Robert Frank Alfred Leslie |
| Written by | Jack Kerouac |
| Narrated by | Jack Kerouac |
Release date | 1959 |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
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 . [1] [2]
Kerouac also provided improvised narration. It features poets Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky and Gregory Corso, artists Larry Rivers and Alice Neel, musician David Amram, art dealer Richard Bellamy, Delphine Seyrig, dancer [3] Sally Gross, and Pablo Frank, Robert Frank's son.
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Based on an incident in the life of Beat icon Neal Cassady and his wife, the painter Carolyn, the film tells the story of a railway brakeman whose wife invites a respected bishop over for dinner. However, the brakeman's bohemian friends crash the party, with comic results.
Originally intended to be called The Beat Generation, the title Pull My Daisy was taken from the poem of the same name written by Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Cassady in the late 1940s. Part of the original poem was used as a lyric in Amram's jazz composition that opens the film.
The Beat philosophy emphasized spontaneity, and the film conveyed the quality of having been thrown together or even improvised. Pull My Daisy was accordingly praised for years as an improvisational masterpiece. It was filmed in Alfred Leslie's loft at Fourth Ave. & 12th St. in Manhattan. [4]
Leslie and Frank discuss the film at length in Jack Sargeant's book Naked Lens: Beat Cinema . An illustrated transcript of the film's narration was also published in 1961 by Grove Press.
Pull My Daisy was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress in 1996, as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
Irwin Allen Ginsberg was an American poet and writer. As a student at Columbia University in the 1940s, he began friendships with Lucien Carr, William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, forming the core of the Beat Generation. He vigorously opposed militarism, economic materialism, and sexual repression, and he embodied various aspects of this counterculture with his views on drugs, sex, multiculturalism, hostility to bureaucracy, and openness to Eastern religions.
Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac, known as Jack Kerouac, was an American novelist and poet who, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, was a pioneer of the Beat Generation.
Beatniks were members of a social movement in the 1950s and early 1960s who subscribed to an anti-materialistic lifestyle. They rejected the conformity and consumerism of mainstream American culture and expressed themselves through various forms of art, such as literature, poetry, music, and painting. They also experimented with spirituality, drugs, sexuality, and travel. The term “beatnik” was coined by San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen in 1958, as a derogatory label for the followers of the Beat Generation, a group of influential writers and artists who emerged in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The name was inspired by the Russian suffix “-nik”, which was used to denote members of various political or social groups. The term “beat” originally was used by Jack Kerouac in 1948 to describe his social circle of friends and fellow writers, such as Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and Neal Cassady. Kerouac said that “beat” had multiple meanings, such as “beaten down”, “beatific”, “beat up”, and “beat out”. He also associated it with the musical term “beat”, which referred to the rhythmic patterns of jazz, a genre that influenced many beatniks.
The Beat Generation was a literary subculture movement started by a group of authors whose work explored and influenced American culture and politics in the post-World War II era. The bulk of their work was published and popularized by Silent Generationers in the 1950s, better known as Beatniks. The central elements of Beat culture are the rejection of standard narrative values, making a spiritual quest, the exploration of American and Eastern religions, the rejection of economic materialism, explicit portrayals of the human condition, experimentation with psychedelic drugs, and sexual liberation and exploration.
Neal Leon Cassady was a major figure of the Beat Generation of the 1950s and the psychedelic and counterculture movements of the 1960s.
On the Road is a 1957 novel by American writer Jack Kerouac, based on the travels of Kerouac and his friends across the United States. It is considered a defining work of the postwar Beat and Counterculture generations, with its protagonists living life against a backdrop of jazz, poetry, and drug use. The novel is a roman à clef, with many key figures of the Beat movement, such as William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Neal Cassady represented by characters in the book, including Kerouac, himself, as the narrator, Sal Paradise.
The Subterraneans is a 1958 novella by Beat Generation author Jack Kerouac. It is a semi-fictional account of his short romance with Alene Lee (1931–1991), an African-American woman, in Greenwich Village, New York. It was the first work of Kerouac’s to be released following the success of On the Road. The Subterraneans and its following novel,The Dharma Bums, both proved to be popular when released in 1958, and are now seen as important works of the Beat Literature. A Hollywood film adaptation would be released in 1960.
David Werner Amram III is an American composer, arranger, and conductor of orchestral, chamber, and choral works, many with jazz flavorings. He plays piano, French horn, Spanish guitar, and pennywhistle, and sings.
Peter Anton Orlovsky was an American poet and actor. He was the long-time partner of Allen Ginsberg.
The City Lights Pocket Poets Series is a series of poetry collections published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti and City Lights Books of San Francisco since August 1955.
Off the Road: Twenty Years with Cassady, Kerouac and Ginsberg is an autobiographical book by Carolyn Cassady. Originally published in 1990 as Off the Road: My Years with Cassady, Kerouac, and Ginsberg, it was republished by London's Black Spring Press, coinciding with the fiftieth anniversary of Jack Kerouac's On the Road. Off the Road recounts the history of Carolyn Cassady, wife of Jack Kerouac's traveling companion and On the Road's hero Neal Cassady. As Neal's wife and Kerouac's intermittent lover, Carolyn Cassady was well situated to record the inception of the Beat Generation and its influence on American culture.
Carolyn Elizabeth Robinson Cassady was an American writer and associated with the Beat Generation through her marriage to Neal Cassady and her friendships with Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and other prominent Beat figures. She became a frequent character in the works of Jack Kerouac.
Mexico City Blues is a long poem by Jack Kerouac, composed of 242 "choruses" or stanzas, which was first published in 1959. Written between 1954 and 1957, the poem is the product of Kerouac's spontaneous prose technique, his Buddhist faith, emotional states, and disappointment with his own creativity—including his failure to publish a novel between 1950's The Town and the City and the more widely acclaimed On the Road (1957).
"Pull My Daisy" is a poem by Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady. It was written in the late 1940s in a similar way to the Surrealist “exquisite corpse” game, with one person writing the first line, the other writing the second, and so on sequentially with each person only being shown the line before.
Beat Generation is a play written by Jack Kerouac upon returning home to Florida after his seminal work On the Road had been published in 1957. Gerald Nicosia, a Kerouac biographer and family friend has said that theatre producer Leo Gavin suggested that Kerouac should write a play; the outcome being Beat Generation.
William Cannastra was a member of the early Beat Generation scene in New York. He was a "wild man" figure that the writers in the group found interesting, similar to their fascination with Neal Cassady. Characters based on Bill Cannastra were included in both the John Clellon Holmes novel Go and Jack Kerouac's Visions of Cody. He is also described in Allen Ginsberg's "Howl".
Jack Kerouac was an American novelist and poet. He is considered a literary iconoclast and, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, a pioneer of the Beat Generation. Kerouac is recognized for his method of spontaneous prose. Thematically, his work covers topics such as Catholic spirituality, jazz, promiscuity, Buddhism, drugs, poverty, and travel. Kerouac used the name "Duluoz Legend" to refer to his collected autobiographical works.
Naked Lens: Beat Cinema is a book by Jack Sargeant about the relationship between Beat culture and underground film. First published by Creation Books in 1997, the book has been subsequently republished in two different English language editions, by Creation Books in 2001 and Soft Skull in 2008. The book also features contributions from Tessa Hughes-Freeland, Stephanie Watson, and Arthur and Corrine Cantrill.
Al Hinkle was a childhood friend of Beat Generation icon Neal Cassady who was the inspiration for the character of Ed Dunkel in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. In December 1948 Hinkle contributed $100 to the down payment on the 1949 Hudson automobile that Cassady drove across the United States, the journey memorialized in Kerouac’s novel. He was also the real life inspiration for characters in two other Kerouac books: Slim Buckle in Visions of Cody and Ed Buckle in Book of Dreams.
Haldon Chase, often referred to as "Hal Chase", was a Denver-born archaeologist, who was known for his archaeological research on several rock art sites at Colorado. Outside the field of archaeology, he was best known as part of the earliest Beat circle.
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