Pull My Daisy. 1959. USA. Directed by Alfred Leslie, Robert Frank. Narrated by Jack Kerouac. With Richard Bellamy, Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, Gregory Corso, Larry Rivers, Delphine Seyrig, David Amram, Alice Neel, Sally Gross, Denise Parker, Pablo Frank. 35mm courtesy Anthology Film Archives. 28 min.
For all its macho posturing, Daddy-O incantations, and choreographed bebop spontaneity, Pull My Daisy is still the quintessential film of the Beat Generation. Robert Frank, who had recruited Jack Kerouac to intro his 1958 photobook The Americans, made his first fully realized foray into avant-garde cinema by collaborating the following year with the painter Alfred Leslie, the poets Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso, the Method-trained French actress Delphine Seyrig, the dancer Sally Gross, the artists Larry Rivers and Alice Neel, the composer David Amram, and the art collector Richard Bellamy, with Kerouac’s narration, drawn from an unfinished play, commenting on the antic bohemian proceedings. After screening privately for friends and family at MoMA, the film premiered in November 1959 at New York’s Cinema 16.
Pull My Daisy production footage. 1959. USA. Directed by Alfred Leslie, Robert Frank. DCP. Silent. 14 min.
Shot in Alfred Leslie’s Bowery loft on Fourth Avenue and 12th Street, this silent production footage belies the long-held belief that Pull My Daisy was purely improvised, offering a tender glimpse of Leslie clowning with Frank’s artist wife Mary Frank and young son Pablo.
The Sin of Jesus. 1961. USA. Directed by Robert Frank. Screenplay by Howard Shulman, based on a story by Isaac Babel. With Julie Bovasso, John Coe, Roberts Blossom, St. George Brian, Telly Savalas, Philip Sterling, Mary Frank, Andrea Frank, Richard Bellamy, Jonas Mekas. 35mm courtesy June Leaf and Robert Frank Foundation, distributed by The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. 40 min.
“The Sin of Jesus feels like homemade Ingmar Bergman,” Jim Hoberman dryly observes. “The film is successful only in parts,” Robert Frank himself avowed regarding this adaptation of an Isaac Babel short story parable, which had its world premiere at MoMA during Edward Steichen’s 1962 exhibition of Frank’s and Harry Callahan’s photographs. Nonetheless, The Sin of Jesus is noteworthy for its score by Morton Feldman, for Frank’s use of sculptor George Segal’s New Jersey chicken farm as a nativity manger, and for its debut film performance by Julie Bovasso, a fixture of off-Broadway experimental theater who helped bring Genet, Ionesco, and the Theatre of the Absurd to America. Playing a “sad-faced, slack-jawed Beat chick” (Hoberman), Bovasso appears opposite the fine character actor Roberts Blossom and Telly Savalas in his first film role.
Program approx. 82 min.