Pull My Daisy (1959)

Although not even coming near to dark, surreal visions of William S. Burroughs and Anthony Balch, pictured in underground gems such as "The Cut-Ups" or "Towers Open Fire", "Pull My Daisy" is one of these obscure, experimental Beat movies, playing around with images and words to create a vision of hipster's soul. Written and narrated by Jack Kerouac it brings Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie as directors and Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky as actors (who play themselves). Moreover, we get Thelonious Monk bebop style soundtrack, which swings about as the movie goes on. Weaving on and off it supports a casual, accidental mood of the film.

"Pull My Daisy" shows Beat cohorts gathering in an usual Lower East Side apartment for couple of hours to swing, read potery, drink beer and smoke weed while they're interacting with tenants: railroad worker and his wife. Later on the party is being visted by the anonimous bishop and his partner. The only sequence shot outside the apartment is a strange street gathering, in which all characters jerk frivolously around the American flag. Narration is a goofy word spilling as Kerouac runs his jazzy overflow throughout the footage (inspiring and uplifiting our spirits). Breaking away from the linear his delivers lines more in a tonal, poetic way than tries to tie them up with logic. I'd bet they're heavily improvised anyway.

Ginsberg and Corso are dubbed by Kerouac to answer questions about buddhism and zigzag frenetically as they get tipsy. But when Peter Orlovsky finally arrives, it kicks into sort of artistic chaos. They swap bottles with booze, squeeze on the couch or play brass instruments, we know they cannot really play. Everything is innocent fun here and although straight people do not really get the meaning of this fooling around, they are embraced by the Beat wave of madness if they want it or not. Angels with dirty faces are here and they're gonna change the world (as we'd read it back then). Light-hearted, experimental short – an interesting artifact from America's important cultural and literary movement.

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