Stop Smiling on the films of Robert Frank:
A Swiss-Jewish ex-pat who immigrated to an America from which he grew profoundly estranged, Frank possessed an outsider’s vision that quickly found kindred spirit in the major bohemian art of the Fifties, the Beat scene of downtown Manhattan. Replacing the isolated melancholy of still photography with the open narrative possibilities of moving pictures, Frank began his film career with collaborative endeavor Pull My Daisy, co-directed by Alfred Leslie and written and narrated by Jack Kerouac, who also supplied the written introduction of The Americans. Made a year after The Americans was released, Daisy> is often deemed the first Beat film, though it’s remarkable how well it’s aged even as the Beats, including Kerouac himself, have largely fallen out of favor in the postwar literature canon. The film’s freshness hasn’t as much to do with its “documentation” of the antics of legends Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, and Gregory Corso, who crash a friend’s respectable party for an esteemed bishop, as it does with still-fresh experimentation that saves it from the status of mere countercultural artifact. Daisy turns Beat duties over to Kerouac, whose muttering multi-voiced narration (he playfully imitates almost all the characters) provides the film’s commentary, dialogue, and free-associational bass-line, while Frank’s sober grey palette strips the hip milieu of most of its pretension. Daisy was widely considered one of the early American independent movement’s masterpieces of improvisation, but Leslie and Frank planned each shot carefully to balance Kerouac’s voiceover. It’s amazing how long this legend of spontaneity had persisted — Frank’s photographer’s eye for skillfully composed drabness (here, an apartment as humble artistic sanctuary and playground) is unmistakable, and the saturnine mood of metropolitan twilight with which he and Leslie choose to surround their giddy subjects expands Daisy into a film modestly grand.
