Famous still photographer Robert Frank (b.1924) would make what was the first and only authentic 'Beat' film, Pull My Daisy (1959). Released a year after his praiseworthy book The Americans, Pull My Daisy was a collaborative effort with abstract expressionist Alfred Leslie, Frank adapted a single inconsequential act from Jack Kerouac's unproduced script The Beat Generation; cast counter-culture gurus in the names of Larry Rivers, Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso opposite a pseudonymous Delphine Seyric (1932-1990) (in her screen debut) ; and over the resultant laid-back mayhem coaxed Kerouac into recording an improvised commentary that includes all of the film's dialogue. In both its poetic exuberance and incoherence, Pull My Daisy is indeed the epitome of frenetic 'cool.'
Frank went solo for his subsequent film, The Sin of Jesus (1961) and followed it in 1968 with the chaotically complex Me and My Brother, ostensibly a portrait of Julius Orlovsky, the catatonic brother of poet Peter Orlovsky who was Ginsberg's lover until his passing in 1997. As much a fantasy as it is a documentary, the film includes sections where an actor plays Julius and ends with the real-life Julius regaining his powers of speech.
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| From 1961's The Sin of Jesus |
In 1972, Frank accompanied the Rolling Stones on an national concert tour, but the footage contained in the resultant feature Cocksucker Blues (1973), was intensely abhorred by Mick Jagger who ultimately would place legal restraints on its distribution and exhibition.