Steidl has just reissued a little book, Pull My Daisy, loaded with photographic power, a document from a phase in Robert Frank�s long career when Robert abandoned still photography to make his first film. It is strangely appropriate that Robert�s film would be about the Beat Generation, which was at the cultural cutting edge at that time.

In January 1959 Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie started production on Pull My Daisy. It was a defining moment for Robert: a statement of an artist continuing along his own path, seemingly changing horses in midstream. His book of photographs The Americans had just been published the year before. As a still photographer, Robert had previous directorial experience working with models and settings for assignments and advertising work in the magazines. He had also started a few experimental personal short films.

Pull My Daisy brought together neighbors and painters from the local downtown art world who had agreed to perform in a scene from a Jack Kerouac play (the Beat Generation which was never produced). It was an odd mixture of beat poets, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and Peter Orlovsky, who played themselves, and painters such as Larry Rivers playing Neal Cassady (Milo), his wife Carolyn played by �Beltiane� who in reality was a famous European actress Delphine Seyrig (�Last Year At Marienbad�). Others in the cast included the Bishop �Mooney Peebles,� really Dick Bellamy, an artist�s dealer and gallery director, the bishop�s mother played by Alice Neel, a painter, the Bishop�s sister played by Sally Gross, a dancer, musician David Amram playing jazz legend Mezz McGillicuddy, and a touching appearance by Robert Frank�s little son Pablo. After the film was edited, Jack Kerouac came in and recorded a voice-over narration � which is a classic in spontaneous improvisation.

Kerouac�s narration was done in three takes, one for each ten-minute segment (reel) of the film. It was a creative leaping from inner thoughts to descriptions of action, to quotes from poets, comments on his poet friends and a discourse on religion��What is holy? Is baseball holy? Is a cockroach holy? Holy, holy!� Robert Frank said, �sometimes the camera illustrates Kerouac�s text, sometimes it is Kerouac who comments on the images.�

Over the years, the film has developed a reputation as spontaneous filmmaking, unplanned, undirected, improvised, and it does affect the viewer this way, topped off and guided by Kerouac�s poetic prose narration. But in actuality the film was planned deliberately and directed by Alfred Leslie and Robert Frank. The problem was how to get the �actors� to follow directions. All they wanted to do was clown around mess things up. David Amram recalls that although Robert was serious with the filming, �we were doing all we could to make him laugh.� Although there were scenes, actions and continuity to be covered and a script to be followed, Alfred Leslie�s directions could be barely heard over the din. But it was Robert who worked seriously composing his camera shots, camera angles, 360-degree pans around the room. Sometimes it seemed as if he was tolerating the actors rather than directing them. If this was the �spontaneous� aspect, then the real structuring, discipline and controlled shaping took place in the editing, where the shots and sequences were assembled and the inner life (rhythm) of the film took its form, following the completed filming. It was after this phase that Kerouac improvised his narration.

Robert had asked me to take photographs of the entire production, so I witnessed all the actions, improvisations, clowning and serious efforts to keep to a script. I also photographed the closing party which was attended by art world luminaries, critics, actors, and Life Magazine which was desperate for a way to show the Beat Generation poets to a national readership (Life goes to a beat party). Life magazine was allowed to the party only if they provided the booze and refreshments. They asked me to cover (photograph) it as an assignment for them. Robert told me not to accept their offer, but instead to photograph it for myself and then lease them the �first look� rights on a weekly basis. I didn�t know I had this power� and eventually accumulated enough �rent payments� from Life to finance my own excursion to photograph and record music in east Kentucky later that year.

In those days there were few venues for independent film� the phrase hardly existed. There was one film series, Cinema 16, in NYC at that time, and the New Yorker Theater did occasional screening of non �mainstream stuff. Pull My Daisy premiered there later that year.

In 1961 Grove Press issued a small size 60 page book called Pull My Daisy, consisting largely of 16 mm stills from the film itself, as well as Jack Kerouac�s narration, both as a text and as titles beneath the images. There was an intro by Jerry Tallmer, and a few of my production photos were scattered throughout. That book has been out of print for more than forty years, even as the fame and influence of the film created its own artistic legend.

In summer of 1960, Jonas Mekas�s magazine Film Culture connected the French New Wave (Nouvelle Vague) to the New American Cinema, and Pull My Daisy played a significant role in that article along with Come Back, Africa, On the Bowery and John Cassavetes 1959 film Shadows. Mekas wrote, �Daisy is not a film of plot, action or logical statement� [It is] the only truly beat film if there is one. . . an expression of the new generation�s unconscious and spontaneous rejection of the middle class way. It is � despite its apparent robe of nonsense, the most truthful American film. There is no lie, no pretension, no moralizing in it.�

About 13 years ago (1995), in conjunction with a Whitney Museum retrospective on Beat Generation art (Beat Culture and the New America, 1950-65), a curator contacted me about doing a book about Pull My Daisy, using many of my production stills. I asked Robert Frank his thoughts on this, and he was totally not in favor. He said the book he had already done for Grove was just fine, and nothing needed to be added. I was impressed by his deep sense of conviction on this. The little book, then 30 years out of print, was the authentic statement, document and presentation, done at the time of the film. Anything else would be after the fact, interpretation, with historical significance and critical comments added.

It is wonderful that Steidl has chosen to re-publish the Pull My Daisy book now, in its original form (with a few subtle elegant design changes). It�s the real thing, the source, as it was intended, an authentic document of a work of art. Robert Frank�s first film.