Pull My Daisy (1959) is a short film that typifies the Beat Generation. Directed by Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie, Daisy was adapted by Jack Kerouac from the third act of his play, Beat Generation; Kerouac also provided improvised narration. It starred poets Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky and Gregory Corso, artists Larry Rivers and Alice Neel, musician David Amram, actors Richard Bellamy and Delphine Seyrig, dancer^[1]Sally Gross, and Pablo Frank, Robert Frank’s then-young son.

Based on an incident in the life of Beat icon Neal Cassady and his wife, the painter Carolyn, the film tells the story of a railway brakemanwhose wife invites a respectable bishop over for dinner. However, the brakeman’s bohemian friends crash the party, with comic results.

Originally intended to be called The Beat Generation the title Pull My Daisy was taken from the poem of the same name written by Kerouac, Ginsberg and Cassady in the late 1940s. Part of the original poem was used as a lyric in David Amram’s jazz composition that opens the film.

The Beat philosophy emphasized spontaneity, and the film conveyed the quality of having been thrown together or even improvised. Pull My Daisy was accordingly praised for years as an improvisational masterpiece, until Leslie revealed in a November 28, 1968 article in The Village Voice that the film was actually carefully planned, rehearsed, and directed by him and Frank, who shot the film on a professionally lit studio set.

Leslie and Frank discuss the film at length in Jack Sargeant’s book Naked Lens: Beat Cinema. An illustrated transcript of the film’s narration was also published in 1961 by Grove Press.

Pull My Daisy was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress in 1996, as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”.

God Speed You! Black Emperor (ゴッド・スピード・ユー! BLACK EMPEROR) is a 1976 Japanese black-and-white 16 mm documentary film, 90 minutes long, by director Mitsuo Yanagimachi, which follows the exploits of a Japanese biker gang, the Black Emperors. 1970s Japan saw the rise of biker gangs, known as Bōsōzoku, which drew the interest of the media. The movie follows a member of the bike gang and his interaction with his parents, after he gets in trouble with the police. The orchestral post-rock band Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s name is derived from the film’s title.

The Century Of The Self - Part 1 of 4 - By Adam Curtis

“This series is about how those in power have used Freud’s theories to try and control the dangerous crowd in an age of mass democracy.” - Adam Curtis

The Dick Towel

Atlanta

A 12 year-old Olympic swimmer and her mother (both played by July) speak to the public about “going for the gold”.

Videoed by Miranda July, Wu La Dawson, and Summer Mastous
Edited by Miranda July

Nest Of Tens (part 2)

Nest Of Tens (part 1)