THE AUTHENTICITY PROJECT

Beskrivelse

Keynote lecture:
Voice(-)Over(,) Sound Track and Silent Movie:
Mediating Beat authority in Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie’s Pull My Daisy (1959)

In his book Deliberate Speed cultural historian W.T. Lhamon puts forth the claim that ‘50s American art was characterized by a common need to compete with all the forms and expressions which the many new media of a constantly growing popular culture offered the contemporary artist, but with which they also challenged him. At stake could be said to be the very authority of the avantgarde artist vis-à-vis the strong power popular culture had over the minds of public audiences. But instead of withdrawing from the cultural forms of poplore in an isolationist position as did the modernists, many American artists of the 1950s embraced and imitated these forms by forging interarts and intermedial links with popular culture.
One such example is Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie’s short film about the Beat generation Pull My Daisy. Not only a collaborative work between two of that decade’s most innovative groups of artists, the Beats and the New York School, the film also experiments with remediating Jack Kerouac’s fictional play Beat Generation as a home movie featuring many of the Beat artists in roles where they play themselves. Indeed, the film balances delicately between the fictional and the documentary, thus acknowledging the intermedial link between Kerouac’s literary play and the more popular cultural home movie genre.
In this paper I shall focus on how Frank and Leslie exploit the media-specific characteristics of the home movie in order to explore the authority of the Beat philosophy and its aesthetics. Here I shall pay special attention to how use is made of the special contrast between silent spectacle and narrating voice in the home movie medium. The two producers have cast Kerouac as the voice-over which mediates the story of the film’s basic conflict between the authority of the Beat vision and that of institutionalized religion. As I shall argue, in Frank and Leslie’s imitation of the amateurism characteristic of the home movie, Kerouac’s voice-over stands forth as perennially parodying and self-parodying one, thus subverting its own status as a narrative authority on what distinguishes the Beat vision from that of which it is critical, namely any institutionalized one.


Special invitation as keynote speaker by courtesy of Associate Professor Michael J. Prince, Department of Foreign Languages and Translation, in connection with THE AUTHENTICITY PROJECT – Symposium Conference [in conjunction with Beat Days] at the University of Agder, Norway, November 4-5, 2010

Periode	4 nov. 2010 → 5 nov. 2010
Begivenhedstype	Konference
Placering	Kristiansand, NorgeVis på kort