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Agder2010 Keynote Lecture Voice(-)Over(,) Sound Track and Silent Movie: Mediating Beat authority in Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie’s Pull My Daisy (1959) Søren Hattesen Balle, Aalborg University, Denmark 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 (Lhamon, 1990: 136- 138). 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. Before I get to a discussion of Frank and Leslie’s film for its own sake, I shall, however, begin with a few reflections on the role and status of the home movie in American fifties culture. Interestingly enough, the fifties can be characterized as a period in which the home movie gained significant cultural influence in American society. The reasons for that are economic, technological as well as cultural. As argued by Patricia Zimmermann in her work on the history of the home movie, not only did the improved technology of cameras facilitate easier access to movie making equipment on an amateur basis, but, as she puts it, [t]historical conjunction of a rising postwar birth rate, expanding leisure time, the growth of a consumer economy, the development of suburbia, a stratified pricing system for amateur film equipment that expanded its market to attract not only upper-class but middle-class consumers, and popular magazine articles on proper movie technique modified the wider notion of amateur film into a more limited definition identified exclusively with the family - home movies. (Zimmermann, 1988: 25) Indeed, on the social and cultural level the bourgeois family came to play a renewed ideological role in American society both as a site for recreational activities, consumption and the strengthening of kinship relations. The latter aspect of family life in postwar America was particularly important, insofar as there existed an increased need for re-unification of families consequent upon their separation caused by the war. But also the suburbanization of the American middle classes had as one of its side effects that social relations were mainly sought in family life, because the new suburban way of living had led to increased isolation among people within the home. Furthermore, the Cold War climate and the development of an automated and efficient society helped consolidate the ideology of the family as what Zimmermann calls “an emotional lifeboat”, i.e., as “the only social structure available for the expression of common, shared experiences that could bolster one against alienation, isolation, and the enervation of work” (30). In this context, according to Zimmermann, “the ideology of [family] togetherness situated amateur filmmaking as ‘home movies’ – private films for the beatification and celebration of the home” (25). As a result of this, home movie making typically served as an ideological mirror, by means of which the cult of the family was naturalized. Or to be more precise, with the disruption of conventional family life, which WWII had occasioned as men went into battle, while women stayed back home taking jobs in the weapons industry, home movies instead should “preserve[..] and evoke[..] a residual social formation of the family”, even as they entrenched women in the home and positioned men as the patriarch in total control of his family. If the main ideological function of the home movie was to naturalize traditional family values and gender roles within the nuclear family, it had certain implications for how the home movie medium was promoted, and how it should be ideally operated in practice. According to Zimmermann, a professionalization of the private sphere took place in American middleclass families to the extent that popular photographic magazines provided the amateur filmmaker with guidelines as to how to achieve photographic naturalism in line with the aesthetic conventions of Hollywood narrative styles, special effects, and continuity. In this way, “[m]agazines used the term natural to mean that subjects did not acknowledge or act for the camera, suggesting that the ‘most natural’ home movie was one that totally effaced the camera and any manipulation that a spectator could detect” (Zimmermann, 1988: 34). So, although recording events in family life that affirmed the naturalness of familialism would most often happen with careful planning and shooting, the aim of home movie making was exactly to control spontaneity in such a way that its manipulation would not be foregrounded. Thus, for instance, the writer Vance Packard – himself trying his hand at producing home movies in the 1950s – warned that unruly gestures on the part of people acting in one’s movie such as yelling, waving or sticking their tongues out draw attention to the act of movie making and break the spell of unselfconsciousness, which normally contributes to ‘naturalizing’ the spectacle. As already pointed out, the promotion of naturalism as the aesthetic of home movie making served the function of underpinning the ideology of the nuclear family and the distinct distribution of gender roles between men and women. In fact, home movie making cast the father of the family as the prime authority of the family. As Zimmermann has it: In this amateur context, naturalism shed its aesthetic as the purveyor of perfect, harmonious beauty and acquired a new role as the most accurate form of observation of family happiness and interaction. This institutionalization of the family as a natural construct preserved the ideology of the patriarch in total control of his family (if not his work life) since, typically, the father was the primary filmmaker. (Zimmermann, 1988: 32) Or as Jeffrey Ruoff has pointed out: the father may often be the absent “voyeur/cameraman”, and the mother is the one who controls editing and presentation of family life (Ruoff, 1991: 13). So, though Zimmermann is wholly convinced that the home movie institutes a very fixed structure of power relations between men and women in the postwar family, Ruoff intimates that it may not be so simple as that and introduces a much more contested field of power distribution in the family. But although Ruoff may have a point here, it is also the case that if the ideology of home movie making ever allowed for any interference from its producers that could be perceived by its audience, voice-over narration would be an example of that. The role of voice-over narration was typically to “further integrate and control the action”, and often it would be the man of the house who would make the recorded narration over the silent images displayed. Now, if we turn our attention to Leslie and Frank’s film, it is interesting to observe that not only does it imitate the home movie, insofar as it reproduces the basic structure of silent action set in a domestic environment and voice-over narration, but it also employs it in such a way that the question of authority and power of the Beat philosophy and aesthetics is raised. This feature is particularly prominent in the film because in contrast to the conventional ideology of the home movie it does not make any attempt to efface the manipulation that has gone into its production. With close- up images of the moving lips of its speaking characters, Jack Kerouac’s voice-over narration is equally foregrounded. A particularly good example of that are those instances when the words of Kerouac’s narrating voice are perceptibly out of sync and often also correspondence with the lip movements of the characters when he impersonates the voices of the film’s characters. The effect of this lack of synchronicity is to generate a suspicion on the part of viewer that instead of following the film manuscript, Kerouac was rather improvising while recording the voice-over track.
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