Alfred Leslie, Robert Frank
Cool Man in a Golden Age
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Add rightsFormat DVD Interzone
Original format 16mm, video
Year 1959-2008
Language(s) English
Artist(s) Alfred Leslie & Robert Frank
Running time 156 min
Films
Pull My Daisy (1959) 29'
The Last Clean Shirt (1964) 42'
Birth of a Nation (1965) 40'
A Stranger Calls at Midnight (2008) 32'
USA Poetry: Frank O'Hara (1966) 15'
Description
Alfred Leslie is a major American artist—painter and filmmaker—whose work spans over fifty years. A celebrated contemporary of the Abstract Expressionists and a central figure in the extraordinary social milieu of downtown New York from the 1950s and 1960s to the present day, his canvases were among the most admired by his peers. In 1964, he made Pull My Daisy with photographer Robert Frank, and in 1966, he collaborated with the inimitable poet Frank O'Hara on The Last Clean Shirt. In 1960, he wrote and published the remarkable collection of texts and drawings that formed the ephemeral magazine The Hasty Papers—a true compendium of cultural activity, bringing together contributions from Allen Ginsberg, John Ashbery, Fidel Castro, among many others. Leslie radically departed from abstraction to paint immense, almost hyperrealistic portraits, the majority of which were destroyed in the now-legendary fire that ravaged his studio and neighboring buildings on October 17, 1966. This devastating event, which annihilated paintings, films, and manuscripts, continues to fuel his work today.
Cool Man in a Golden Age presents for the first time on DVD a selection of his major films, accompanied by a new "self-interview" video and a rare 1966 television documentary featuring Frank O'Hara and Alfred Leslie, along with a previously unpublished essay by Ian White.