Mekas saw Pull My Daisy as restarting cinema from its origins.

Evidence

Star Spangled to Death, the epic Smith vehicle that Jacobs began shooting in 1957, shortly before John Cassavetes started Shadows and several months before Viking published On the Road, would be the quintessential example of the movie that Mekas now extolled. After disowning Shadows, he used his Voice column to herald a new epoch in American cinema. Like The Connection, Pull My Daisy, which Mekas previewed when it was still called “The Beat Generation,” pointed “toward new directions, new ways out of the frozen officialdom and midcentury senility of our arts.” More than the first flowering of some new aesthetic, Pull My Daisy renewed the promise of the medium. It was a return to origins, “to where the true cinema first began, to where Lumière left off.” — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 77

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines how the underground was framed as a return to Lumière’s origins — a conceptual rebooting of the medium.