The Last Clean Shirt, Alfred Leslie & Frank O’Hara, USA, 1964, Beta SP, 39 mins

Thelastcleanshirt

In Brief:

A parody of a (Manhattan) road movie and meditation on bifurcation, in paths traveled and between the seen and the heard: a road trip played over and over from different perspectives. Made by the director of the essential beat movie Pull My Daisy in collaboration with the great New York School poet Frank O’Hara.

In more detail:

In a letter to his friend and collaborator, the poet Frank O'Hara, Leslie writes: "We will shoot for two SEPERATE LEVELS on the film. One is the VISUAL, the other the HEARD & the spectator will be in TWO places or more SIMULTANEOUSLY. NOT AS MEMORY BUT AT THE SAME MOMENT. PARALLELISM! MULTIPLE POINTS OF VIEW!"

It is a blueprint for The Last Clean Shirt in which a man and a woman take a car ride through the streets of downtown Manhattan. A clock on the dashboard foregrounds the fact that the film is a single shot. The woman speaks in Finnish jibberish, interpreted by the beautiful and brilliant story told via O’Hara’s subtitles that run throughout.