Not even ten minutes into director Gerald Fox’s 2004 documentary Leaving Home, Coming Home: A Portrait of Robert Frank, the legendary photographer-collagist-filmmaker, then turning 80, explodes when the camera runs out of film again and he’s asked to do another take. “Well, look, forget it! Look, I’m not an actor, you know? I can’t go through this shit, you know? I mean, there’s no spontaneity in this; it’s completely against my nature, what’s happening here. So, if the crew can’t get it together with the film, let’s go out to Coney Island . . . let’s look at the landscape with my photographs, and see, this man is looking at something he did 50 years ago. Can you tell me, is that guy still around? I mean, this is shit, you know? I can’t do it!”

The Gene Siskel Film Center has paired Fox’s documentary with Frank’s debut short film, Pull My Daisy (1959), codirected by Alfred Leslie. Better than Leaving Home, Coming Home, Pull My Daisy situates the viewer in one of Frank’s most creative decades, with a cast of who’s who among the Beats. Written and narrated by Jack Kerouac, who adapted the third act of his play, Beat Generation, the movie stars poets Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, and Gregory Corso as high-spirited merrymakers; artist Larry Rivers as a railway brakeman whose flat they visit; French actress Delphine Seyrig as his wife; art dealer Richard Bellamy as a visiting bishop; and artist Alice Neel as the cleric’s mother. With no plot to speak of and sections of nonsensical narration concatenating like something out of Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky,” the short was meant to seem improvised, but if you look closely at Ginsberg and Corso’s faces, you can tell that Kerouac was trying to match his scripted narration as closely as possible to their moving lips. Anita Ellis (who dubbed Rita Hayworth’s “Put the Blame on Mame” in Gilda) vocalizes the surreal song that plays over the opening title.

Directed by Gerald Fox. 85 min.

Pull My Daisy ★★★ Directed by Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie. 27 min. Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State, 312-846 2800, siskelfilmcenter.org, $12.