Cocksucker Blues (Robert Frank, 1972).
In 1957, Swiss-born photographer Robert Frank was on the road. He was finishing two years of cross-country journeys, his wife and two young children in tow, snapping the 28,000 grainy black-and-white pictures that he would distill into the 83 images in his book The Americans. A culture-shifting landmark, with its deglamorized, deeply ambivalent view of the country, The Americans was a bracing and poetic antidote to the clarity and sentimentality of the images in magazines like Life, Vogue, and Fortune, where Frank worked as a freelancer after coming to the United States in 1947. “If you dig out-of-focus pictures, intense and unnecessary grain, converging verticals, a total absence of normal composition, and a relaxed, snapshot quality,” noted Popular Photographer editor James Zanutto, “then Robert Frank is for you.” The same year, Jack Kerouac published his own American odyssey, On the Road, a jazz-like literary improvisation quickly acclaimed by the New York Times’s Gilbert Millstein as “the most important utterance yet made by the generation Kerouac himself named years ago as ‘beat’ and whose principle avatar he is.”
Kindred spirits, the two artists met in New York around that time. The encounter was life-changing for Frank. First, Kerouac agreed to pen the introduction to the US edition of The Americans. In it, Kerouac wrote, “Frank, Swiss, unobtrusive, nice, with that little camera that he raises and snaps with one hand he sucked a sad poem right out of America onto film, taking rank among the tragic poets of the world.” He found the verbal equivalent of Frank’s visual style: “Madroad driving men ahead—the mad road, lonely, leading around the bend into the openings of space towards the horizon Wasatch snows promised us in the vision of the west.…”
A year later, Kerouac played a pivotal role in Frank’s first movie. When Frank and the painter Alfred Leslie decided to experiment with a 16mm camera, Frank suggested they make something based on Kerouac’s writing. They had just enough money to make a half-hour short film: $2,000 pooled together from freelance earnings. The result was Pull My Daisy (1959), a freewheeling slice of bohemian life on the Bowery that brought together what felt like the entire downtown art scene; the cast includes poets (Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, and Gregory Corso), painters (Larry Rivers, Alice Neel), the dancer Sally Gross, and—in her first film appearance—the Actors Studio alumna Delphine Seyrig. The free-jazz score was by composer and pianist David Amram. Very loosely based on a play, The Beat Generation, by Kerouac, Pull My Daisy, like many of Frank’s subsequent films, is partly scripted but largely improvised. And its most memorable component was completely spontaneous. In the spirit of a poetry slam, Kerouac watched the edited film in Frank’s loft and recorded three takes of a Beat-flavored voice-over narration, with lines like “There’s nothing out there but a million screaming 90-year-old men being run over by gasoline trucks. So throw the match on it.”
Pull My Daisy (Robert Frank, 1959).
Pull My Daisy premiered at Amos Vogel’s Cinema 16 on a double bill with John Cassavetes’s Shadows on November 11, 1959. Jonas Mekas, writing in the Village Voice, called it “the most alive and truthful of all films” and said later in a Sight and Sound report that it heralded the advent of a “New American wave.” In their directors’ statement, Frank and Leslie wrote, “the intention…was to create a situation whereby one might comply with James Agee’s tender request: ‘the films I most eagerly look forward to will not be documentaries but works of pure fiction, played against and into and in collaboration with unrehearsed and uninvented reality.”
The film exemplifies the playful confusion of documentary and fiction modes that would define Frank’s prolific body of work as a filmmaker. The monumental importance of The Americans guarantees that Frank will always be remembered as a still photographer first and a filmmaker second. But an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, Life Dances On: Robert Frank in Dialogue, shows how the interplay between still and moving images is at the core of Frank’s art. Cinematic techniques including collage, serial imagery, and the layering of text and image abound in his photography after The Americans. And in conjunction with the gallery exhibition, which makes abundant use of video juxtaposed with photographs, the film series “The Complete Robert Frank: Films and Videos, 1959–2017” shows a prolific body of moving-image work that is constantly probing and searching for new forms.
Me and My Brother (Robert Frank, 1969).
Frank had little interest in perfection. He was always seeking something more interesting. As he told a group of New York University students in 1971, “I create chaos.… I am looking for something. All my films are in no way as successful to almost all people as my photographs are. It just makes me look harder. Maybe I’ll never get there.… I’m just happy I’m looking for it. You have to have your foot in the world, not on a rose petal.”
Along with Frank’s understanding that “the truth is somewhere between the documentary and the fictional,” his films are marked by two defining traits: a constant exploration of the tension between past (the moment of filming) and present (the moment of editing, of looking back and making sense of the past), and an acknowledgment of the subjectivity of the artist and the way it flavors his fascination with the workings of the world. As Frank says in his autobiographical video Home Improvements (1985), “I am always looking outside, trying to look inside.”
Three years in the making, Frank’s solo feature-length debut was the meta-fictional Me and My Brother (1969). Wonderfully inchoate, it ponders the thin line between art and insanity, focusing on Peter and Julius Orlovsky, the former a poet and Frank’s close friend, the latter his schizophrenic brother. “In this film all events and people are real,” we are told at the outset. “Whatever is unreal is purely my imagination.” And then we are thrown into a film-within-a-film, as a porn director films Peter in a gay sex scene while Julius reluctantly looks on. We cut to a screening room, where a crew is watching dailies of the footage that we just saw being filmed. The film’s scripted scenes (Sam Shepard worked with Frank on the screenplay) are intercut with cinema verité footage of Julius accompanying Peter on a poetry-reading tour. When Peter mysteriously disappeared in San Francisco during filming, he was replaced on camera by the actor Joseph Chaikin. A movie that seeks to embody the very schizophrenia it is exploring, Me and My Brother probes both the struggle of artists to create and the struggle of the schizophrenic Julius to make sense of the world.
Frank continually raises questions about what kind of film he is making. This conflict is articulated in the film by Kismet Nagy, an actress, who tells an aspiring filmmaker, “Don’t make a movie about making a movie. Make it.… Wouldn’t it be fantastic if you didn’t even have to have a piece of celluloid between you and what you saw?” As if Frank is trying to follow Kismet’s advice, he jumps back to his photographic roots and alights on candid street scenes. Kismet is talking on one side of the split-screen frame; on the other, we watch a group of older people kibbitzing on Upper West Side benches while cars and buses whiz by. This moment epitomizes a tendency in Frank’s narrative films to move away from the scripted story and look at the world around him. Filled with ideas, the film also teems with life. Fittingly, it is Julius, speaking directly to the camera in the final shot, who cogently speaks to Frank’s approach to reality: “The camera seems like a reflection of disapproval or disgust or disappointment, or unexplainability to disclose any real truth that might possibly exist. Truth exists inside and outside in the world.”
Jonas Mekas, who had championed Pull My Daisy, was baffled by Me and My Brother, writing about it for the Village Voice over two weeks, first attesting, “I seemed to like all the footage. But I seemed to hate what was done with the footage,” then equivocating, “I think I liked it more in retrospect than when I was watching,” and ultimately explaining, “I found it too clever, like trying to tell something and play five different records at the same time, and maybe stand on your head, and wiggle your toes, and do a few other tricky things—instead of doing it plainly and to the point.”
C'est vrai! (One Hour) (Robert Frank, 1990).
Frank was always drawn to structures that allow for spontaneity and digressions. His cinematic masterpiece is C’est vrai! (One Hour) (1990) which has an Aristotelean unity of time and place, comprising what appears to be a single shot filmed between 3:45 and 4:45 p.m. on Thursday, July 26, 1990, all within a few blocks of Frank’s Bleecker Street studio. Frank is behind the camera; over the hour, he walks and rides in a van, with an assistant (Kevin J. O’Connor, the young actor who had starred in Frank’s only commercially released narrative film, Candy Mountain, in 1987) and a sound recordist. During their perambulations, they “stumble onto” scenes that are scripted (a heated conversation between two women in a diner, a chat between Lower East Side actors Taylor Mead and Bill Rice in front of an antique store, an irate businessman making ominous threats into a pay phone) and pure observations of random street life (tourists in front of the Noho Star looking for Chinatown, a woman asking Frank what he is filming), until the film is seemingly hijacked by Peter Orlovsky, whom he runs into in front of the newly opened Angelika Film Center. In a scene that feels scripted but was in fact completely improvised, Orlovsky tries to convince Frank to let him steal a car, and then takes the crew into a subway station, threatening to climb onto the tracks as a train approaches. Orlovsky and crew ride uptown, continuing to loudly ad-lib while the car full of passengers respond with New York nonchalance. Though very different in style than Me and My Brother, the two works make a perfect pair; both are self-reflexive hybrids that employ documentary techniques to show that people—whether or not they are actors—are always performing. Or as Shirley Clarke once provocatively said, talking about her nonfiction Portrait of Jason (1967), “There is no real difference between a traditional film and a documentary. I’ve never made a documentary. There is no such trip.”
Through filmmaking, Frank tapped into an autobiographical impulse that would find its way into his still photography. In his 1972 book, The Lines of My Hand, a self-portrait in photography and text, Frank wrote, “In making films I’m no longer the solitary observer turning away after the click of the shutter. Instead I’m trying to recapture what I saw, what I heard, and what I feel. What I know!” In the opening of Conversations in Vermont (1969), a first-person documentary, Frank addresses the camera while a Bessie Smith album plays in the background: He is flipping through old prints and contact sheets from the past twenty years, many with his first wife, Mary, and their two children, Andrea and Pablo. As Frank reflects on his attempts to balance his art and his family life, he films conversations with his teenage children, asking what they remember of the photographs, and of their father’s busy work life. Disarmingly candid, these conversations will become unbearably poignant later in Frank’s life; Andrea died in 1974 in a plane crash, and Pablo, who suffered from addiction and schizophrenia, took his own life in 1994.
Top: Conversations in Vermont (Robert Frank, 1969). Bottom: True Story (Robert Frank, 2004–08).
In his last major film work, the 26-minute True Story (2004–08), which he began filming when he was 80, Frank rambles freely over a collage of home movies and photographs, at times talking directly to the camera, at others looking around his homes in Nova Scotia and in New York for telling details in the objects around him—typewriter chairs, work tables, scraps of paper, works of art, typewriter. His camera surveys all the detritus that surrounds him, settling on a shot of three black crows perched on branches outside his window. As he continues talking, he asks the crows, “You heard me? You heard me?” And in a sudden burst of anger that feels like a release of the pain from the sorrows of the loss of his children, “You heard me, you fucking crows?”
Frank’s presence in his films never feels solipsistic; instead it is an acknowledgment of the significance of the artist’s personality, an interest reflected in nearly all of the photographic work on view in the MoMA exhibition. Whether writing directly on his images, or turning them into scrapbook collages, Frank transforms the photographs into personal artifacts; he makes us aware of the process of their creation. Yet he can be tongue-in-cheek about his presence. About Me: A Musical (1970), originally commissioned as a study of music by Native Americans, instead turned into a fictionalized self-portrait, with Frank played by an actress, Lynn Reyner. And in Life-Raft Earth (1969), which documents a 1969 hunger strike near San Francisco to call attention to the need for food justice in developing nations, he wryly documents his decision to leave the protest with a friend to eat, first at a Chinese restaurant and then at a burger joint.
Top: Life-Raft Earth (Robert Frank, 1969). Bottom: Candy Mountain (Robert Frank and Rudy Wurlitzer, 1987).
Frank’s output as a filmmaker is as impressive and varied as it is unknown. He was reportedly unenthusiastic about the experience of making Candy Mountain, written and codirected by Rudy Wurlitzer. As delightfully oddball and atmospheric as the film is, Frank was bored by the predetermined rigidity of filming a relatively conventional feature film. One of the gems of the MoMA series is Hunter (1989), a 36-minute film made in Germany just after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The dark, deadpan comedy, reminiscent of an Aki Kaurismäki film, is about a traveler driving through the Ruhr region, and incorporates documentary scenes in its portrait of the country dealing with the end of the Communist regime. The traveler argues with a hitchhiker, stops to talk to a Turkish migrant family, and encounters a butcher, a baker, and a teacher in their work environments. In its brief running time, Hunter takes the temperature of a country and captures the spirit of its people, just as Frank’s early work did in the United States.
Like nearly all the films in the series, Hunter is virtually unknown. Frank’s most famous film, Cocksucker Blues (1972), a chronicle of the Rolling Stones during a concert tour, is also rarely screened, as the band objected to the content of the film and worked to suppress it. The film is remarkable for capturing the tedium as well as exhilaration of traveling on the road, stripping away the glamor from the lives of rock stars.
Sanyu (Robert Frank, 2000).
For Frank, the road may never have been glamorous, but it was always an inspiration. In the 23-minute Paper Route (2002), Frank accompanies a friend on his pre-dawn drives delivering newspapers in a remote Nova Scotia community, stopping along the way to talk to people and observe the desolate beauty of the landscape as the sun rises. This lovely film is a continuation of Frank’s eternal road trip, his open-eyed encounter with the world.
Frank’s final films were affectionate portraits of friends: Sanyu (2000), about a Chinese artist whom Frank would see in Paris; Fernando (2008), made in memory of a Swiss artist whom Frank had known nearly all his life; and Harry Smith at the Breslin Hotel (1984), which documented the legendary Smith’s preparations to move after being evicted. These films are loving gestures, made in the spontaneous mode that Frank had always favored. In an email he sent to an art dealer during the preproduction of Sanyu, he wrote about his shooting plans: “No clear direction or substance of what I will be trying to say and to show. But usually by intuition a small idea will start rolling like a snowball on a Swiss mountain.”