In one of art history’s greatest zigzags, Robert Frank, who would have been 100 this year, renounced photography even before he was famous for it.
“I put my Leica in a cupboard,” the Swiss-born artist recalled, soon after his masterpiece, “The Americans,” a photobook documenting a now legendary 10,000-mile cross-country tour, was published in the United States in 1960.
The book’s unpolished depiction of Frank’s adopted country was scandalous to some (the photographer Minor White, in Aperture, called it “a degradation of a nation!”), but almost no photographer has proved more influential: Everyone from Diane Arbus to Dawoud Bey bears Frank’s mark.
Though he would eventually return to still photography in the 1970s, he gravitated toward the narrative possibilities of moving pictures, producing some 30 films and videos.
Frank resented that his films never got as much attention as his photographs. Yet the director Richard Linklater, speaking with the journalist Nicholas Dawidoff in 2015, called Frank the “founding father of personal film”; in 2008, the critic Manohla Dargis hailed Frank in The New York Times as “one of the most important and influential American independent filmmakers of the last half-century.”
From Nov. 20 to Dec. 11, the Museum of Modern Art will stage a complete retrospective of Frank’s filmography, which he donated to the museum in 2015. (He died in 2019 at age 94.) Also on the program are several documentaries on Frank’s life and films he shot for other directors, like Gordon Matta-Clark, Conrad Rooks and John Cohen.
The series complements “Life Dances On: Robert Frank in Dialogue,” MoMA’s concurrent show of photography, collage and film clips made after 1958 (through Jan. 11), plus “Robert Frank’s Scrapbook Footage,” newly assembled film by Frank’s longtime editor, Laura Israel, and the art director Alex Bingham (through spring 2025). At Pace, “Hope Makes Visions” (which opened Friday) concentrates on Frank’s work from the 1970s onward, some never exhibited before. And beginning on Dec. 12, the Anthology Film Archives will mount “Robert Frank Centennial: Influences,” a series of films that influenced Frank, and others that Frank influenced in turn.
Frank isn’t a canonical figure in the history of American cinema. But the retrospective makes a case that his films and videos deserve a closer look.
“It’s taken me many, many years of watching these films with some skepticism to come around to the idea that he was deeply influential,” said Josh Siegel, a curator in MoMA’s department of film. Siegel compared Frank’s films to those of Jonas Mekas and sees his sensibility reflected in the work of directors as diverse as Andy Warhol, Jim Jarmusch, Harmony Korine and Wim Wenders.
His early films are often considered Beat; his later films are hard to get a handle on. “He was a guy who just did not want to be defined, period, at all, ever,” said Kent Jones, a filmmaker and former director of the New York Film Festival. “The films themselves are defiantly indefinable, too.”
Where to begin with a filmmaker who never stopped changing? Here are some of the landmark offerings from the retrospective.
‘Pull My Daisy’ (1959)
From the start, Frank rejected straightforward storytelling. His first film, “Pull My Daisy,” co-directed with the artist Alfred Leslie, debuted in 1959 alongside John Cassavetes’s “Shadows”; the two are founding documents of what became New American Cinema. The 28-minute short, based on a play by Jack Kerouac (who wrote the introduction to “The Americans”), is a broadcast from the world of the Beats, with a cast comprising the poets Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso and the painters Larry Rivers and Alice Neel. Kerouac ad-libbed an often hilarious narration over music by David Amram. In The Village Voice, Mekas praised the film’s spontaneity as “returning to where the true cinema first began, to where Lumière left off.”
‘Me and My Brother’ (1965-68)
Frank’s first feature, co-written with Sam Shepard, is about the poet Peter Orlovsky’s catatonic brother, Julius, who emerges as something like a holy fool, or a Beatnik saint. Blending cinéma vérité with stranger than vérité, Frank weaves footage of the siblings (plus Peter’s lover, Allen Ginsberg) at home and on the road with a narrative about a fictional director (Christopher Walken, in his feature debut) making a film-within-the-film about Julius, played by an actor. Frank similarly fused fact and fiction in “Energy and How to Get It” (1981), a rollicking yarn about a madcap inventor that doubles as a sendup on documentary itself.
‘Conversations in Vermont’ (1969)
Although Frank gravitated to film because it was less lonely than photography, he felt constrained by big productions. He found his style in more personal projects, beginning with “Conversations in Vermont” (1969), a searching dialogue with his children, Pablo and Andrea, about their lives, and implicitly about Frank’s limits as a father, made the year Frank separated from his first wife, Mary Frank.
‘Cocksucker Blues’ (1972)
The best known of Frank’s films — and the first on MoMA’s program — has been nearly impossible to see except in grainy bootleg. This 93-minute documentary about the Rolling Stones on American tour, filled with sex and drugs and actually very little rock ’n’ roll, was considered so unflattering by the Stones that the band sued to prevent its distribution. Frank was legally required to be physically present at screenings, which were limited to four per year. (The band apparently got their satisfaction: They lent their print of the film to MoMA for the retrospective.) But it isn’t so much Keith Richards’s drug use that’s disturbing; it’s the bizarre condition of fame. “Everybody’s got cameras and they’re shooting nothing happening,” a character thinks in Don DeLillo’s 1997 novel “Underworld” as she watches a fictional screening.
‘Life Dances On …’ (1980)
Grief shadows Frank’s later work. His daughter, Andrea, died in a plane crash in 1974, and Danny Seymour, a friend and collaborator on the Rolling Stones film, had disappeared on a sailing trip the year before. They are the dedicatees of “Life Dances On …” (1980), a stirring juxtaposition of family encounters with footage of a mentally disturbed man wandering the streets of New York, and downtown divagations with his friend, the painter Marty Greenbaum. In this and later films, shots of Frank’s stills and collages (some of which are on display at MoMA and Pace) are scattered throughout, like memories.
‘Candy Mountain’ (1987)
Frank’s final feature, “Candy Mountain,” a 1987 collaboration with the writer Rudy Wurlitzer, was the closest he came to the mainstream. Even if he wasn’t particularly happy with the result, there’s lots of charm in this shaggy-dog story about a down-and-out musician (Kevin J. O’Connor) who makes a desperate drive to Canada in search of a mysterious guitar maker. Along the way, he encounters characters played by the musicians Tom Waits, Leon Redbone, Joe Strummer, Dr. John and Rita MacNeil. It’s not hard to see the road, which crisscrosses Frank’s oeuvre, as a dramatic symbol for his open-ended approach to narrative.
‘The Present’ (1996)
Frank’s own road led ever further inward, particularly in the early 1980s, when he began using a video camera to shoot by himself. He started making filmic diaries, narrated in his heavily accented English. Perhaps the greatest is “The Present” (1996), made two years after Pablo, who had struggled with addiction, schizophrenia and cancer, died by suicide. “I don’t know what story I would like to tell,” Frank says at the start, his lens trained on a window in his second home in Mabou, Nova Scotia. “But looking around this room, I really should be able to find a story. Don’t you think so? Don’t we know? Isn’t it all there?” Later, he gleefully films a friend erasing the word “memory,” scrawled in black paint on a large mirror (a recurring image, the visual opposite of the camera). Certain scenes in Frank’s late work have all the bittersweet absurdity of Beckett.
In a recent phone interview, the director Jim Jarmusch observed that Frank traded the aesthetic perfection of “The Americans” for the messiness of artistic process. “I can’t categorize his style, because he created his own, which is a mixture of essay film, and documentary elements, mixed with fiction,” Jarmusch said.
Just as stills in “The Americans” appeared haphazardly shot, Frank’s personal films were carefully edited — primarily by Israel, who directed the documentary “Don’t Blink” (2016) about Frank, included in the MoMA retrospective — to seem hardly edited at all. (“It’s Real,” an hourlong tour of the East Village for French public television, was in fact shot in one take from 3:45 to 4:45 p.m. on July 26, 1990.) Frank’s camerawork, particularly in his videos, can be queasily kinetic, and beautiful compositions are interlarded with the banal. “They’re very unprecious about the image,” said the filmmaker Jem Cohen, who will participate in the MoMA retrospective. A late jewel, “Paper Route” (2002), is partially shot through the cracked windshield of a Canadian newspaper delivery driver’s car.
Not all of Frank’s films succeed; frustration is, in fact, one of Frank’s preoccupations, and he spoke candidly about his feelings of failure as a filmmaker. “I think it’s actually important to not try to pretend that they’re all great films, because they were made by a great man,” Cohen said. “Partly the reason the man is great is because he stumbled in interesting directions.”
For Jarmusch, Frank’s uncompromising search for the real —no matter where he found it —ultimately serves as a personal model, rather than a purely aesthetic one. “He became a godfather of finding your own way,” he said.
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