Robert Frank’s significant contribution to photography in the mid-twentieth century is unquestionable. His book, The Americans, is arguably the most important American photography publication of the post-World War II period, and his photography has spawned numerous disciples, as well as a rich critical literature. However, at the very moment Frank achieved the status of a “star” at the end of the 1950s, he abandoned traditional still photography to become a filmmaker. He eventually returned to photography in the 1970s, but Frank, as a filmmaker, has remained a well-kept secret for almost four decades. Robert Frank The Complete Film Works fills a long overdue gap by presenting every one of Frank's more than 25 films and videos, some of them classics of the New American Cinema of the 1950s and 60s.
Robert Frank The Complete Film Works Volume 1: Pull My Daisy is a 1959 short film that typifies the Beat Generation. Directed by Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie, Daisy was adapted by Jack Kerouac from the third act of a stage play he never finished entitled Beat Generation. Kerouac also provided improvised narration. It starred Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Larry Rivers, Peter Orlovsky, David Amram, Richard Bellamy, Alice Neel, Sally Gross and Pablo, Frank’s then-infant son. Based on an incident in the life of Neal Cassady and his wife Carolyn, Daisy tells the story of a railway brakeman whose painter wife invites a respectable bishop over for dinner. However, the brakeman’s bohemian friends crash the party, with comic results. Pull My Daisy was praised for years as an improvisational masterpiece, until Leslie revealed in 1968 that the film was actually carefully planned, rehearsed, and directed by him and Frank
The Sin of Jesus was based on the story of Isaac Babel, a woman on a chicken farm who spends her days working at an egg-sorting machine. “I’m the only woman here.” She is pregnant, her husband spends his days lying in bed, and his friends encourage him to go out on the town with them. The woman talks to herself as she works, lost in the monotony of human existence. She counts the passing days in the same way she counts eggs. Even extraordinary events, such as the appearance of Jesus Christ in the barn, go under the stream of this melancholy solipsism.
Me and My Brother seems to be a rather artless-film-within-a-film being shown at a rundown movie theater. The story contains bizarre twists and turns: skillfully weaving together opposites, playing counterfeits against the authentic, pornography against poetry, acting against being, Beat cynicism against hippie romanticism, monochrome against colored. This was Frank’s first feature-length film work and it celebrates the return of the poetic essay as assemblage, the affirmation of the underground as a wild cinematic analysis in the form of a collage. There is a method to this film’s madness: It is so rich in text, quotes, music, and associations that keeping up with it through the underbrush of psyche, film, and urbanity is barely possible.
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Three jewel cases in a sleeve
Pull My Daisy – 28 minutes – 1959
The Sin of Jesus – 40 minutes – 1961
Me and My Brother – 85 minutes – 1968
13 cm x 21 cm
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Robert Frank The Complete Film Works Vol. 2
Robert Frank’s significant contribution to photography in the mid-twentieth century is unquestionable. His book, The Americans, is arguably the most important American photography publication of the post-World War II period, and his photography has spawned numerous disciples, as well as a rich critical literature. However, at the very moment Frank achieved the status of a ‘star’ at the end of the 1950s, he abandoned traditional still photography to become a filmmaker. He eventually returned to photography in the 1970s, but Frank, as a filmmaker, has remained a well-keptsecret for almost four decades. Robert Frank The Complete Film Works fills a long overdue gap by presenting every one of Frank's more than 25 films and videos, some of them classics of the New American Cinema of the 1950s and 1960s.
OK End Here is Frank’s 1963 short film about inertia in a modern relationship. The film alternates between semidocumentary scenes and shots composed with rigid formality, and appears to have been directly influenced by the French Nouvelle Vague and Michelangelo Antonioni’s films. The characters are often only partially visible or physically separated by walls, doors, reflections, or furniture, and the camera relays the story with little rhyme nor reason, a roaming gaze, which seems to lose itself in things of little importance, while at the same time capturing the dominant atmosphere of routine, alienation, and apathy.Conversations in Vermont“This film is about the past … when Mary and I got married…. the past and the present … Maybe this film is aboutgrowing older … some kind of a family album.” Robert Frank in the Prologue.Produced in 1969, this was Frank’s first autobiographical film, telling the story of a father’s relationship with his two teenaged children, and his fragile attempts to communicate with them by means of a shared story. The shared story is partly told through Frank’s narration over filmed images of his photographs, family photographs and world famous images.
Liferaft Earth begins with a newspaper report from Hayward, California: “Sandwiched between a restaurant and supermarket, 100 anti-population protesters spent their second starving day in a plastic enclosure…. The so-called Hunger Show, a week-long starve-in aimed at dramatizing man’s future in an overpopulated, underfed world….” This film accompanies the people on this “life raft” from 11 to 18 October 1969, and was made by Robert Frank for Stewart Brand, the visionary founder of the international ecological movement and publisher of the bestselling Whole Earth Catalog (1968-85).
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Three DVD’s in a film-roll box, slipcased
OK End Here - 32 minutes - 1963
Conversations in Vermont - 26 minutes - 1969
Liferaft Earth - 37 minutes - 1969
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The Complete Film Works. Vol 3
Robert Frank’s significant contribution to photography in the mid-twentieth century is unquestionable. His book, The Americans, is arguably the most important American photography publication of the post-World War II period, and his photography has spawned numerous disciples, as well as a rich critical literature. However, at the very moment Frank achieved the status of a “star” at the end of the 1950s, he abandoned traditional still photography to become a filmmaker. He eventually returned to photography in the 1970s, but Frank, as a filmmaker, has remained a well-kept secret for almost four decades. Robert Frank The Complete Film Works fills a long overdue gap by presenting every one of Frank's more than 25 films and videos, some of them classics of the New American Cinema of the 1950s and 60s.
Keep Busy "I am filming the outside in order to look inside," Robert Frank once said about his aesthetics. In Keep Busy his chosen home of Nova Scotia serves for the first time as the “outside” in an examination of the “inside.” The protagonists’ astounding verbal gymnastics and often incomprehensible interactions tend to descend into nonsense, and with the syncopated rhythm of its action and dialogue, this film is reminiscent of the playful and parodying elements of the Beat fantasy Pull My Daisy. The interweaving of documentary and fiction with the syncopated rhythm of its action and dialogue presents an absurd buzz of activity reminiscent of Beckett’s abstract comic grotesque.
About Me: A Musical “My project was to make a film about music in America…. Well, fuck the music. I just decided to make a film about myself.” Robert Frank’s self-portrait is a film about music that repeatedly poses questions concerning artistic expression and the function of memory. Frank himself introduces an actress as “the young lady that is playing me.” She throws a stack of photographs onto the bed and says with disgust, “That’s my past.” Despite the apparently autobiographical nature of the film, Frank, the immigrant, regards his story as a collective one. The film teaches temple musicians in Benares, India, “hope freaks” in New Mexico and inmates in a Texas prison. “That’s me,” Frank says when an old-fashioned film projector shows him as a small child. An interview of passers-by completes the circle: “If you had a camera and some film, what would you shoot?” A street musician answers, “About myself,” and starts playing a classic number. “Those were the days, my friend.”
S-8 Stones Footage from Exile on Main St. Filmed during the making of the Exile on Main St., Rolling Stones album cover.
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Three DVDs in a film-roll box, slipcased
Keep Busy – 38 minutes – 1975
About Me: A Musical - 35 minutes - 1971
S-8 Stones Footage from Exile on Main St. - 5 minutes - 1972
13 cm x 21 cm
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The Complete Film Works / Volume 4
Even though Robert Frank was already a renowned photographer when he started his work as a film maker at the end of the 1950s, he remained a well-kept secret within the film community for almost four decades. Robert Frank The Complete Film Works fills a long overdue gap by presenting every one of Frank’s more than 25 films and videos, some of them classics of the New American Cinema of the 1950s and 60s.
The Complete Film Works Volume 4: Life Dances On… is dedicated to Frank’s deceased daughter and the memory of his friend. Though it makes use of outtakes and footage from earlier works, the purpose is not to convey mourning in narrative form. Frank’s fragmentary and associative representational style has more in common with self-portraiture than autobiography. This is demonstrated by the apparently casual nature of the events captured on film. For example, in a black-and-white image taken from the filmmaker’s personal archive, the camera pans suddenly from a static self-portrait in a mirror on the wall to Frank’s sleeping wife, then zooms back briefly and traverses the apartment. A boiling kettle on the stove, a view out a window in New York, a radio program, then the woman again: “Why are you filming this?” Frank fails to offer the answer, which can be found in the way the film brings a motionless image to life.
Home Improvements is a kind of film diary. Sequences resembling home movies tell the story of how Frank’s wife becomes ill. Frank sets off to visit his son in a psychiatric clinic. His thoughts and actions all revolve around the past and his attempts to free himself of its remnants. These events are shot through with associations and objets trouvés such as a photograph taken in a subway car. It combines a detail of a poster and graffitis to form a puzzling statement.
The original idea of Energy and How to Get It was to make a documentary about the somewhat tragic existence of inventor Robert Golka, who experimented with ball lighting in an abandoned hangar, intending to use it as a practical source of energy. Frank, who had made photographic portraits of Golka in the late 1970s, Gary Hill, and the screenwriter Rudy Wurlitzer took off with the real story of Golka’s life, creating a fake documentary about a man who faced numerous obstacle presented by the American authorities.
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Three DVDs in a film-roll box housed in a slipcase
Life Dances On… – 30 minutes – 1980
Home Improvements – 29 minutes – 1985
Energy and How to Get It – 30 minutes – 1981
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