News Archiv
Tue, 10. September 2019
Robert Frank, 1924 – 2019
We just learned of the passing of Robert Frank, the legendary photographer turned filmmaker (and then photographer again). Frank was one of the great individualists and non-conformists of US-American post-war art. His pictorial style defied the aesthetics, the content and the production conventions of his time. With a defiant and often bitter humour he commented on and often ridiculed the arts establishment and its unsavoury closeness to consumer capitalism; but also the idea of the core family and authorship when he started directing his filmic attention to biography and his own life. For the last decades Frank become a digital video chronicler of the quotidien: the landscapes and the people populating the microcosm of his home community in Nova Scotia.
Franks legacy as a filmmaker is profound: from the landmark Beatnik film Pull My Daisy (1959) to the notorious (and yet unreleased) Rolling Stones tour diary Cocksucker Blues (1972) to experiments in real-time faux documentary like One Hour (1990) and feature-length dramas like Me and My Brother (1968).
We presented Frank's complete film works twice, in 2003 and in 2017; and in June 2019 we had the privilege to screen Frank's About Us (1972), a film he created with students of the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, New York.
Only only last night, during a discussion on direct cinema and the chaotic and "open" way documentary deals with contingency an audience member referred to Frank's ultimate defiance of arts market conventions: the "star" photographer who burns his vintage prints and who occasionally made films by making bystanders, hanger-ons and random strangers actors and at times cinematographers of his sly masterpieces. "Don't blink" is the apt title of a beautiful documentary on Frank: a work that speaks of turmoil where peace is only to be found in miniature detail, in the solitude of his remote home, and in the often hilarious yet always human 'small moments' that happen in-between. Blink and you'll miss it.
Michael Loebenstein
Franks legacy as a filmmaker is profound: from the landmark Beatnik film Pull My Daisy (1959) to the notorious (and yet unreleased) Rolling Stones tour diary Cocksucker Blues (1972) to experiments in real-time faux documentary like One Hour (1990) and feature-length dramas like Me and My Brother (1968).
We presented Frank's complete film works twice, in 2003 and in 2017; and in June 2019 we had the privilege to screen Frank's About Us (1972), a film he created with students of the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, New York.
Only only last night, during a discussion on direct cinema and the chaotic and "open" way documentary deals with contingency an audience member referred to Frank's ultimate defiance of arts market conventions: the "star" photographer who burns his vintage prints and who occasionally made films by making bystanders, hanger-ons and random strangers actors and at times cinematographers of his sly masterpieces. "Don't blink" is the apt title of a beautiful documentary on Frank: a work that speaks of turmoil where peace is only to be found in miniature detail, in the solitude of his remote home, and in the often hilarious yet always human 'small moments' that happen in-between. Blink and you'll miss it.
Michael Loebenstein
