Afternoon, at Anthology
Anthology gets Frank
By J. Hoberman
Tuesday, November 4th 2008
Who is Robert Frank? The most influential of mid-century American
photographers? Eternal boho and Beat Generation fellow traveler?
Venerable titan of the (old) New American Cinema?
Although he's made over 20 personal films since 1959, it's
symptomatic of Frank's subterranean career that his best known is
still the Beat family portrait Pull My Daisy, co-directed with
painter Alfred Leslie and narrated by Jack Kerouac. Still,
Anthology's comprehensive retro "Mapping a Journey: The Films &
Videos of Robert Frank" (November 7–16, coinciding with the artist's
84th birthday) could hardly begin anywhere else. The first two
programs are devoted to Frank's beatnik moviesnotably his faux
cinema verité feature Me and My Brother (1968), which, although
ostensibly a portrait of poet Peter Orlovsky and his catatonic
sibling Julius, is filled with theater people and self-identified actors.
Me and My Brother, which Frank re-edited in the late '90s, is the
weightiest item in his oeuvre, but, for my money, he came into his
own as a filmmaker with the first-person Conversations in Vermont
(1969), which concerns his ambivalent confrontation with his
adolescent children. Anticipating by several years Yvonne Rainer's
more polished avant-celebrity psychodramas, Conversations in Vermont
and its successors Life-Raft Earth (1969), documenting a week-long
"starve-in" organized by Wavy Gravy and Stewart Brand, and About Me:
A Musical (1971), which mutated from traditional music doc to
startlingly manic self-presentation, are steeped in the pungent
clutter of late-'60s hippie boho life. The elusive, ineffably sad
Life Dances On (1980) provides a postscript to this period, touching
on the accidental deaths of Frank's daughter Andrea and his young
assistant, Danny Seymour.
Frank's legendary and usually restricted Rolling Stones documentary
Cocksucker Blues (1972) is scheduled for two rare screenings. Less
sensational but more felt is the (very) quasi-commercial feature
Candy Mountain (1987), a collaboration with novelist Rudy Wurlitzer.
In a way, this shaggy-dog hipster road film is Frank's ultimate
workevoking the end of the road and even the end of Endsvillebut he
has persevered. "Mapping a Journey" includes subsequent low-tech
music videos (for New Order and Patti Smith), eccentric tributes to
fellow artists (Kerouac and Alfred Stieglitz), and at least one
nearly unknown gem, C'est Vrai! One Hour (1990), a single-take chunk
of real time choreographed one summer afternoon in the artist's Lower
Manhattan neighborhood.
Here, 30 years later, is the (almost) spontaneous action documentary
Frank claimed to have made with Pull My Daisy. Even the milieu is
similar: C'est Vrai! begins in the artist's impressively disheveled
studio; the camera moves outside to the corner of Bleecker and
Lafayette and into a beat-up van that drives in circles around the
neighborhood, occasionally stopping to allow the camera to run out
into a diner or record a bit of on-street conversation. Truth is an
elastic concept: One soon realizes that Frank has salted the area
with staged events. C'est Vrai! is a one-of-a-kind stunt, both street
theater and an urban road movie.
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