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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.
Julius Orlovsky, after spending years in a New York mental hospital, emerges catatonic and must rely on his brother Peter, who lives with poet Allen Ginsberg. When Julius wanders off in the middle of filming, Frank hires and actor (Joseph Chaikin) to play the character and begins a fictional version of his psychological portrait. Then, as suddenly as he vanished, Julius turns up in an institution where he and Peter must face their relationship.
This fly-on-the-wall documentary follows the Rolling Stones on their 1972 North American Tour, their first return to the States since the tragedy at Altamont.
A mediocre musician goes on the road in search of the world's greatest guitar maker.
Invited to shoot the cover for their 1972 album Exile on Main St., Robert Frank developed a relationship with the Rolling Stones that extended beyond Cocksucker Blues to include this Super 8 short, a jittery montage of the band slumming on Skid Row in downtown Los Angeles and gadding about in Mick Jagger’s rented Bel-Air mansion that Frank wryly contrasted with images of poor Black street buskers on the Bowery. Graphic designer John Van Hamersveld ended up using still images and film strips from the Super 8 footage to create collages for the album’s back cover and inner sleeves; the original material is on view in the exhibition Life Dances On. — Museum of Modern Art
In the words of Robert Frank, Hunter is about “. . . a man whose destiny is not to find a destination. . . . A man who fears that he will never find what his imagination compels him to look for, a mystical traveler going by train and by car through . . . language and landscape.” The film was shot entirely on location in Germany’s industrial Ruhr region in September/October 1989.
O.K. 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.
Based on an incident in the life of Beat icon Neal Cassady and his wife, the painter Carolyn, the film tells the story of a railway brakeman whose wife invites a respected bishop over for dinner. However, the brakeman's Bohemian friends crash the party, with comic results. Pull My Daisy is a film that typifies the Beat Generation. Directed by Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie, Daisy was adapted by Jack Kerouac from the third act of his play, Beat Generation; Kerouac also provided improvised narration.
In 1982, Robert Frank was on hand at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, to film the Jack Kerouac Conference, a 25th-anniversary commemoration of On the Road in which poignantly aging Beats and fellow-traveling authors, activists, and composers (Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Michael McClure, Herbert Huncke, Anne Waldman, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Ken Kesey, Abbie Hoffman, David Amram) gathered on a rain-swept Chautauqua porch to recite poetry and raise a glass to their patron saint. Particularly memorable is Frank’s humorous encounter with a group of grizzled and well-lubricated onlookers. — Museum of Modern Art
One of the longest handheld tracking shots in film history, It’s Real documents an hour in the street life of downtown Manhattan. Not only is it a unique record of a particular time and place—July 26, 1990, from 3:45 to 4:45 p.m. in the Lower East Side near Robert Frank’s studio (we note in a Daily News headline that after some 20 years the Zodiac killer still hasn’t been identified)—it’s also an experiment in fragmentary language, gesture, and life caught unawares. Snippets of dialogue captured in passing at phone booths and crosswalks, in alleyways, subways, and diners—chance encounters, only presumably, with people going about their day—have something of the aleatory cut-up technique of the Dadaists in the 1920s and William Burroughs and Byron Gysin in the 1950s, an effort to divine new and deeper meanings in ordinary life. — Museum of Modern Art