Robert Frank

Scenes from the life and work at Anthology Film Archives. Much of the footage in this video was shot by Auguste Varkalis.

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.

Semi-autobiographical story of Conrad Rooks, who travels to France to undergo a drug-withdrawal cure. Flashbacks to the beginings of psychedelia in San Fran. Though initially confusing, as Rooks blends drug-illusion with reality, and cuts color with black-and-white and monochrome tinted shots, "Chappaqua" is conventionally constructed with a beginning, middle, and end.

This film documents the legendary SoHo restaurant and artists' cooperative Food, which opened in 1971. Owned and operated by Caroline Goodden, Food was designed and built largely by Matta-Clark, who also organized art events and performances there. As a social space, meeting ground and ongoing art project for the emergent downtown artists' community, Food was a landmark that still resonates in the history and mythology of SoHo in the 1970s.

A small film crew goes through several locations including Europe, New York and Mexico.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

In an empty lot in Harlem, an elite group of New Yorkers prepares for a book-signing party given in honor of a writer who never shows up. Local residents, dealing with the practicality of life, look on as the guests obsess about identity, status, and success.

The 94-year-old Robert Frank’s unique recordings of his fellow artists Harry Smith and Allen Ginsberg, which he had salvaged from his own archive for Harry Smith at the Breslin Hotel.

An artist in his own right, Clark Winter captured the intimacy of his longtime friendships with Robert Frank and June Leaf in a series of videos shot over nearly 30 years in New York and Nova Scotia. These are a precious record of the married couple’s seemingly inseparable—yet resolutely independent—home and work lives. Today, Winter serves as one of only three board members of the June Leaf and Robert Frank Foundation. — Museum of Modern Art

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

Super 8, 16mm film, and video transferred to HD video (six-channel projection, color and black and white, sound). Like many artists, Frank kept diaries and scrapbooks, which provide a window into his interior life. Similarly, the raw footage used in this installation sheds new light on Frank’s artistic process, stitched together by Israel and Bingham in a way that evokes his restless gaze and declamatory voice, at once comical and melancholy. He journeys between his homes in New York and Nova Scotia; the open roads of the United States and Canada; and urban landscapes, including those of Beirut, Cairo, Moscow, and his native Switzerland. Frank makes timeless the most fleeting of pleasures: a warm bath and a steaming tea kettle, a glimpse of his wife June Leaf in her studio, or the play of sunlight on his hand. — Museum of Modern Art

Home Improvements, Robert Frank’s first video project, is a simple and poignant diary of consequential events. It is about the relationship between Frank’s life as an artist and his personal life, and how the two are inevitably intertwined. It was made cheaply with a half-inch video porta-pak. Home Improvements takes place in New York and Nova Scotia and in the mental space between these two opposing worlds

After Robert Frank’s death in 2019, film canisters and video tapes were discovered in storage places, containing footage of Frank’s reflections on the world and his place in it, scraps of ideas, and stirrings of art. These moving images, only now being brought to light, offer insight into the home and work life of an artist who is foremost known for the photographs he took of the postwar United States. Partnering with the June Leaf and Robert Frank Foundation, Laura Israel, Frank’s longtime film editor, and art director Alex Bingham have used these fragments to create a kind of moving-image scrapbook. Featuring projections across multiple screens, the installation conveys the intimacy and immediacy of Frank’s observations of family, friends, and collaborators, as well as of domestic interiors and vistas of city and coastline. To capture this footage, which spans 1970 to 2006, Frank spent countless hours behind the viewfinders of various film and video cameras. — Museum of Modern Art

Sanyu (1901-1964), an important Chinese artist, was a friend of Robert Frank's who died in anonymity in Paris. In this film portrait, Frank creates a requiem that includes dramatic and documentary scenes set in Paris, and a chronicle of his trip to Taipei to attend Sotheby's auction of the paintings Sanyu left him.

Is this house getting built or demolished? Robert Frank’s poetic visual report packed with disorienting close-ups leaves it up to the viewer to decide. [Overview Courtesy of Mubi]

In a simple, sensitive and entertaining video film, Robert Frank accompanies his local newspaper delivery boy during his morning round one chilly winter day in Nova Scotia.

A Musical Set in New York City

The South Bank Show is a television arts magazine show produced by ITV between 1978 and 2010. A new series began on Sky Arts from 27 May 2012. Presented by Melvyn Bragg, the show aims to bring both high art and popular culture to a mass audience.

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