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Tag: robert frank

The Mesmerizing Movies of Robert Frank

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Nicholas Dawidoff on the films of Robert Frank for The New Yorker:

Critics, including Manohla Dargis, of the Times, and younger filmmakers, such as Richard Linklater and Jim Jarmusch, consider Frank the godfather of independent American personal cinema. They revere his contempt for standard approaches, his willingness to try anything, his willingness to fail. But I am a pretty conventional moviegoer. I found his shaggy-dog day-in-the-life film of his Beat-poet friends, “Pull My Daisy,” from 1959, and his long meditation on mental illness, love, family, and conventions of behavior, “Me and My Brother,” from ten years later, beautiful and arresting. But much of the work was mystifying to me. Frank had laid out and sequenced “The Americans” meticulously. Some of the films, by contrast, seem like near-random collages. Was he trying to say something about spontaneity? Was there a method at all?

One day, I confessed my confusion to Frank. He said abruptly that he was displeased with his films: “It was bigger than me. I failed.” Showing his longer films to small audiences got so “boring,” he said, that one day he cut a couple of them up, stitched together sections of one with chunks of another, and then showed an audience what amounted to two fresh movies. By this point, I knew Frank to be notoriously sly and puckish, and ambivalent about everything. I still had the feeling that I was missing something, that he had groped toward a significant vanishing point, and that, in the films, deeper forces were at play than even he was admitting.

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Robert Frank: The Man Who Saw America

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Katy Grannan for The New York Times

This weekend’s New York Times Magazine has a remarkable profile of photographer and filmmaker Robert Frank by writer Nicholas Dawidoff:

Frank absorbed artistic influences all over New York. Edward Hopper’s moody office-scapes, restaurant interiors and gas pumps were not in fashion when Frank discovered the painter: ‘‘So clear and so decisive. The human form in it. You look twice — what’s this guy waiting for? What’s he looking at? The simplicity of two facing each other. A man in a chair.’’ Frank’s creative day to day was informed by the Abstract Expressionist painters he lived among. Through his window, Frank studied Willem de Kooning pacing his studio in his underwear, pausing at his easel and then walking the floor some more. ‘‘I was a very silent unobserved watcher of this man at work. It meant a lot to me. It encouraged me to pace up and down and struggle.’’ He also saw the downside of an artist’s life: ‘‘I used to watch de Kooning work, and then I’d walk down the street and see him drinking and lying in the gutter. Somebody’s bringing him upstairs. You drink because you have doubts. Things seem to crumble around you.’’

Online, the Times also revisits The Americans, Frank’s best known work and “one of the most influential photography books of all time.”

“Parade — Hoboken, New Jersey,” 1955. Robert Frank
“Parade — Hoboken, New Jersey,” 1955. Robert Frank
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“Fuck The Midtones” — How To Make A Book With Steidl

Screening at MoMA next month, How To Make A Book With Steidl is an award-winning documentary by Jörg Adolph and Gereon Wetzel about book publisher Gerhard Steidl:

(via Coudal. Of course.)

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