Mapping a Journey: The Films & Videos of Robert Frank.

"Swiss expat Robert Frank, who revolutionized American photography in the 50s with unromanticized studies of outcasts in a lost and lonely country, is best known in the world of cinema for two movies: one famous, the other infamous." Michael Joshua Rowin in the L Magazine: "Quintessential Beat film Pull My Daisy (59), co-directed with Alfred Leslie, expresses that movement's jazzy ecstasy in Jack Kerouac's sardonic, absurdist multi-character narration and its story of [Allen] Ginsburg, [Gregory] Corso and [Peter] Orlovsky seeking 'holy' kicks."

Updated through 11/7.

"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," notes J Hoberman in the Voice. Then: "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." And the infamous one? "Frank's legendary and usually restricted Rolling Stones documentary Cocksucker Blues (1972) is scheduled for two rare screenings."

Updates, 11/7: "The images in The Americans, first published in 1958, have the deceptively casual quality of snapshots despite their compositional harmony and occasional purposefully skewed framing," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "A newly transplanted Swiss Jew, he was pitching himself as a poet of the American quotidian. The restlessness and the poetry permeate the must-see 10-program retrospective, Mapping a Journey: The Films & Videos of Robert Frank..., which makes an argument for Mr Frank as one of the most important and influential American independent filmmakers of the last half-century."

Artforum runs J Hoberman's piece on Frank from the April 07 issue.

Posted by dwhudson at November 5, 2008 2:58 PM