Steidlville

Even though Robert Frank was already a renowned photographer when he started his work as a film maker at the end of the 1950s, he remained a well-kept secret within the film community for almost four decades. Robert Frank The Complete Film Works fills a long overdue gap by presenting every one of Frank’s more than 25 films and videos, some of them classics of the New American Cinema of the 1950s and 60s.

The Complete Film Works Volume 4: Life Dances On… is dedicated to Frank’s deceased daughter and the memory of his friend. Though it makes use of outtakes and footage from earlier works, the purpose is not to convey mourning in narrative form. Frank’s fragmentary and associative representational style has more in common with self-portraiture than autobiography. This is demonstrated by the apparently casual nature of the events captured on film. For example, in a black-and-white image taken from the filmmaker’s personal archive, the camera pans suddenly from a static self-portrait in a mirror on the wall to Frank’s sleeping wife, then zooms back briefly and traverses the apartment. A boiling kettle on the stove, a view out a window in New York, a radio program, then the woman again: “Why are you filming this?” Frank fails to offer the answer, which can be found in the way the film brings a motionless image to life.

Home Improvements is a kind of film diary. Sequences resembling home movies tell the story of how Frank’s wife becomes ill. Frank sets off to visit his son in a psychiatric clinic. His thoughts and actions all revolve around the past and his attempts to free himself of its remnants. These events are shot through with associations and objets trouvés such as a photograph taken in a subway car. It combines a detail of a poster and graffitis to form a puzzling statement.

The original idea of Energy and How to Get It was to make a documentary about the somewhat tragic existence of inventor Robert Golka, who experimented with ball lighting in an abandoned hangar, intending to use it as a practical source of energy. Frank, who had made photographic portraits of Golka in the late 1970s, Gary Hill, and the screenwriter Rudy Wurlitzer took off with the real story of Golka’s life, creating a fake documentary about a man who faced numerous obstacle presented by the American authorities.

Volume 1: Pull My Daisy (1959), The Sin of Jesus (1961) and Me and My Brother (1968).
Volume 2: OK End Here (1963), Conversations in Vermont (1969), Liferaft Earth (1969).
Volume 3: About Me: A Musical (1971), S-8 Stones Footage from Exile on Main Street (1971), Keep Busy (1975).