Robert Frank

June 3, 1990. New York City. On his 64th birthday, Allen Ginsberg gathers a handful of friends in his downtown apartment. Among them, a young, unknown Chinese artist documents the day. His name is Ai Weiwei. The tape survives. Nothing “historic” happens and yet, everything is there.

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.

No description available.

Hit videos.

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.

This rarely screened film was used to raise funds for the making of Energy and How to Get It. High-energy physicist Robert Golka was granted a lease on an airplane hangar once used to build B-29 bombers to further his experiments on ball lightning and free energy distribution. By the time Robert Frank and his crew arrived, Golka, his frisky older love interest Agnes Moon, and his dogs Nitro and Proton were facing eviction. — Museum of Modern Art

Dedicated from one great photographer to another, I Remember reenacts an afternoon spent with Alfred Steiglitz. Robert Frank plays Steiglitz, Frank is played by the artist Jerome Souther, and Frank’s artist wife June Leaf plays Steiglitz’s own artist wife Georgia O’Keeffe (the two women bear an uncanny resemblance). Together, the three share in simple domestic pleasures, the “hospitality, the wood stove in the kitchen, chicken for lunch, Steiglitz waiting for the sun to appear through the clouds.” — Museum of Modern Art

“Tell the truth and shame the devil”: Robert Frank had turned 80 when he set out to make True Story, repurposing still photographs, home movies, and excerpts of completed films to reflect on memory and resilience. Moments of delight (a lobster claw and wiggling toes silhouetted against the sky) brush against moments of melancholy (the camera drifting across one of his son Pablo’s tortured collage letters written in microscript: “He wanted to say everything, he wanted to get rid of his loneliness…”); an inventory of enfeeblement (“swollen toes, nails falling out, gum disease, itching, irregular heartbeat”) gives way to an image of steadfastness (the crotch of a old tree stump propping up another tree). — Museum of Modern Art

A mediocre musician goes on the road in search of the world's greatest guitar maker.

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.

This documentary explores the growing American interest in the 1970s in Eastern religions and philosophy. The teachings and lifestyles of ten spiritual teachers and their followers are presented without voice-over narration.

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.

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

In this punkish, puckish music video for a song from Patti Smith’s 1996 album Gone Again, Frank borrows Catholic signifiers from past films like Sin of Jesus and Last Supper, including a kitsch rendering of Jesus and his apostles, a Caravaggesque closeup of Smith’s naked, dirty foot, and a discarded rosary. The producer of Summer Cannibals, Michael Schamberg, was a persuasive guy with consummate good taste, having also recruited Chris Marker, Kathryn Bigelow, Jonathan Demme, Robert Longo, and William Wegman to work on various music videos for New Order, R.E.M., Grace Jones, Talking Heads, and the B-52’s. — Museum of Modern Art

"Today memory creeps along the wall at Seven Bleecker. In the back of my eyes, longings and obsessions, Outside someone is yelling Robert! I love New York…." Robert Frank looks back on a lifetime of memory-gathering through photographs, home movies (his parents' gravesite, June Leaf making art), portraits of artist friends (Raoul Hague, Allen Ginsberg), and portraits of those he admired (Jean-Luc Godard). The film resembles one of Gregory Corso's "shuffle poems," as Frank muses, "Together go words and images without sound. I have an obsession in my life for Fragments which reveal and hide truth." — Museum of Modern Art

Commissioned for an event commemorating the ongoing construction of a 21-mile tunnel through the Swiss Alps, Robert Frank’s experimental short is as terse and unflinching as a Dziga Vertov newsreel, superimposing images of his wife, the artist June Leaf, at work and at play with the emotionless felling of a farm cow. — Museum of Modern Art

Longtime friends and frequent foils, Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso appeared onstage together countless times over the years, reading to audiences that sometimes numbered in the hundreds or thousands. On January 9, 1984, Robert Frank filmed Ginsberg reading his poem “White Shroud,” while Corso read a poem he had written the night before, some turgid verses on priapic preoccupations. — Museum of Modern Art

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.

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.