Robert Frank's American Cinema

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AWAKENING THE EYE This page intentionally left blank AWAKENING THE EYE ROBERT FRANK’S AMERICAN CINEMA

GEORGE KOUVAROS

University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis • London Parts of chapter 1 were previously published as “ ‘Time and How to Note It Down’: The Lessons of Pull My Daisy,” Screen 53, no. 1 (Spring 2012): 1–17. A slightly shorter version of chapter 2 was previously published as “He’s Not There: Robert Frank’s Me and My Brother,” Screening the Past, no. 29 (2010).

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Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290 Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520 http://www.upress.umn.edu

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kouvaros, George. Awakening the eye: Robert Frank’s American cinema / George Kouvaros. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8166-9556-0 (hc) ISBN 978-0-8166-9559-1 (pb) 1. Frank, Robert, b. 1924 — Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. PN1998.3.F7325K68 2015 791.4302'33092—dc23 2014043032

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.

21 20 19 18 17 16 15 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 CONTENTS

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction: Awakening the Eye 1 1 “Time and How to Note It Down” 31 Pull My Daisy

2 He’s Not There 61 Me and My Brother, One Hour

3 “A Better Way to Live” 91 Conversations in Vermont, Liferaft Earth, About Me: A Musical, Cocksucker Blues

4 “The Fire of Pain” 121 Life Dances On . . . , Home Improvements, The Present

5 Fragments Shored against My Ruins 153 Moving Pictures, True Story

Coda: The Circle 185 Paper Route

Notes 199 Index 215 This page intentionally left blank ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

An Australian Research Council Discovery Grant helped fund the research and writing of this book. The bulk of the research occurred at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, where I was able to view the films and videos that comprise the Robert Frank Collection. The hospitality provided by the MFAH was extraordinary. In particular, I thank curator of film and video Marian Luntz and her colleagues in the Film Depart- ment, assistant curator Tracy Stephenson, and community outreach and administration assistant Ray Gomez. Their dedication, professionalism, and kindness over the course of a number of extended visits made the period of research an absolute delight. For me this book will always be linked to the friendships formed at the MFAH. Securing permission to reproduce photographs and images would not have been possible without the support of Lauren Panzo, director at Pace/MacGill Gallery in New York. I am deeply indebted to Lauren for graciously responding to my numerous requests and bringing the project to Robert Frank’s attention. A great deal of what I learned about Frank’s working methods came from time spent with his editor, Laura Israel, who also provided me with copies of the films and videos and helped arrange the production of stills. She did this while juggling numerous professional commitments as well as completing the production of her documentary on Frank’s career. During the course of the research, I was fortunate to have a number of conversations with two experts on Frank’s career: Sarah Greenough, senior curator and head of the Department of Photographs at the Na- tional Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and Anne Wilkes Tucker, curator of photography at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Their writings on Frank’s photographs were invaluable in shaping my own

◆ vii understanding. At the University of New South Wales, colleagues John Golder, Maija Howe, Michelle Langford, Sean Pryor, and Melanie Rob- son provided useful feedback on the manuscript. Thanks also go to Paul Pavlou for assistance with the reproduction of images. This is my third publication with the University of Minnesota Press. Former executive editor Richard Morrison played an important role in bringing each of the books to fruition. Humanities editor Danielle Kasprzak took over this project at a crucial time. Her commitment to the project was a major factor in its completion. As with each and every publication, it is to the members of my family that I owe the greatest debt. Their patience, support, and love are essential. Finally, I thank Robert Frank for granting permission to reproduce the images that appear in this book.

viii ◆ ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Introduction AWAKENING THE EYE

The 1989 edition of Robert Frank’s autobiographical photobook The Lines of My Hand begins with a collage composed of two strips of film placed side by side (see Plate 1). At the center of each of the film frames is a large eye superimposed on a coastal scene. The reflection of a small rectangular object passes across and, at times, obscures our view of the eye. In the left-side strip, we can see the outline of a dog gazing along the coastline. The superimposition of the eye on the coastal landscape recalls Dziga Vertov’s famous image of the camera-eye in his 1929 film Man with a Movie Camera. By combining an image of a human eye with a close-up of a camera lens, Vertov constructs a rendition of the central principle of his filmmaking practice: the movie camera’s ability to supersede the capacities of natural perception. Vertov’s exploration of the capacities of the camera-eye culminated with the formulation of a new model for documentary filmmaking: “Kino-eye = kino-seeing (I see through the camera) + kino-writing (I write on film with the camera) + kino-organization (I edit). The kino-eye method is the scientifically experimental method of exploring the visible world.”1 Frank’s collage acknowledges the legacy of Vertov’s pioneering formulation. It too speaks of a desire to establish new ways of seeing and writing through the camera. But whereas Vertov’s championing of the camera-eye is framed in trenchant opposition to humanist principles, Frank’s superimposition of the eye onto the coastal scene draws inspiration from a Romantic tradition that positions the external world as a mirror for inner processes. This interaction of inner and outer worlds is affirmed in the accompanying text:

◆ 1 i have come home and I’m looking through the window. Outside it’s snowing, no waves at all. The beach is white, the fence posts are grey. I am looking back into a world now gone forever. Thinking of a time that will never return. A book of photographs is looking at me. Twenty-five years of looking for the right road. Post cards from everywhere. If there are any answers I have lost them.2

Located at the top of the adjacent page, Frank’s words situate the collage of the eye in a broader biographical context spanning twenty-five years of “looking for the right road.” Some of the people who played an important role in this biography appear on the following page. Above a collage composed of negatives laid on top of a light box, Frank writes:

here together for the first and only time some of my friends now gone forever Teddy Gross and his friend Bob Thompson and to Rachel Armour, to Jack Kerouac to Gaby’s father to Ben Schultz and to Gotthard Schuh to Shane O’Neill and to Paddy from 23rd Street to Freddy Nield and to Stanley Sulzer to San-Yu to Jan Müller and to Saint George Brian so that we remember . . . a little bit longer.

Often little more than a few sentences, these biographical reflections lend The Lines of My Hand a rueful, melancholic tone. “we meet IN New york,” Frank writes under an image of his former friend and collaborator Danny Seymour. “He is young—crazy about images. We become friends. Daniel Seymour travels fast. We work together—it ended with Cocksucker Blues. Fate. And Danny will never return from his last trip. good bye—cut.” The book’s reflections on time and loss conclude with the words printed on the back panel of the dust jacket:

2 ◆ INTRODUCTION I have been going forward, travelling my road while looking out. I am listening to my voice. The landscape changes and me too. Years ago a first version of the lines of my hand was published. Since then many have gone a way. I continue to look and search for an image that comes close to a truth. It is my choice, it is my fate, and I continue. . . . robert frank

To properly understand the place and impact of these autobio graphical reflections, we need to consider them in tandem with the words that appear on the surface of the images themselves. One of the most striking images in The Lines of My Hand is a black-and-white photograph of Frank’s wife, the artist June Leaf, standing naked in the center of a large room (see Plate 2). To her right a TV emits a bright white light that blends with the whiteness of the large expanse of the back wall. The room’s disorder is echoed in the awkward theatricality of the pose. Looking back at the camera, she holds one hand above her head while placing the other on her hip. Scrawled in large capital letters along both the top and bottom of the image is the statement: “4am make love to me.” Not quite a story, these words give voice to a wave of emotion and feeling that dominates the scene depicted. Not quite a narrative, “4am make love to me” illuminates Frank’s method of reinterpreting and integrating narrative processes in his work. Asked about the prominent place of words and statements in his photographics, Frank attributes this development to his experience as a filmmaker. “It all comes from being forced to explain something,” he told an interviewer, “being forced to communicate your ideas to the people you work with in films. So then, when I went back to photographing with the Polaroid camera, it didn’t leave me. I wanted to communicate something else—not necessarily to explain it, but to communicate something else with the photographs.”3 This book is about the complex storytelling processes that define Frank’s career. It considers how narrative methods employed in one medium are

INTRODUCTION ◆ 3 transferred to and reinterpreted in another. In doing so, it develops a new understanding of the interaction between film, photography, and writing as it leaves its mark not merely on Frank’s career but also on the larger history of postwar American cinema.

STORYLINES In 2004 a major exhibition at the Tate Modern used the recurrence of certain images across Frank’s photographs, films, and videos, as well as the pages of his photobooks, as the motivation for an examination of the narrative aspects of his work. The choice of exhibition title, Story lines, encapsulates this curatorial agenda, but it also raises interesting questions about the context of his career. Frank was twenty-two when he left Europe for New York. In interviews he has spoken candidly about his family life in Zurich, the closed nature of Swiss society, and his strong desire not to follow in the footsteps of his father, who ran a successful import business: “It’s sad when you know the only thing you want to do is to get away from what someone is offering you.”4 After apprenticing with a number of commercial photographers and completing his basic military training, Frank left Switzerland and traveled across Europe. In February 1947 he bought a ticket for a freighter bound for New York. His arrival in the United States coincided with the golden period of magazines such as Life and Look. Taking their lead from Europe’s flourishing magazine culture of the interwar period, these large-circulation U.S. magazines consolidated a style of reporting in which photographic images convey visually arresting accounts of events happening at home and abroad. In his famous prospectus to investors, Life’s founding publisher, Henry Robinson Luce, promised to create a magazine capable of satisfying the desire of his readers “to see life; to see the world; to eyewitness great events.” He also promised to edit this view “into a coherent story—to make an effective mosaic out of the fragmentary documents which pictures, past and present, are.”5 The role of photographic images in this process was to expand

4 ◆ INTRODUCTION the conceptual horizon of the magazine’s readership while affirming the universality of American democratic values. Like a number of other photographers at the time, Frank sought to earn a living by producing work that would suit the needs of the large magazines. One of the first to recognize his talents was Alexey Brodo- vitch, the influential art director at Harper’s Bazaar, who offered him a position as an assistant photographer. He remained at the magazine for roughly six months. Following his resignation in October 1947, he continued to contribute work as a freelancer.6 Over the next two years, Frank undertook a series of journeys, first through Central and South America and later in Europe. The images taken during these travels formed the basis of two self-produced book maquettes: one drawn from images shot in Peru and the other using photographs from his time in Paris. Both books evidence Frank’s interest in using formal elements such as layout, visual rhythm, and juxtaposition to develop a distinct point of view across a series of images devoted to a single all-encompassing theme. His points of reference were such landmark photobooks as André Kertész’s Day of Paris, Brodovitch’s Ballet, and Bill Brandt’s A Night in London and The English at Home. Each one characterized by a distinct mood and agenda, these books exemplify the capacity of photographic narratives to convey a range of complex ideas, emotions, and sensations. In June 1950 Frank married Mary Lockspeiser, a young dancer and artist, whom he had met the previous year. In February 1951 their son, Pablo, was born; three years later, their daughter, Andrea. In between these births, Frank and his young family returned to Europe. It was during this period that he produced three copies of Black White and Things, a book designed by his friend Werner Zyrd that uses thirty-four photographs taken between 1948 and 1952. The book’s epigraph is drawn from the lines found in Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s novella The Little Prince: “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly. What is essential is invisible to the eye.” The book’s emphasis on subjective experience signals a deliberate move away from the photojournalistic principles

INTRODUCTION ◆ 5 that characterize the earlier book maquettes. Looking back on this time, Frank also identifies a decisive change in his approach:

After 1950, because of getting married and because of where I lived, I entered into a much more conscious period where I knew more about what I was doing and what I wanted. I spent a lot of time and effort getting the picture that meant a lot to me onto a piece of paper. That’s when I started to know what I could do.7

In tracing the evolution of Frank’s photographic approach, his involvement with Life magazine is telling. In 1951 the May and Novem- ber issues of Life published a selection of his photographs. During the same year, he submitted a picture story for the magazine’s Contest for Young Photographers. Entitled “People You Don’t See,” this piece focuses on the lives of six individuals who lived or worked near his apartment in Lower Manhattan. In her analysis of Frank’s photo story, Sarah Greenough notes how closely its conception and organization, as well as captioning, align with Life’s agenda—“its celebration of the everyday and community responsibility, its commitment to education, and even its moral rectitude.”8 Although Frank did not win the contest, he was awarded second prize in the individual picture competition. But this early success did not lead to greater patronage by the magazine. Not only did Life refuse to publish “People You Don’t See,” but they also rejected a number of his later photo stories—most notably, his series on London bankers that has since been published alongside his photographs of Welsh mining communities in London/Wales.9 We should not overplay the significance of Life’s rejection. In the decade following his arrival in New York, Frank was fortunate enough to benefit from direct contact with an extraordinary range of figures spanning American photography, literature, and visual arts—figures such as Brodovitch, Edward Steichen, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Walker Evans. These individ-

6 ◆ INTRODUCTION uals helped him forge an approach to photographic expression beyond the scope of the large magazines. Yet by forcing Frank to clarify his approach to photographic storytelling, Life’s rejection serves as a defining event in his career. In various interviews Frank himself gives due weight to this event: “I wanted to follow my own intuition and do it my way, and not make any concession—not make a Life story. That was another thing I hated. Those goddamned stories with a beginning and an end.”10 Elsewhere, he expands on the implications of this rejection of Life’s approach: “If I hate all those stories with a beginning, a middle, and an end then obviously I will make an effort to produce something that will stand up to those stories but not be like them.”11 The outcome of this intense desire to counter the form of photographic storytelling propagated by Life was The Americans, a book whose impact spans American postwar culture. The majority of the photographs included in the book were taken during a period of travel across the United States that was funded by a Guggenheim Fellowship awarded in 1955. Frank was encouraged to apply for the fellowship by Walker Evans, who also helped to draft the application. He had worked with Evans on a number of assignments for Fortune magazine, and the two had developed a strong mutual respect and friendship. From one perspective the images in The Americans represent a continuation of Evans’s photographic investigations into everyday American life. But whereas the classical compositions in Evans’s images evoke the sense of a discrete distance, Frank’s deceptively “uncomposed” photographs suggest his immersion in a scene caught on the run, only half glimpsed or understood. This difference can be attributed to the mobility offered by the 35 mm Leica camera that he used during his travels. But it is also drawn from a photographic approach quite different from that of Evans. Reviewing the controversy created by The Americans, John Szarkowski observes that the book “includes no photographs of lynchings, police brutality, overt crime, or licentious sin; it shows no intimate views of dire poverty, lewd behavior, or official corruption.”12 As Szarkowski notes, the controversy surrounding these

INTRODUCTION ◆ 7 images had less to do with their content than with their rebuttal of accepted standards of photographic style: “These standards called for a precise and unambiguous description of surface, volume, and space, and for a clearly resolved graphic structure.” Frank’s disregard for these qualities made his work seem antagonistic to the qualities of the medium itself. Compounding this problem was the difficulty of locating the subject of the images: “American standards of photographic excellence required that the picture state clearly and simply what its subject was. The subject of Frank’s later pictures seemed ten- tative, ambivalent, relative, centrifugal; the photographer’s viewpoint and the disposition of the frame seemed consistently precarious and careless—lacking in care.”13 More than fifty years later, it is clear that these images were, in fact, setting up new approaches to photographic representation that suggested experiences that remained awkward, disturbing, or never quite grasped. In a scrupulously researched catalog marking the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of The Americans, Sarah Greenough un- packs the book’s carefully articulated structure. Drawing on Frank’s own comments on the book’s organization, she points out that the original conception was to divide the book into four discrete chapters, indicated by the headings “Part I,” “Part II,” “Part III,” and “Part IV.” Although these divisions were discarded prior to publication, the logic of the chapter divisions was maintained through the use of recurring images of the American flag. Greenough compares the use of these images to that of “an incantation, much as Allen Ginsberg had repeated the word who in his 1955 poem Howl ‘to keep the beat,’ . . . as ‘a base to measure, return to and take off from again and again onto another streak of invention.’ ”14 At the same time, she is at pains to stress that the structure of the book does not follow a preconceived logic or agenda. Instead, it emerged as a result of the four months Frank spent arranging and rearranging, on the walls and floor of his New York studio, approximately one thousand work prints of photographs garnered from his travels: “More of a process of discovery than a discourse, more

8 ◆ INTRODUCTION of a revelation than a recitation of facts, the chapters, like the trip and the photographs themselves, evolved intuitively.”15 Understood in this manner, the book’s impact stems from a compositional order that is able to generate a set of associations and meanings yet also resists the attribution of a clearly defined narrative agenda. Moving from one image to the next, the reader is struck by the disparities between rich and poor, the powerful and the powerless. This strong sense of social inequality forefronts the influence of British photographer Bill Brandt. In her catalog essay Greenough draws attention to the similarities and differences between the two photographers:

Brandt had also contrasted photographs of wealth and privi lege with those of poverty and despair, but he had placed them on facing pages, making their stark comparisons emphatic and unmistakable. Frank’s method of putting them on successive pages, each facing a blank page on the left, was far more subtle, almost subliminal, planting thoughts of disparities within his viewers’ minds without fully explicating them.16

In contrast to Brandt’s approach, Frank’s rendition of American life brings together images whose connection to one another remains in- tuitive, something felt rather than known for certain. The story about postwar American life that emerges from these images is one that unfolds as if by accident, drawn directly from the contingent circumstances and chance discoveries that comprise the photographer’s journey across the United States. Blake Stimson has also sought to understand how The Ameri cans redefined photographic reporting. “The strength of The Ameri cans,” he writes, “is that it shifted the primary locus of attention of documentary photography from object to subject, from objects to be photographed—people, places, and things, social conditions and history as lived by the photographic subjects—to the photographer’s own experience along the way.”17 In place of the outward vision that

INTRODUCTION ◆ 9 characterized an earlier tradition of American documentary photography, Frank’s approach was “strictly self-absorbed and claustrophobic, a looking out through the camera-as-window onto the world, only to find there nothing more than the narcissist’s mirror, only to find no world there to be had after all, or at least not one worthy of inhabit- ing.”18 The extraordinary thing for Stimson was Frank’s ability to transform this self-absorption and sense of dissatisfaction with accepted aesthetic standards into a powerful new form of photographic report that was capable of mediating between the photographer’s own subjective responses and the demands of the social world. The structuring principle used to facilitate this mediation was that most quintessentially American of narrative devices: the road. “It is this, after all,” Stimson writes, “that allowed Frank his grand and comprehensive claim to represent the nation in sum. He had traveled its highways from north to south, from east to west, we are to understand; he had seen it in whole; he could legitimately claim to characterize its people.”19 For Stimson the value of the road as a structuring device lies in its capacity to articulate two discrete possibilities. The first relates to its potential to harness the disparate viewpoints contained in The Americans according to a single material and conceptual thread. In this guise the road enables the photographer to do justice to the broad subject given in the book’s title. The second representational possibility functions in contra distinction to the first. Instead of simply acting as a device for bringing together disparate views of the nation, the road also serves as “an opening—as a way out of town, as the open road or the road to nowhere or, more simply and abstractly, as a gap or void or blank in or on which narration or figuration can occur.”20 This sense of blankness is evident in the content of the images themselves and also in the use of adjacent blank pages. The blank pages in The Americans function as indicators “of isolation and grim dehumanization, of identity that lacks a living, vital, generous sense of community, of a collective social form that had become brittle and without the rejuvenation of fresh human connection.”21 Although Stimson and Greenough draw different inferences from

10 ◆ INTRODUCTION the interaction between the images and the adjoining blank pages, both agree that the construction of The Americans marks a fundamental shift in the tradition of the American photo story, a shift from an emphasis on the power of the single image to sum up a situation to the effect generated by the reader’s movement across and between images. In The Americans movement is everything: the photographer’s movement from place to place is echoed in the viewer’s movement from image to image. The outcome of this relentless movement is a reconceptualization of narrative. In The Americans the traditional beginning, middle, and end that defined Life’s model of the picture story is replaced by a story formed on the basis of half-caught glimpses and oddly recurring motifs—a story that, above all, reflects the photographer’s own uneasy relationship to the journey. “The impact of The Americans then as now,” writes W. T. Lhamon Jr., “hangs on its approach/avoidance conflict with narrative. [Frank] was always telling and denying a story, always catching and freeing a connection, encouraging and discouraging an interpretation.”22

“YOU GOT EYES” Following the path that led to the creation of The Americans offers valuable insights regarding Frank’s approach to storytelling and the significance of later autobiographical works such as The Lines of My Hand. Just as important, it also helps to clarify the larger question posed by his career: how does Frank’s work in film and photography shed light on broader changes in postwar narrative expression? We can begin to formulate a response to this question by considering his involvement with prominent American literary figures such as Ginsberg, Kerouac, and Gregory Corso. Frank’s contact with these writers spans a number of different projects and periods in his creative history. A handy gauge for measuring the implications of this involvement is his decision to put aside an introduction to The Americans already written by his friend and mentor Evans and approach Kerouac to write a new

INTRODUCTION ◆ 11 introduction for the book. Frank met Kerouac in September 1957, the month in which On the Road was published. Although he had not read Kerouac’s novel, he was aware of the book through his friend, the filmmaker Emile de Antonio, who had read the glowing review published in the New York Times. Appearing shortly after the publication of On the Road, the introduction to The Americans is seen as evidence of a close affinity between Kerouac’s writings and Frank’s photographs. Luc Sante, for example, claims that both On the Road and the images in The Americans capture “aspects of American life that were supposed to lie beneath notice at the time: the filling stations and bus stops and fleabag hotels and jukeboxes and diners and dented cars and industrial landscapes.”23 Both the writer and the photographer present a “bottom-up view of the nation” that combines criticism of America’s racism and materialism with an appreciation of the country. The trouble with Sante’s reading of the link between Frank and Kerouac is that it does not go beyond the establishment of a broad iconographic affinity. Nor does it have much to say about Kerouac’s own attempt to make sense of Frank’s work, in other words, how Kerouac himself describes the significance of his friend’s images—in terms of both the vision of America found in his own work and the task of writing more generally. Although only a little over a year separates the publication of the two pieces, the introduction to The Americans was written seven years after Kerouac had penned On the Road.24 Hence, the introduction is characterized not by the lyrical prose style found in his canonical novel but rather by the more formally adventurous form of writing developed later in his career that came to be known as Sponta- neous Prose. In his 1953 text “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose,” Kerouac urges writers to adopt a method of working similar to the practice of sketching used by visual artists: “The object is set before the mind, either in reality, as in sketching (before a landscape or teacup or old face) or is set in the memory wherein it becomes the sketching from memory of a definite image-object.”25 Immediately following this statement, Kerouac compares the process of sketching to the performance practice of jazz

12 ◆ INTRODUCTION musicians: “Time being of the essence in the purity of speech, sketching language is undisturbed flow from the mind of personal secret idea- words, blowing (as per jazz musician) on subject of image.” Regina Weinreich clarifies that rather than involving an extemporaneous process of textual production, Kerouac’s prose method was forged, in fact, around an obsessive reworking of scenes and events that reappear in different shapes and forms across his body of work. The point of this reworking is to develop writerly processes in which the immediacy of the description becomes inseparable from the event described. “Kerouac’s writing is an attempt to discover form, not to imitate it,” she affirms, “and to discover experience in the act of writing about it, as if the language of the ‘mental spontaneous process’ could expose some human experience as yet unknown because no writer had dared to set it down unimpinged by ‘craft’ in simply the traditional sense.”26 In a number of stories and novels written after On the Road, Kerouac creates this sense of a writing process constantly discovering the object of description by mixing past and present tense and by constructing extended passages in which sentences are separated not by a full stop but by a long dash. These dashes suggest a writing practice evolving and taking shape in the present moment. A good example is the following paragraph from the introduction to The Americans, which Kerouac sourced from the (at the time) unpublished Visions of Cody:

Madroad driving men ahead—the mad road, lonely, leading around the bend into the openings of space towards the horizon Wasatch snows promised us in the vision of the west, spine heights at the world’s end, coast of blue Pa- cific starry night—nobone half-banana moons sloping in the tangled night sky, the torments of great formations in mist, the huddled invisible insect in the car racing onward, illuminate—The raw cut, the drag, the butte, the star, the draw, the sunflower in the grass—orangebutted west lands of Arcadia, forlorn sands of the isolate earth, dewy exposures

INTRODUCTION ◆ 13 to infinity in black space, home of the rattlesnake and the gopher—the level of the world, low and flat: the charging restless mute unvoiced road keening in a seizure of tarpaulin power into the route, fabulous plots of landowners in green unexpecteds, ditches by the side of the road, as I look.27

In place of the more measured descriptions found in On the Road, the flow of language in the introduction to The Americans conveys a sense of the objects seen through the windscreen of the rapidly moving vehicle as well as the specific nature of this mechanized form of seeing. “The raw cut, the drag, the butte, the star, the draw, the sunflower in the grass”: these are less clearly defined objects or things and more shards of sensation generated by the narrator’s propulsion through the landscape. The effects of this mechanized form of seeing are also brought forth by the placement of the last three words: “as I look.” In this passage, the narrator still serves as a point of reference, but only in a belated sense. The question yet to be answered is: how does this form of writing connect with the nature and subject matter of Frank’s photographs? Like a number of other writers and artists, Kerouac was fascinated by the capacity of popular media such as photography, film, and audio- tape to render forms of everyday experience that had been marginal- ized or ignored. Yet he was also deeply skeptical about the role played by these media in promoting an image of social conformity and con- sumer affluence. The artist’s task was to exploit the creative potential of popular media so as to fashion a new image of postwar American life. Hence, Kerouac begins his introduction to The Americans by evoking something much larger than the photographs themselves:

That crazy feeling in America when the sun is hot on the streets and the music comes out of the jukebox or from a nearby funeral, that’s what Robert Frank has captured in tremendous photographs taken as he traveled on the road around practically forty-eight states in an old used car (on

14 ◆ INTRODUCTION Guggenheim Fellowship) and with the agility, mystery, genius, sadness and strange secrecy of a shadow photographed scenes that had never been seen before on film.28

Frank’s photographs affirm a vernacular vision of American life. At the same time, they challenge established ways of photographing the nation. At the heart of this challenge is something that Kerouac also sought to initiate in his writings: an overturning of distinctions between high and low culture, spiritual experience and secular life. “After seeing these pictures,” Kerouac proposes, “you end up finally not knowing any more whether a jukebox is sadder than a coffin.”

That’s because he’s always taking pictures of jukeboxes and coffins—and intermediary mysteries like the Negro priest squatting underneath the bright liquid belly mer of the Mississippi at Baton Rouge for some reason at dusk or early dawn with a white snowy cross and secret incantations never known outside the bayou—Or the picture of a chair in some café with the sun coming in the window and setting on the chair in a holy halo I never thought could be caught on film much less described in its beautiful visual entirety in words.29

That Kerouac saw in Frank’s photographs valuable lessons for writing is confirmed by his determination to look closely at not just the content of individual images but also the method of their creation. His most sustained discussion of this issue occurs in a text written a few months after he finished the introduction to The Americans. In April 1958 Kerouac traveled with Frank to Florida. The trip was paid for by a commission from Life magazine to produce a collaborative article in which Frank’s photographs would illustrate Kerouac’s written account of the trip. As it turned out, “On the Road to Florida” was rejected by Life, and it was not until 1972 that it eventually appeared in Evergreen Review. In the article Kerouac explains that the purpose of the trip to

INTRODUCTION ◆ 15 Florida was to bring back his “mother and cats and typewriter and big suitcase full of original manuscripts.”30 The trip was also an opportunity to observe Frank’s photographic method up close—“to see how a photographic artist does the bit, of catching those things about the American road writers write about.”31 The first thing that grabs Kerouac’s attention is the extraordinary way in which his companion takes his photographs: “It’s pretty amaz- ing to see a guy, while steering at the wheel, suddenly raise his little 300 dollar German camera with one hand and snap something that’s on the move in front of him, and through an unwashed windshield at that.”32 Even more astonishing, when the pictures were developed the unwashed streaks of the dirty windshield did not harm the picture but enhanced its effect. Frank’s ability to ground his work in the hustle and flow of everyday life also becomes apparent when the two travelers stop for a snack at a roadside diner:

I didnt see anything in particular to photograph, or “write about,” but suddenly Robert was taking his first snap. From the counter where we sat, he had turned and taken a picture of a big car-trailer with piled cars, two tiers, pulling in the gravel driveyard, but through the window and right over a scene of leftovers and dishes where a family had just vacated a booth and got in their car and driven off, and the waitress not had time yet to clear the dishes. The combination of that, plus the movement outside, and further parked cars, and reflection everywhere in chrome, glass and steel of cars, cars, road, road, I suddenly realized I was taking a trip with a genuine artist and that he was expressing himself in an art-form that was not unlike my own and yet fraught with a thousand difficulties quite unlike those of my own.33

Kerouac’s description draws attention to the quickness of Frank’s eye: his ability to identify meaningful patterns in activities and actions that

16 ◆ INTRODUCTION have yet to settle. Watching him take a photograph of a pole with a clus- ter of light bulbs on top, Kerouac muses: “How beautiful to be able to detail a scene like that, on a gray day, and show even the mud, abandoned tin cans and old building blocks laid at the foot of it, and in the distance the road, the old going road with its trucks, cars, poles, roadside houses, trees, signs, crossings . . . .”34 It is as if by observing Frank at work Ker- ouac is able to grasp both the specific attributes of photographic inscription and an idealized image of his own deep-seated desire to develop forms of writing that are capable of doing justice to the textures and patterns of everyday life. This is not a matter of seeking to match photography’s capacity to inscribe individual moments but rather of bringing the structures and procedures of prose into close alignment with the dislocating forces and elements that Frank reveals in his photographs. The mud, abandoned tin cans, old building blocks, trucks, cars, poles, roadside houses, trees, signs, and crossings represent both a distinctive type of American subject matter and a dilation of descriptive processes so as to evoke the fecundity of material life. Frank’s hyperattentive photographic method enables Kerouac to grasp how this material life might be used to fashion a new model of writing. This is why he concludes his account of the trip to Florida with a piece of advice to writers: “Follow a photographer and look at what he shoots . . . I mean a great photographer, an artist . . . and how he does it. The result: Whatever it is, it’s America. It’s the American Road and it awakens the eye every time.”35 Kerouac was not the first American writer to draw from photography important lessons for writing. For Juan A. Suárez the most compelling example of this alignment between written prose and photographic inscription is the collaboration between writer James Agee and photographer Walker Evans: the 1941 publication Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Supported by a commission from Evans’s employer, Fortune magazine, Agee and Evans set out to compile an account of the lives of impoverished southern farmers during the Great Depression. The significance of their collaboration lies in the extent to which the final outcome far exceeds this documentary agenda. Focusing on Agee’s written

INTRODUCTION ◆ 17 report, Suárez notes how the author’s account of the materiality of the farmers’ existence generates a series of “overwhelmingly detailed di- gressions”: “He reports at length on the grain of the wood in the walls, the scratches and erosions on the floorboards, the dust under the beds, the garbage shoved under the porch, the sweat stains and wrinkles in the clothing.”36 This proliferation of details, Suárez argues, is the result of Agee’s literal interpretation of the observational methods of documentary and ethnography. It is also, to spell this out, the result of Agee’s attempt to incorporate the implications of Evans’s photographic practice. “If I could do it I’d do no writing at all here,” Agee declares at one point. “It would be photographs; the rest would be fragments of cloth, bits of cotton, lumps of earth, records of speech, pieces of wood and iron, phials of odor, plates of food and of excrement.”37 Kerouac’s account of Frank’s practice shares this fascination with photography’s capacity to capture the “unknowable accretion of mere substance.”38 But whereas Agee seems to suggest the replacement of prose by a form of photographic inscription, Kerouac’s discussion of Frank’s work enacts a more complex imbrication of the two media. The Spontaneous Prose writer who sets the object in mind and proceeds to sketch its qualities and features is not attempting to return to a moment of empirical engagement prior to language. Rather, the writer is seeking to imbue the language of description with an awareness of the highly selective nature of perception. The significance of Frank’s photographic method for Kerouac lies in its ability to embody just such a form of writing that takes as its core component the temporally inflected appearance of objects and people in the world. Kerouac’s framing of The Americans as a form of writing, different from his own practice but equally bound to certain descriptive dilemmas concerning how one conveys the heterogeneity of the present, is evidenced by the valediction near the end of his introduction: “Robert Frank, Swiss, unobtrusive, nice, with that little camera that he raises and snaps with one hand he sucked a sad poem right out of America onto film, taking rank among the tragic poets of the world.”39

18 ◆ INTRODUCTION Kerouac concludes his introduction to The Americans with a message for Frank: “You got eyes.” Kerouac’s message recalls the advice offered by the American poet William Carlos Williams in a letter to his younger colleague Louis Zukofsky: “Eyes have always stood first in the poet’s equipment.”40 Three decades separate Williams’s letter to Zukofsky from Kerouac’s message to Frank. Bridging this historical divide is an abiding interest in the capacity of photography and film to set the eyes differently. This connection allows us to position Kerouac’s introduction to The Americans and his Spontaneous Prose method as part of a larger intermedial history involving writing, photography, and film. It also clarifies a question that recurs throughout this study: what does writing mean for Frank? This study will locate Frank alongside other seminal twentieth-century figures whose work is characterized by both a profound self-consciousness about the nature of sensory experience and an expansion of the terms and conditions of writing itself. It will illuminate a history of engagement between different media in which an idea of writing enables a reconsideration of narrative expression. By drawing attention to the significance of writing in his work, I am not seeking to elevate Frank to the status of a literary figure or to diminish the filmic and photographic qualities of the work. Instead, I want to understand the creative impulses and methods that moti- vate his use of film, photography, and written language. The wager proposed is that by considering Frank’s work in these terms we can achieve a clearer understanding of its connection with a broader set of aesthetic and cultural developments. One of my objectives here is to trace the mark left by these developments on the shape and direction of his films and photographs after The Americans.

A PASSAGE OF TIME Frank’s most revealing discussion of the place of writing in his work occurred during a 1977 symposium on photography held at Wellesley

INTRODUCTION ◆ 19 College in Massachusetts. Not coincidentally, it was on this occasion that he gave his most detailed account of why, after the publication of The Americans, he decided to focus his attention on film. The Ameri cans patented a distinctive style of photography. Following the book’s publication, Frank felt that his practice could move in one of two directions. One option was to “build on that, and just sort of vary it a little bit here and there.”41 The other was to take up a new and, in many ways, more challenging medium. During the symposium he described the nature of this challenge. “As a still photographer I wouldn’t have to talk to anyone,” he told his audience. “I could walk around and not say anything. You’re just an observer; you just walk around, and there’s no need to communicate. And so you feel that you don’t have to use words. Whereas with films it becomes more complicated—thinking in long durations, and keeping up a kind of sequence.”42 Frank’s switch from photography to film can thus be linked to the structural tension that defines The Americans, the tension between the capacities of the single photograph to sum up or embody a situation and the creative potential, as well as the challenge, of “keeping up a kind of sequence.” As we have already seen, the outcome of this tension was not another version of the Life magazine model of a photo story with a beginning, middle, and end. Rather, it involved a much more ambivalent form of photographic narration. In the transcript of the Wellesley symposium, Frank seems determined to draw a line between his past and present activities. The questioning of the unidentified symposium participants obliges him, however, to return constantly to the issue of the still image. At one point, he speculates on how he might continue with photography: “If I continued with still photography, I would try to be more honest and direct about why I go out there and do it. And I guess the only way I could do it is with writing. I think that’s one of the hardest things to do—combine words and photographs. But I would certainly try it.”43 A little later, he clarifies the type of writing he has in mind. He de-

20 ◆ INTRODUCTION scribes his attempts to write sentences directly on the black acetate of already-exposed Super 8 film. This process destroyed the original footage, but it also added an important new dimension to the work: “Those sentences made a lot of sense later. I guess a lot of photography today deals with your personal life. It records it in some way—what you see, or your environment or travels. It’s not so much that you want to make beautiful photographs. It’s something else, and that appeals to me.”44 Further on, he spells out what this something else is: “It’s not the beautiful photograph. It just means a passage of time to me.” Frank’s comments illustrate the multilayered nature of his engagement with writing. On one level writing is a matter of words inscribed on the surface of the image or scratched directly onto the negative. These words have a dual purpose: they express certain feelings and emotions that are part of the artist’s response to the image; at the same time, they suggest a dogged refusal to let the moment captured in the photograph lie. Frank’s insistence on placing the image within a continuum of other moments and impulses indicates a more precise understanding of what writing stands for in his work: writing figures here as a response to the temporalized nature of all attempts to give expression to experience. Understood accordingly, the defining lesson to be drawn from Frank’s career is not concerned with the replacement of one media by another. More interesting, it concerns the need to make the material properties of photography and film accountable to the passing of time. Film and photography are best thought of not as separate media but as staging posts in the development of a particular form of intermedial writing. In its use of an autobiographical form of address, The Lines of My Hand allows us to track this interaction between still and moving images throughout Frank’s career. At one point in the book, he describes the shift from photography to film. He begins on one page, writing in uppercase: “to make films . . . .” On the adjacent right- hand page, he continues the line of thought:

INTRODUCTION ◆ 21 in making films i continue to look around me, but I am no longer the solitary observer turning away after the click of the shutter. Instead I’m trying to recapture what I saw, what I heard and what I feel. What I know! There is no decisive moment, it’s got to be created. I’ve got to do everything to make it happen in front of the lens:

SEARCHING—EXPLAINING—DIGGING— WATCHING—JUDGING—ERASING— PRETENDING—DISTORTING—LYING—JUDGING—RECORDING— TRYING—TRYING—TRYING— RUNNING—TELLING A TRUTH—RUNNING—CRAWLING— WORKING TOWARDS THE TRUTH— UNTIL IT IS DONE45

In describing the consequences of his move from photography to film, Frank employs a form of writing that abandons a purely descriptive relation to its subject in favor of a more self-conscious approach that brings together the event described and the present moment of writing. Like Kerouac, Frank is continually drawn back to moments and incidents in the past—not to master their significance but to do justice to their passing. In The Lines of My Hand, this process of going back over events is also enacted through a series of collages made up of filmstrips from various film projects. Accompanying these collages are grabs of dialogue and voice-over statements drawn from the films. These assemblages of image and written text provide an overview of Frank’s output following his decision to concentrate on filmmaking rather than photography. They also affirm that, in its content and construction, The Lines of My Hand represents a crucial articulation of the constant process of writing and rewriting that defines Frank’s career. The role of words in this process is to mark the passing of time and its impact on both the consciousness of the artist and the material surface of the work itself. They transform this material surface into a meeting point between then and now, artist and work.

22 ◆ INTRODUCTION Understanding how this process operates requires that we look closely at the passages between film, photography, and written text in Frank’s body of work. It also requires that we scrutinize another form of media that has played a defining role in the development of his career: video. In Home Improvements (1985), Moving Pictures (1994), The Present (1996), and True Story (2004/2008), Frank employs the directness of video to compose a series of self-portraits of his life, split between his homes in Mabou, Nova Scotia, and New York. In these works the filmmaker turns the camera back on his personal life. But this is a personal life deeply embedded in the public life of his work as an artist. The value of video is that it enables him to pursue this implication of life and work at its most intimate or everyday level. Com- paring video with film, Raymond Bellour argues that the video image is “more adept at translating the impressions of the eye, the movements of the body, the processes of thought. And all transformations the image undergoes seem more ‘natural,’ insofar as the video image itself is from the first more precarious, more unstable and more artificial.”46 This responsiveness to the shifts in the filmmaker’s intentions means that video, far more than film, lends itself to the pursuit of the ideal first forecast by Alexandre Astruc. In an article published in 1948, Astruc looks forward to the emergence of a new age of cinema, the age of the “caméra-stylo,” or camera pen. Spurred on by the advent of 16 mm technology, Astruc urges filmmakers to consider the camera as “a means of writing just as flexible and subtle as written language. . . . The most philosophical meditations on human production, psychol- ogy, metaphysics, ideas, and passions lie well within its province.”47 In more recent years, Astruc’s pronouncements have played a central role in linking the use of video by filmmakers such as Jean-Luc Godard, Chris Marker, Agnès Varda, and Frank himself to the history and aesthetic agendas of the essay film. Michael Renov suggests that one of the defining features of the essay film is its capacity to straddle a number of formal and conceptual distinctions such as fiction/ nonfiction, documentary/avant-garde, and cinema/video.48 Taking

INTRODUCTION ◆ 23 Jonas Mekas’s Lost Lost Lost (1976) as an example, he claims that the essay film can be distinguished from other forms of nonfiction film by its emphasis on registering the intersection of the filmmaker’s subjectivity and the world: “While all documentary films retain an interest in some portion of the world out there—recording, and less frequently interrogating, at times with the intent to persuade and with varying degrees of attention to formal issues—the essayist’s gaze is drawn inward with equal intensity.”49 This inward turn lends films such as Lost Lost Lost a reflexive quality. “I’m trying to get to why I’m looking at what I’m filming,” Mekas explains in a lecture on his films, “why I’m filming it, and how I’m filming. The style reflects what I feel . . . I’m trying to understand myself, what I do.”50 Mekas’s comments crystallize two overlapping elements that are central to Frank’s career: first, an acute investment in the image as a highly subjective response to the challenges of everyday life and, second, a deliberate undermining of the image’s tendency to consolidate experience. Looking over Frank’s career, this need to keep his work open or responsive to experience lay at the core of his dissatisfaction with the monumentality of photography. In turn, the “long durations” demanded by film helped him to reorient the photographic image’s tendency to freeze time. “Sometimes I put several images together to make one,” he explains in a discussion of his photographic work. “I tell of my hopes, my little hope, my joy. When I can, I put in a bit of humor. I destroy the descriptive elements in the photos so I can show how I am, myself.”51 This reconfiguration of the image in order to “show how I am, myself” is what I call writing. In the chapters that follow, I consider how Frank’s films and videos connect with other traditions of auto biographical filmmaking and forge their own distinct path. Above all, I address the various ways his work wrestles with the dilemma of how to represent the experience of living in a present moment that is open to new events and encounters while also etched by the grief of the past. How can the moving image represent this fleeting, overripe, yet always surprising present?

24 ◆ INTRODUCTION Chapter 1 responds to this question by looking at the circumstances surrounding the production of Frank’s first completed film, Pull My Daisy (1959). Loosely based on the third act of Kerouac’s unproduced play Beat Generation, the film was shot in the apartment of Alfred Les- lie, a painter and friend of Frank’s who also served as the film’s codirector. Drawn from the New York literary and art scenes, the cast features the poets Ginsberg, Corso, and Peter Orlovsky and the painters Larry Rivers and Alice Neel. The film was shot in black and white on silent 16 mm film. Added during the editing, Kerouac’s voice-over sketches the film’s story about an encounter involving a railway worker, Milo, his poet friends, and a young bishop visiting Milo’s wife. The spontaneity and playfulness of Kerouac’s voice-over are indicative of the cultural values and aesthetic ambitions of a major strand of postwar American art and literature. Paul Arthur claims that “the idea of living in the moment, with its concomitant celebration of creative spontaneity and its rejection of the assumed authority of History, became a potent shibbo leth in sixties art and countercultural activities.”52 He cites as examples happenings, be-ins, protests, improvised music, and spoken-word poetry. Appearing at roughly the same time as John Cassavetes’s first version of Shadows (1958) and Shirley Clarke’s The Connection (1961), Pull My Daisy represents a signal moment in the formation of this cultural milieu. It also complicates our understanding of this period of cultural expression by imbuing the impression of spontaneity with an awareness of things captured, not in the moment of their occurrence, but in and through their belated echo. Kerouac’s voice-over slides between aligning itself with the “nowness” of the images and giving voice to a sense of “pastness.” The significance of Pull My Daisy for our consideration of Frank’s career lies in its rendition of an experience of the present as both here and now and past. This is the lesson taken up and developed in each of the films and videos examined in this book. It is a lesson about time—its elusiveness, pressures, and costs—and it is fundamental to Frank’s work. At the start of 1960, Film Culture magazine awarded Pull My Daisy

INTRODUCTION ◆ 25 its second Independent Film Award, and the film’s place as a landmark work in the development of the New American Cinema was confirmed in 1996 when it was listed on the National Film Preservation Board’s National Film Registry. The trouble with this kind of recognition is that it encourages writers to limit their discussion to the landmark work rather than to engage with the range of a filmmaker’s career. Since the production of Pull My Daisy, Frank has directed twenty-nine films and videos.53 These projects include feature-length films involving professional actors (Me and My Brother [1968] and Candy Mountain [1987]); documentaries (Liferaft Earth [1969], Cocksucker Blues [1972], and This Song for Jack [1983]); a video portrait of his local community in Mabou (Paper Route [2002]); and highly personal meditations on memory and grief (Life Dances On . . . [1980], Home Improvements, and The Present). The production of these works enabled Frank to forge connections with a range of prominent figures in film, literature, theater, photography, and music, including Kerouac, Ginsberg, Godard, Harry Smith, Joseph Chaikin, Rudy Wurlitzer, William Bur- roughs, Danny Lyon, the Rolling Stones, Patti Smith, Allan Kaprow, and Tom Waits. His willingness to engage in a variety of collaborations and explore different styles of cinema is part of the pleasure and value of his career. Underpinning this eclecticism is a concern, also evident in his photographic work, with developing styles of narration capable of doing justice to the elusive nature of experience. Frank’s struggle with narrative lies at the heart of his first feature- length film, Me and My Brother. At its simplest level, the film is a portrait of the relationship between Julius Orlovsky and his brother Peter. After spending fifteen years in a state psychiatric facility, Julius is released into the care of his brother and his brother’s partner, Gins- berg. The self-splintering that characterizes Julius’s predicament is echoed in Frank’s own storytelling methods. Chapter 2 locates Me and My Brother in two interconnected contexts: the first involves the new forms of nonfiction filmmaking that emerged in the wake of Direct Cinema, and the second, the discontinuous narrative structures asso-

26 ◆ INTRODUCTION ciated with the French New Wave. In unpacking how these contexts left their mark on Frank’s development as a filmmaker, I pay particular attention to the affinity between Me and My Brother and Shirley Clarke’s extraordinary direct-to- camera interview Portrait of Jason (1967). In both films we find a model of filmmaking characterized by a crossing of frontiers between documentary and fiction and between filmmaker and subject. In Me and My Brother, Christopher Walken plays the role of a director struggling to make a documentary about Julius Orlovsky. In About Me: A Musical (1971), this conceit is taken a step further when Frank casts a young female actor to play himself. “My project was to make a film about music in America,” he explains in the voice-over at the start of the film. “Well, fuck the music. I just decided to make the film about myself.” The presence of his on-screen proxy allows Frank to mark the autobiographical nature of the film while affirming the inevitable displacement that is part of all attempts to render a life story. At first glance Conversations in Vermont (1971) is a much simpler project. The film consists of a series of conversations between the filmmaker and his children, Pablo and Andrea, at the Vermont boarding school where they are completing their schooling. As they talk, they peruse a pile of photographs covering the early years of their life together as a family. For Pablo these backwards glances are less important than the need to understand what is happening now. His resistance to his father’s questions suggests feelings of estrangement between father and son. Shadowing the discussions between Frank and his children is another set of conversations, the subject of which is the capacity of photographic images to conjure a relationship with the past. In Con versations in Vermont, the gesture of picking up a photograph, looking at it for a second or two, and putting it aside so as to look at another image is used to initiate a tension between the past and the present as well as between the image and its paper support. A similar tension characterizes the interaction of image and written text found in the black-and-white Polaroids that Frank produced during the early 1970s.

INTRODUCTION ◆ 27 In these images Frank uses a pen or some other sharp instrument to write statements directly onto the surface of the image. On other occasions he brings together a series of prints in a single collage in which text appears either on the individual images or below the photographs. In both cases his concern with registering the consequences of time’s passing involves a direct engagement with the image’s material support. Chapter 3 considers how this engagement informs Frank’s autobiographical reflections in Conversations in Vermont, Liferaft Earth, and About Me: A Musical. In an interview published in 2001, Frank was asked about the array of postcards, souvenirs, and other memorabilia that he had amassed. In his response he refers to the influence of his place of birth: “That’s because of Switzerland. I learnt it there, and I have never given it up— it’s sentimentality that makes you cling to it. Memory helps you—like stones in a river help you to reach the shore.”54 Using memory and being overwhelmed by the force of recollections, holding on to the past and needing to escape from its grip, these are some of the competing impulses driving Frank’s most personal works. The dark emotions that characterize these works stem from the personal tragedy of losing his daughter, Andrea, at just twenty years of age and the illnesses suf- fered by his son, Pablo. W. S. Di Piero observes that the photographic images produced after Andrea’s death “are obsessively mauled over, lacerated, intruded upon. For the first time in his career, the picture- making process becomes part of the pictorial finish.”55 Far more than anything Frank produced in the years leading up to or just after The Americans, the photographs produced during the second half of the 1970s evidence a willingness to violate the descriptive properties of the image. In works such as Brattleboro, Vermont (1979) and Sick of Goodby’s (1978), the staging of emotion gives rise to an image that, as Samuel Beckett once noted about his own work, “admits the chaos and does not try to say that the chaos is really something else.”56 The striking thing about the interaction of words and images in Brattleboro, Vermont is the oblique yet extremely precise nature of its

28 ◆ INTRODUCTION evocation of anxiety: while we know very little about the specific circumstances depicted in the image, we are well aware of the feeling of desperation conveyed in the statement scrawled across its surface, as well as the time to which it belongs, a time when life is at its weakest, biologically and emotionally. This is an image about the shudder of such overwrought thoughts, an image that achieves its effect through an interaction of words and image. Chapter 4 considers how the formal strategies evident in the photographs influence the storytelling structures and forms of address employed in the loose trilogy consti- tuted by Life Dances On . . . , Home Improvements, and The Present. In each of these works, Frank records the details of a world that is close at hand: a cup resting under a dripping faucet, flies crawling across a windowpane, dime-store souvenirs gathering dust on a windowsill. At the same time, he renders the presence of people and events that exist only through the processes of memory. In The Present the filmmaker shows us a photograph of his daughter. “And this is Andrea,” he tells us. “Today, she would be forty. And maybe she would have children. . . . I don’t know what she thinks.” The outcome of these melancholy reflections is a tally of things that occupy the mind, things that can be neither forgotten nor resolved into a story. In The Present the portability of the video camera allows the filmmaker to say things he could not say before and pursue associations that link the past to the present. Although it may appear haphazard, his method of working with video is attuned to the possibility of an enigmatic connection between his thoughts and memories and the objects scanned by the camera. “I have an obsession in my life / for Fragments / which reveal / and hide truth.” In chapter 5, I connect Frank’s obsession with the fragment to a view of human history as transitory. The piles of photographs, letters, and souvenirs that the filmmaker returns to again and again operate as enigmatic reminders of what the narrator in Chris Marker’s Sunless (1983) calls “the impermanence of things.” The feelings of loss and estrangement inspired by Frank’s treatment of everyday objects challenge the possibility of pro-

INTRODUCTION ◆ 29 viding a full account—of either the life or the work. They reveal and, at the same time, hide truth. The selection of Frank’s films, videos, and photographs that constitutes the basis of this study is determined by a desire to understand something very specific about his method: his ability to forge an intense connection between the concerns that determine his biography and the material attributes of the image. “I exist more as images than as a real human being,” said Godard as he too was turning to video, “since my only life consists in making them. . . . There’s something in life that takes place there.”57 It is difficult to imagine Frank being this categorical about his own approach, yet Godard’s statement identifies an imperative also evident in Frank’s work: the desire to treat the image as something more than just an image, to recognize it instead as a space where the fluctuations of experience and memory leave their trace. Once again, we return to the impact of the words inscribed across his photographs: having been forged through an exposure to light, these images are exposed to another pressure that comes from the weight of memories and experiences stirred into being by the images themselves. Studying Frank’s methods illuminates the passages between media during the postwar period. It also exemplifies a principle articulated by D. N. Rodowick: “It is fundamentally through a practice or actual artistic acts that media are recognized and assume an identity, no matter how variable.”58 Without doubt this process is conditioned by preexisting methods of conceiving and working with different media, as well as by the material attributes of the media themselves. The premise upon which the present study is based is that these methods are susceptible to transformation. Scrutinizing the outcomes of Frank’s creative practice demonstrates his key role in the history of experimental cinema and enables us to better understand how the transformation and extension of media has taken shape since the postwar period.

30 ◆ INTRODUCTION 1 “TIME AND HOW TO NOTE IT DOWN” Pull My Daisy

A decision: I put my Leica in a cupboard. Enough of lying in wait, pursu ing, sometimes catching the essence of the black and white, the knowl edge of where God is. I make films. Now I speak to the people who move in my viewfinder. Not simple and not especially successful. —Robert Frank

By his own admission, the move from photography to film did not come easy to Robert Frank. Ten years after the release of his first film, Pull My Daisy, he looked back on his transformation from photographer to filmmaker in a column written for Creative Camera: “Since being a filmmaker I have become more of a person. I am confident that I can synchronise my thoughts to the image, and that the image will talk back—well, it’s like being among friends.”1 In the same column he drew a line under his involvement with photography: “For me, photography is in the past. I wish I could write about the work of my friend Ralph Gibson or of Danny Lyon’s new book or any other photographer whose work I like. . . . No, I’m glad I’ve gone too far: I wish to be free to express my feelings and doubts which live with me.” With hindsight we know that photography did not remain consigned to the past. But the challenge for anyone writing about Frank’s career is not to correct the filmmaker’s inability to predict the future; it is to explain how this desire to express “my feelings and doubts” took shape, as well as the contexts and influences that enabled Frank’s shift from photography to film. We can respond to this challenge by focusing on the circumstances surrounding the production of Pull My Daisy. Benefiting from the contributions of a range of individuals, this film crystallizes a set of formal and conceptual issues that permeate the cinema of the postwar

◆ 31 period. What lessons are being learnt in Pull My Daisy? How might these lessons help us to understand the significance of this film for both Frank’s career and the New American Cinema?

A SPONTANEOUS CINEMA The first public screening of Pull My Daisy was held in New York City on November 11, 1959. Amos Vogel, the proprietor of Cinema 16, promoted the film as one half of a double-bill special event, the other half being John Cassavetes’s Shadows. First screened at the Paris Theatre approxi mately twelve months earlier, Shadows had been lauded for its use of nonprofessional actors, improvised storyline, and sensitive depiction of mixed-race family relationships. In a press release announcing the bestowal of Film Culture magazine’s First Independent Film Award on Shadows, the award committee commended the film’s presentation of “reality in a fresh and unconventional manner. . . . The improvisation, spontaneity, and free inspiration that are almost entirely lost in most films from an excess of professionalism are fully used in this film.”2 The story of what happened next is well known. After Shadows had been lauded in Film Culture, Cassavetes decided to reedit and reshoot parts of the film. A great deal of the new material added to the second version of Shadows consists of dialogue and entire scenes written by Cassavetes and Robert Alan Aurthur. Released in 1959, the second version of Shad ows, with a much stronger characterization and narrative structure, was condemned by a number of its former advocates as a misguided attempt to appease the demands of commercial distributors. The upshot of all this was that the version of Shadows screened alongside Pull My Daisy was markedly different from the one that had so impressed Film Culture. In the days that followed the Cinema 16 event, the relative merits of the two versions of Shadows generated as many column inches in the pages of the Village Voice as the plau- dits lavished on Pull My Daisy. At the center of both of these discussions was the avant-garde spokesperson, critic, and filmmaker Jonas

32 ◆ “TIME AND HOW TO NOTE IT DOWN” Mekas. Through his writings in magazines like Film Culture and the Village Voice, his own work as a filmmaker, and his tireless advocacy, Mekas helped to define the terms of a New American Cinema radically opposed to mainstream Hollywood filmmaking. Along with the producer Lewis Allen, Mekas was responsible for organizing the meeting of directors, actors, producers, distributors, and theater managers that led to the formation of the New American Cinema Group. In its “First Statement of the New American Cinema Group,” published in Film Culture in 1961, the group asserts: “The official cinema all over the world is running out of breath. It is morally corrupt, aesthetically obsolete, thematically superficial, temperamentally boring.”3 The statement committed the group to developing a cinema based on the principle of personal expression: “We don’t want false, polished, slick films—we prefer them rough, unpolished, but alive; we don’t want rosy films—we want them the color of blood.”4 The tone and rhetoric of the “First Statement” bears the imprint of Mekas’s writings on the nature and aesthetic possibilities of film art. Published six years earlier, his first editorial as founding editor of Film Culture bemoans a situation in which “cinematic creation tends to be approached primarily as a production of commodities, and large sections of the public—to whom film-going is still merely a mode of diversion—remain unaware of the full significance of filmic art.”5 The task ahead, the editorial opines, is to undertake “a searching revalua tion of the aesthetic standards obtaining both among film-makers and audiences and for thorough revision of the prevalent attitude to the function of cinema.” During its first phase of publication, Film Cul ture promoted discussion of a wide range of films. In his own writings, Mekas was as critical of aspects of experimental filmmaking as he was of Hollywood’s narrow commercial focus.6 It was only after Film Culture switched from monthly to quarterly publication that it began to assume a new character and charter as a vehicle for experimental cinema in the United States, a move that was consolidated by the establishment of the Independent Film Awards.

“TIME AND HOW TO NOTE IT DOWN” ◆ 33 Given Mekas’s prominent role in debates on film, it is not surprising that the issue of the Cinema 16 Film Notes, distributed on the evening of Pull My Daisy’s premiere, contains one of his most important statements on New American Cinema: “A Few Notes on Spontaneous Cinema.” First published in an expanded form in the British journal Sight and Sound, these reflections position Pull My Daisy and the first version of Shad ows alongside the work of Morris Engel, Sidney Meyers, Stan Brakhage, Lionel Rogosin, Edward Bland, and Denis and Terry Sanders as part of “a spontaneous cinema.” Existing outside the commercial system of West Coast filmmaking and reliant on ad hoc funding arrangements, the work of these filmmakers is informed by a shift in aesthetic agendas that is discernable in a range of other forms of creative expression:

Art as an action and not as a series of plots, facts, still-lives, moving collages and pastiches. It is a direction intimately linked with the general feeling in other areas of life and art, with the ardor for rock-and-roll, the interest in Zen Bud- dhism, the development of abstract expressionism (action painting), the emergence of spontaneous prose and New Poetry—a long delayed reaction against puritanism, Aristo- tle, and the mechanization of life.7

In his study of postwar American culture, Daniel Belgrad argues that the valorization of spontaneity is a defining feature of this period of creative expression. He traces the migration of this idea from discussions dealing with aesthetic procedures to broader debates concerned with values in American society. For Belgrad and others, the dominant force in these debates was a set of economic principles, beliefs, and public policy agendas referred to as corporate liberalism. “Corporate liberals,” Belgrad explains,

instituted an “American Way of Life” defined by a complementary combination of scientifically managed work, on the

34 ◆ “TIME AND HOW TO NOTE IT DOWN” one hand, and mass leisure and consumption on the other. High wages, vacation time, and installment buying maintained a consistently high demand for industrial products, reversing the economic slump that had followed the end of the First World War.8

Shifting the purpose of artistic activity from that of mirroring the existing order of things to that of creating new possibilities of expression, the embrace of spontaneity by artists, writers, and filmmakers sought to challenge the dominance of the corporate liberal view of American life. This change in the conception of art is evident in Harold Rosenberg’s widely cited 1952 essay “The American Action Painters,” in which he claims that the significance of abstract expressionist art lies in its overturning of a fundamental tenet of modern painting: “At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act—rather than as a space in which to reproduce, redesign, analyse or ‘express’ an object, actual or imagined. What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event.”9 Rosenberg goes on to characterize the abstract expressionist painter as approaching the canvas with a specific purpose in mind: “He went up to it with material in his hand to do something to that other piece of material in front of him. The image would be the result of this encounter.”10 The encounter between the abstract expressionist painter and the canvas is unencumbered by historical precedent. It is an encounter fully responsive to the painterly event: “Form, colour, composition, drawing, are auxiliaries, any of which—or practically all, as has been attempted logically, with unpainted canvases—can be dispensed with. What matters always is the revelation contained in the act.”11 Rosenberg’s emphasis on the encounter between painter and canvas affirms a view of artistic creation as essentially productive rather than simply reproductive. Spontaneity describes how this shift in the purpose of art manifests itself in the artist’s approach. In his essay “Projective Verse,” first published in 1950, the American

“TIME AND HOW TO NOTE IT DOWN” ◆ 35 poet Charles Olson claims that a spontaneous approach necessitates an uninhibiting of one’s mind and ear: “At all points . . . get on with it, keep moving, keep in speed, the nerves, their speed, the perceptions, theirs, the acts, the split second acts, the whole business, keep it moving as fast as you can, citizen.”12 The type of movement valorized in Olson’s essay is different from the incessant movement of goods and services central to the corporate liberal view of American life, in other words, the movement of efficient mass production generating more and more goods that, in turn, generate greater demand. Instead, Olson valorizes a type of movement that bridges the distance between perceptual experience and the principles of poetic expression: “projective verse teaches . . . that verse will only do in which a poet man- ages to register both the acquisitions of his ear and the pressures of his breath.”13 The attempt by Rosenberg, Olson, and others to charge the moment of creative production allows us to identify another principle central to postwar discussions about the nature and value of art. Put simply, this principle involves a striving for presentness. Olson’s admonitions to “get on with it, keep moving, keep in speed” are about ensuring that the present counts—not merely as a point of continuity with the past but also as the point at which newness comes into the poem. During the immediate postwar decades, the striving for presentness was evident in a number of different areas of creative endeavor—literature, painting, theatrical performance, and, of course, film. In the case of film, the engagement with the present went beyond an aesthetic agenda to become the very measure of its distinctiveness as a medium. In his history of postwar American avant-garde filmmaking, Paul Arthur claims that the valorization of presentness achieves its apogee in the new cinematic movements of the 1950s and 1960s:

In a state of charged reciprocity between art and life, movies were held to suffuse reality, which in turn acquired a distinctly cinematic gloss. Events unspooled on a mental screen,

36 ◆ “TIME AND HOW TO NOTE IT DOWN” movies were a journey in time, actual or spiritual journeys conjured or became occasions for motion pictures. . . . What appeared onscreen was said to have an undeniable immediacy of impact and enunciative address continuously couched in the present tense.14

Evidence for Arthur’s claim can be found in Mekas’s account of the spontaneous impulse at work in Shadows and Pull My Daisy. Down- playing the amount of careful planning that went into the staging and shooting of both films, Mekas argues that Shadows and Pull My Daisy ground their fictional stories in a strong sense of documentary reality. “When one is watching these films,” he proposes, “it is as if one was witnessing the reality itself and not the reality played back.”15 Over the past half century, the assumptions underpinning Mekas’s claims regarding the impression of documentary reality in Shadows and Pull My Daisy have been critiqued by a range of writers keen to circumvent any suggestion of a naively realist view of cinematic representation. No doubt, Mekas’s pronouncement can be regarded as ide- alistic, but it also reveals how postwar American cinema engaged with broader debates about cinema’s distinctiveness as a medium. Exactly a week after its premiere, Mekas again wrote about Pull My Daisy, this time in his regular “Movie Journal” column in the Village Voice. He positions the film alongside the Living Theatre’s production of Jack Gel- ber’s 1959 play The Connection as a signpost “toward new directions, new ways out of the frozen officialdom and midcentury senility of our arts, toward new themes, a new sensibility.”16 In Pull My Daisy this new sensibility manifests itself in the playfulness and spontaneity of the acting, as well as in the quality of the film’s photography:

Nobody seems to realize that the quality of photography in cinema is as important as its content, its ideas, its actors. It is photography that is the midwife, that carries life from the street to the screen, and it depends on photography whether

“TIME AND HOW TO NOTE IT DOWN” ◆ 37 this life will arrive on the screen still alive. Robert Frank has succeeded in transplanting life—and in his very first film. And that is the highest praise I can think of. Directorially, Pull My Daisy is returning to where the true cinema first began, to where Lumière left off.17

For Mekas the overriding lesson of Pull My Daisy is that the direction forward for film requires a rediscovery of its past, a past in which film’s ability to record life serves as the medium’s primary inspiration. In the decades immediately following the end of World War II, this view of film’s distinctiveness was echoed in a range of different contexts. In terms of the group of writers associated with Film Culture, Hans Richter’s 1955 condemnation of the prevalence of literary values in filmmaking provides an important early reference point. While noting that the contemporary novel has adapted itself to film by becoming “increasingly image-minded,” he asserts that cinema’s reliance on novelistic values is far more pervasive and, in terms of its aspirations to becoming an independent art form, far more detrimental: “[The novel’s] technique of psychological character development, its style of story-telling— traditional properties of literature—dominate the film and make it, also, from this side, reproduction (of literary works, which were original art before they were produced in Holly- wood, London, Paris, and Rome).”18 In searching for a form of cinema that is “more cinematographic” in its conception and outlook, Rich- ter turns, first, to the postrevolutionary Russian cinema and the films of the Italian Neorealists. “In both cases,” he maintains, “the fictional film has turned from fiction to history and from theater style to documentary style in the use of natural setting, people not actors, and real events.”19 By means of their selection, elimination, and coordination of these natural elements, filmmakers such as Sergei Eisenstein and Roberto Rossellini have managed to create a film form that, for Richter, “is original and not bound by theatrical or literary tradition.”20 Richter’s second example of a distinctly cinematographic form of

38 ◆ “TIME AND HOW TO NOTE IT DOWN” filmic expression is the experimental film. The use of film by artists such as Viking Eggeling, Fernand Léger, Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Francis Picabia, Walter Ruttmann, Francis Bruguière, Len Lye, and Jean Cocteau links the history of filmic experimentation to the investigations into form, color, and motion central to the key movements of modern art: “Cubism, expressionism, dadaism, abstract art, surrealism found not only their expression in films but also a new fulfilment on a new level.” 21 In films like Ballet Mécanique (1924), Entr’acte (1924), and Emak-Bakia (1926), the external object still serves as “raw material.” Whereas documentary film employs this object to articulate social, economic, or scientific themes, in experimental cinema the external object has “broken away from its habitual environment and [is] used as material to express irrational visions.”22 By bringing together the progressive documentary-inspired work produced in the Soviet Union and postwar Europe with a pre–World War II European tradition of filmic experimentation, Richter demonstrates how film’s search for authentically cinematographic forms of expression helped shape the vision of the New American Cinema found in the writings of Mekas and others. He shows how both narrative and nonnar rative film forms can be accommodated in a unified view of the medium that emphasizes its photographic basis. The historical sweep of Rich- ter’s article is, however, dwarfed by the postwar era’s most sustained and comprehensive work of film scholarship, Siegfried Kracauer’s Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality. Published in 1960, the book is the culmination of several decades of writing about photography, film, and their mutual implication. Kracauer spells out his fundamental assumption clearly in his preface: “Film is essentially an extension of photography and therefore shares with this medium a marked affinity for the visible world around us. Films come into their own when they record and reveal physical reality.”23 Physical reality, he explains,

includes many phenomena which would hardly be perceived were it not for the motion picture camera’s ability to catch

“TIME AND HOW TO NOTE IT DOWN” ◆ 39 them on the wing. And since any medium is partial to the things it is uniquely equipped to render, the cinema is con- ceivably animated by a desire to picture transient material life, life at its most ephemeral. Street crowds, involuntary gestures, and other fleeting impressions are its very meat. Significantly, the contemporaries of Lumière praised his films—the first ever to be made—for showing “the ripple of the leaves stirred by the wind.”24

Physical reality, then, is a fleeting constellation of elements and forces that are imprinted on the surface of the film. “Works of art con- sume the raw material from which they are drawn,” Kracauer stipulates, “whereas films as an outgrowth of camera work are bound to exhibit it.”25 This emphasis on an affinity between film and physical reality prompts a fundamental question that motivates Kracauer’s discussion of individual films: “Are all types of stories indiscriminately amenable to cinematic treatment or are some such types more in keeping with the spirit of the medium than the rest of them?”26 In his view, film’s connection to physical reality makes it opposed to the principles of tragedy:

If film is a photographic medium, it must gravitate toward the expanses of outer reality—an open-ended, limitless world which bears little resemblance to the finite and ordered cosmos set by tragedy. Unlike this cosmos, where destiny defeats chance and all the light falls on human interaction, the world of film is a flow of random events involving both humans and inanimate objects. Nor can the tragic be evoked by images of that flow; it is an exclusively mental experience which has no correspondences in camera-reality.27

Kracauer’s concern with “an open-ended, limitless world” and the flow of random events means that his writings share little in common with what is conventionally seen as a realist view of cinema. The world re-

40 ◆ “TIME AND HOW TO NOTE IT DOWN” vealed in cinema is a world revealed anew by the camera. Moreover, this revelation connects directly with the spectator as a physiological entity. “Film not only records physical reality,” he writes in his discussion of the spectator, “but reveals otherwise hidden provinces of it, including such spatial and temporal configurations as may be derived from the given data with the aid of cinematic techniques and devices.”28 Film’s ability to reveal “hidden provinces” points to a nexus between Kracauer’s writings and Mekas’s vision of the New American Cinema that is worth examining. Time and again, Mekas declares that a new cinema can be forged only by a deliberate embrace of film’s ability to dislocate our sense of the world. In February 1959, he writes: “We need less perfect but more free films. If only our younger film-makers— I have no hopes for the old generation—would really break loose, completely loose, out of themselves, wildly, anarchically!”29 Three years later, Mekas looks back on how far the New American Cinema had come to answering his call. His comments traverse an extraordinary range of filmmakers and approaches: Helen Levitt, Sidney Meyers, Willard Maas, Hans Richter, Sidney Peterson, Lionel Rogosin, Shirley Clarke, Edward Bland, Stan Brakhage, and Ron Rice; but once again, the two films that dominate his discussion are his late-1950s touch- stones, Shadows and Pull My Daisy. Mekas begins his consideration of Shadows by explicating a decisive shift in the filmmaker’s use of improvisation: “The content sought by Cassavetes and his actors was no longer the surface realism alone, which was well explored by Morris Engel and the neorealists. For the new cinema, Shadows represented a turn inwards—a focusing upon psychological realities.”30 Mekas’s elabora- tion of the psychological realities revealed in Shadows draws directly on Kracauer’s arguments about a distinctly cinematic form of drama:

The actors and the director improvised as they went along, searching into their own experiences, listening, without forcing, without dramatizing. It is this immediacy of the drama- less, beginningless, and endless episode which is the most

“TIME AND HOW TO NOTE IT DOWN” ◆ 41 important aspect of Shadows. The true value of the “immediacy” being not its realism, but its cinematic properties. The film’s rhythm, its temperament is not that of the ideas in it, but, primarily, that of the people in it, their faces, their movements, their tone of voice, their stammerings, their pauses—their psychological reality as revealed through the most insignificant daily incidents and situations. . . . With- out knowing it, Cassavetes and his actors created a work that moved freely in what Siegfried Kracauer has called “camera reality”—a film free from literary and theatrical ideas.31

For both Mekas and Kracauer, camera-reality does not imply a rejection of narrative per se. On the one hand, it is clear that too much narrative steers cinema in the direction of literature and theater, yet on the other, narrative principles of character, story, and drama remain important cinematic values in the films that both writers admire.32 For both it is a matter of identifying those styles of narrative that enable, rather than negate, the engagement with contingency and “endless- ness” that gives camera-reality its distinctive quality. This issue lies at the heart of the controversy surrounding the two versions of Shad ows and Mekas’s championing of Pull My Daisy. He describes Pull My Daisy as the perfect blend of

elements of improvisation and conscious planning, both in camera work and directing. The plotless episode has never been more eloquent than it is in this film. That feeling of “being there,” of which [Richard] Leacock speaks in connection with the documentary, was achieved in this fictional film to the highest degree.33

We can now refine the questions that will guide our engagement with Frank’s film. How does Pull My Daisy promote and keep in check this sense of “being there”? What might the copresence of fictional and docu-

42 ◆ “TIME AND HOW TO NOTE IT DOWN” mentary agendas in this landmark film reveal about the role of narrative in both Frank’s work and the New American Cinema more generally?

NECKTIES AND TORTURED SOCKS The first thing to note is Pull My Daisy’s status as an adaptation. Frank and his codirector, Alfred Leslie, adapted the screenplay from the third act of Jack Kerouac’s Beat Generation, an unproduced play based on an incident that took place when the author was visiting his friends Neal and Carolyn Cassady in Los Gatos, California. After attending a speech by a progressive bishop, Carolyn invited the clergyman to her home. On his arrival the bishop, accompanied by his mother and aunt, was greeted by a group of friends that included Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Peter Orlovsky. In the film the location shifts to New York, and instead of being accompanied by his mother and aunt, the bishop arrives with his mother and sister. But the central drama involving the interaction between the young poets and the straight-laced visitors remains the same. The film was shot in Leslie’s Lower East Side apartment. Apart from Delphine Seyrig, who plays the wife, and Denise Parker, who has a small nonspeaking part, the cast is made up of nonprofessional actors drawn from New York’s community of artists and writers: Larry Rivers, a leading postwar painter, plays the role of Milo, a railroad brakeman; Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and Orlovsky are his poet friends; Richard Bellamy, a gallery director and member of New York’s Tenth Street community of artists, plays the young bishop; Alice Neel, a noted portrait painter, plays the bishop’s mother. The decision to shoot the film silent and rely on Kerouac’s voice- over to convey the interactions between the characters came about when Leslie heard a tape recording of the writer improvising The Beat Generation. “You can’t act out Kerouac’s characters,” he decided, “because they’re all poetry. . . . They’re not independent people, independent characters. Each person he writes about is another aspect of himself.”34 As well as signaling Kerouac’s ownership of the characters,

“TIME AND HOW TO NOTE IT DOWN” ◆ 43 the decision to shoot the film silent meant that the filmmakers were freed from the technical requirements of recording cleanly captured dialogue. The film was shot on 16 mm black-and-white film and later enlarged to 35 mm for distribution. A great deal of preplanning went into the shooting. Leslie, who was responsible for staging the action, blocked each scene meticulously. Although it did not always eventu- ate, the filmmakers planned on shooting at least three takes of each setup.35 From approximately thirty hours of footage, a film with a running time of twenty-eight minutes emerged. With a rough cut of the film playing in front of him, Kerouac recorded the voice-over narration three times, each time varying the tone, intonation, and content. The version used on the film’s soundtrack is an amalgam of material from the three versions, spliced together by Frank and Leslie. In the publicity material that accompanied the film’s distribution, the filmmakers use as a statement of intent a declaration by the Ameri can author, screenwriter, and critic James Agee: “The films I most eagerly look forward to will not be documentaries but works of pure fiction, played against, and into, and in collaboration with unrehearsed and uninvented reality.”36 Published in the Nation on January 25, 1947, Agee’s declaration was prompted, in part, by his viewing of Neorealist dramas such as Rossellini’s Rome, Open City (1945) and Paisà (1946) and Vittorio De Sica’s Shoeshine (1946). The work of the Neorealists helped inspire a group of films that includes Morris Engel’s trilogy Little Fugitive (1953), Lovers and Lollipops (1956), and Weddings and Babies (1958) and Sidney Meyers’s The Quiet One (1948). Using real locations and a mixture of professional and nonprofessional actors, these films ground their stories in a tangible sense of everyday reality. In Pull My Daisy this emphasis is evident in the opening panning shot of the apartment. Positioned above eye level, the camera surveys an ornate lampshade and a two-seater sofa, above which hangs a small upper-body portrait of a man. Continuing its pan around the room, the camera passes a large painting in which a man holding a brush

44 ◆ “TIME AND HOW TO NOTE IT DOWN” looks down at an easel. When the panning movement arrives at a sec- tion of blank white wall, a cross-fade shifts our perspective to a shot from ceiling height of a round table with four chairs. The presence of the lampshade and the two-seater sofa confirms that we are still in the same room as the previous shot, but viewing it from a different angle. After a few moments, a cut takes us to another interior space teeming with visual details: a cot containing a sleeping figure, a large icebox, rows of shelves filled with small tins of paint, a pile of frames stacked in a corner. In the background a woman is pulling back the shutters of the apartment windows; her actions signal that the film’s story is about to begin. When the camera cuts to a position closer to the woman, the opening music fades out, and Kerouac’s voice-over commences:

Early morning in the universe. The wife is getting up, opening up the windows, in this loft that’s in The Bowery in the Lower East Side, New York. She’s a painter and her husband’s a railroad brakeman and he’s coming home in a couple of hours, about five hours, from the local. ’Course the room’s in a mess. There’s her husband’s coat on a chair—been there for three days—neckties and his tortured socks.

Kerouac’s opening narration confirms the location for the story, introduces two of the main characters, and fills in a little of their back- grounds. If we pay attention to his words, we can see that, as well as establishing the basis of the story, the voice-over serves the more fundamental role of pointing to particular elements in the filmic world. Indeed, part of the pleasure of the film is in listening to how Kerouac directs our eyes to the existence of the people, places, and objects on- screen while filling in just enough of the dialogue to maintain a sense of the story. The husband’s coat slung over the chair, the neckties and tortured socks: these objects are made present to us as objects by a

“TIME AND HOW TO NOTE IT DOWN” ◆ 45 spectator who is both part of the film and outside it, narrating what he sees. A knock on the door signals the arrival of Milo’s poet friends:

Gregory Corso and Allen Ginsberg there, laying their beer cans out on the table, bringing up all the wine, wearing hoods and parkas, falling on the couch, all bursting with poetry while she’s saying, Now you get your coat, get your little hat and we’re going to go off to school. Health to you this morning Mr. Hart Crane. No bridge. He says, Look at all those cars out there. There’s nothing out there but a million screaming ninety-year-old men being run over by gasoline trucks. So throw the match on it.

After entering the loft, Corso and Ginsberg take their places near the front windows. Seemingly oblivious to their presence, Milo’s wife continues to get her son—played by Frank’s own son, Pablo—ready for school. It is only after her departure from the loft that she acknowledges the two interlopers with a look up at the windows. But the camera’s point of view at this moment is not with the wife and her young son; it remains instead with Ginsberg and Corso, who have set up camp with their cigarettes and beer. This alignment is indicative of the film’s broader engagement with postwar culture. Seen through the windows of the loft, the movement of the cars, trucks, and buses on the street below stands in for the ordered drudgery of everyday life. The task faced by the filmmakers is to replace this ordered movement with the leaps of thought and quicksilver emotions that distinguish the world inside the loft, the world of the poets. This is summed up in Kerouac’s command: “So throw the match on it.” In a short introduction to the poetry of the San Francisco Renais- sance Group, Kerouac describes the work of his peers as “a kind of new-old Zen Lunacy poetry, writing whatever comes into your head as it comes, poetry returned to its origin, in the bardic child.” He links this highly subjective form of spontaneous address to the mental discipline

46 ◆ “TIME AND HOW TO NOTE IT DOWN” FIGURE 1. Gregory Corso and Allen Ginsberg in Pull My Daisy (Robert Frank, 1959). Copyright Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie.

of “pointing out things directly, purely, concretely, no abstractions or explanations.”37 The literary precedent for this type of mental discipline is the haiku, a form of poetic expression that Kerouac practiced throughout his career. Hovering in the background of these observations is the writer’s interest in the capacities of film and photography to model a particular type of writing. Evidence of this interest can be found in his introduction to The Americans, as well as his less well- known account of the trip to Florida with Frank. In both pieces of

“TIME AND HOW TO NOTE IT DOWN” ◆ 47 FIGURE 2. David Amram, Peter Orlovsky, Gregory Corso, and Allen Ginsberg in Pull My Daisy (Robert Frank, 1959). Copyright Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie.

writing, Kerouac focuses on Frank’s ability to reveal aspects of Ameri- can life that other photographers have tended to ignore:

A trailer camp . . . a swimming pool . . . Spanish moss waving from old trees . . . and while prowling around to photograph a white pony tethered by the pool we spot four frogs on a stick floating in the cerulean pool . . . look closely and judge for yourself whether the frogs are meditating. A Melody Home

48 ◆ “TIME AND HOW TO NOTE IT DOWN” trailer, the canaries in the window cage, and a little way down the road, the inevitable roadside Florida zoo and the old alli- gator slumbering like a thousand years and too lazy to shake his horny snout and shake off the peanut shells on his nose and eyes . . . mooning in his gravy.38

Watching Frank move “like a cat, or an angry bear, in the grass and roads, shooting whatever he wants to see,” the writer muses: “How I wished I’d have had a camera of my own, a mad mental camera that could register pictorial shots, of the photographic artist himself prowling about for his ultimate shot—an epic in itself.”39 We need to be careful not to misinterpret Kerouac here. He is not proposing an end to writing, nor its replacement by the camera. Instead, he is using Frank’s method of working to identify a writing practice able to render the experience of a world appearing before our eyes. In “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose,” he refers to this writerly method as a form of sketching that begins not from a “preconceived idea of what to say about image but from jewel center of interest in subject of image at moment of writing.” “Nothing is muddy that runs in time and to laws of time.”40 Kerouac’s insistence on developing methods of writing able to convey the temporally inflected nature of perception confirms the extent to which his work is indebted to media such as film and photography, media in which we experience the world in and through a direct experience of time. Kerouac’s narration in Pull My Daisy thus marks the intersection of Agee’s promotion of a style of cinematic fiction “played against, and into, and in collaboration with unrehearsed and uninvented reality” and forms of literary experimentation central to the film’s genesis. It shows how, during the postwar period, literature, film, and photography crossed paths in their determination to develop forms of narration able to redeem the material conditions of everyday life. This agenda also motivates Kracauer’s claim in Theory of Film that “film exposes to view a world never seen before, a world as elusive as [Edgar Allan] Poe’s purloined letter, which cannot be found because it is

“TIME AND HOW TO NOTE IT DOWN” ◆ 49 within everybody’s reach.”41 The most effective means to reveal this unseen world, Kracauer proposes, is a narrative structure that is epi sodic or porous, a narrative structure, in other words, that is “full of gaps into which environmental life may stream.”42 In Pull My Daisy environmental life incorporates all of the objects and surface clutter to which Frank’s camera and the off-screen narrator point. But we can also understand this term more broadly and take it to refer to the moments of self-expression and social interaction that dissipate

FIGURE 3. Larry Rivers in Pull My Daisy (Robert Frank, 1959). Copyright Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie.

50 ◆ “TIME AND HOW TO NOTE IT DOWN” FIGURE 4. Pull My Daisy (Robert Frank, 1959). Copyright Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie.

the film’s narrative. Gregory Corso’s goofing to the bishop about Bud- dhism, Peter Orlovsky’s questions about holiness and baseball, Mezz McGillicuddy’s (David Amram) musical interjections, even Milo’s im- promptu dancing and running argument with his exasperated wife: these activities reveal the individual personalities that make up this environment, as well as something larger or more diffuse, its spirit of place. Kerouac’s dialogue renditions and off-the-cuff musings work in tandem with the camera’s scrutiny of the people and objects in the loft to make this spirit cinematically present. When Milo and his friends gather at the table with the bishop, the camera begins a series of slow circular pans. It surveys the array of faces scattered around the room, as well as the domestic clutter visible in the

“TIME AND HOW TO NOTE IT DOWN” ◆ 51 background: the dishes in the dish rack, the coffee pot on the stove, the plates stacked on the shelf, the pile of canvases next to the icebox. Many years after his involvement in Pull My Daisy, Ginsberg spoke about the affinities between photography and poetry. Both endeavors, he argues, require recognition of “the transitoriness of the moment.” Both the poet and the photographer must pay close attention to “the minute particular details of the culture: the street, the people, their dress, clothes and gestures.”43 The value of this attentiveness is that it can convey the distinctive qualities of the present, as well as how this present will be recognized in the broader sweep of history. Not surprisingly, Ginsberg identifies this quality of attention as crucial to the success of Pull My Daisy. “The film had the quality . . . of playing for eternity,” he recalls, “and at the same time being right there in time.”44

HOME MOVIES In contextualizing Pull My Daisy’s approach to narrative, we need to consider another form of filmmaking that played a vital role in the history of the New American Cinema: the home movie. Leslie himself claims that the intention behind the film was to create a “facsimile of a home movie” about the way of life of the writers and artists featured in the film.45 During the postwar period, the small-scale intimacy of the home movie helped experimental filmmakers conceptualize cine ma’s place and value outside of an overtly commercial function. This did not rule out the use of fictional characters or the creation of stories, but it did ensure that these activities were grounded in social and familial networks that existed alongside the film. Shot between 1965 and 1969, Mekas’s Walden (1969), for example, is an accumulation of already completed films and a vast archive of footage that records the people, places, and events of the New York avant-garde film community. The array of individuals and events encompassed in this film contrasts with Stan Brakhage’s approach in films such as Wedlock House: An Intercourse (1959) and Window Water Baby Moving (1959). These

52 ◆ “TIME AND HOW TO NOTE IT DOWN” films focus more exclusively on the private, domestic sphere, taking as their subject aspects of Brakhage’s married life with his wife, Jane, their marital tensions, and the birth of their first child. Despite differences in the scope of these works, by framing their films as home movies, both Mekas and Brakhage embed the activity of filmmaking at the very center of their lives; it enables them to make sense of the events that shape their lives as artists, husbands, and parents. Pull My Daisy conforms to this “radically inspired revision of the home movie.”46 But the decision to shoot the film silent and rely on Ker- ouac’s voice-over also suggests that the appeal of the home movie lies in its ability to stage a confrontation between two forms of temporal experience central to the cinema: the “now” of viewing and the “then” of filming. The development of 16 mm and 8 mm film enabled amateur filmmakers to bring the experience of making and watching movies into the domestic environment. Yet in the period up till the early 1970s at least, one consequence of this infiltration of the domestic environment by filmmaking was, effectively, the loss of speech. The silence of the early home-movie formats paralleled the silence that characterized cinema’s first decades: not really a silence at all but rather a disjunction between an image track and a series of orchestrations occurring alongside the screening. It was this loss of speech that, for early cinemagoers, gave motion-picture images such a ghostly quality. Even with the various forms of musical accompaniment, the inability to restore the sounds that emanated from the mouths of the people on-screen made audible, as well as visible, the noncoincidence between the present of viewing and the present brought to life on-screen. In part, at least, the role of the home-movie filmmaker–projectionist was to cover over this gap by bringing the audience up to date with the events captured on-screen. Kerouac’s narration continues this vital task of mediating between the moment captured in the image and the moment of viewing. His affection for the people depicted on-screen suggests the type of personalized engagement that distinguishes home-movie narration. Un- like home-movie narration, however, which tends to historicize the

“TIME AND HOW TO NOTE IT DOWN” ◆ 53 objects, people, and activities depicted, Kerouac’s narration slides between aligning itself with the “now” of the image and giving voice to a recognition of its pastness:

Yes, it’s early, late or middle Friday evening in the universe. Oh, the sounds of time are pouring through the window and the key. All ideardian windows and bedarveled bedarveled mad bedraggled robes that rolled in the cave of Amontillado and all the sherried heroes lost and caved up, and transyl vanian heroes mixing themselves up with glazer vup and the hydrogen bomb of hope.

The overt playfulness of this passage does not disguise the fact that it too points to something, namely the astonishment generated by cinema’s ability to conflate, yet hold separate, two renditions of the present: the present as bound to the contingent here-and-now and the present as something that once existed, that-has- been. This astonishment is closely tied to the photographic properties of the images themselves. For Kerouac the lure of film and photography resides in their ability to remind us of the transitoriness of things. Concurrent with this is an activation of memory. “Like Proust be an old teahead of time,” he admon- ishes other writers. “Write in recollection and amazement for yourself.”47 Pull My Daisy’s voice-over embodies just such a form of writing, located at the crossroads of the Spontaneous Prose method and the heightened temporal consciousness that distinguishes the New American Cinema. On one level Mekas was right: Pull My Daisy does enact a direction forward for film that involves a return to cinema’s past. Yet the consequence of this reengagement is not, as Mekas claims, an affirmation of cinematic immediacy; it is rather an affirmation of something more contradictory: cinema’s ability to render an experience of the present- as-past. Through a deft separation of image and sound, Pull My Daisy exemplifies a style of home-movie narrative that is able to relay stories and fictional characters while reflecting on the temporality of the

54 ◆ “TIME AND HOW TO NOTE IT DOWN” storytelling. It is this temporal consciousness that makes the film such an important landmark in the formation of the New American Cinema and Frank’s career as a filmmaker.

FROM EAR TO EYE The more we look at and listen to Pull My Daisy, the more the impression of spontaneity referred to by critics is overladen with an awareness of things captured in and through their belated echo. Writing as deferral, as embodying the always-already-past nature of appre- hension: during the postwar period this idea of writing was used to account for forms of narration in which the telling of a story—real or fictional—occurred hand in hand with an acknowledgment of the process of telling. This understanding of writing can be traced to the influence of two important strands of thought. The first involves ideas and models of analysis imported from the study of modernist literature by philosophers and literary theorists such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Roland Barthes. In the early work of Barthes, especially, writing embodies a displacement of the principles of invisibility and seamlessness that govern realist literature and a renewed attention to the structures and formal features of narrative activity. “Writing is . . . essentially the morality of form,” he explains, “the choice of that social area within which the writer elects to situate the Nature of his language.”48 During the 1960s, writing signaled an acute awareness of the profound philosophical and conceptual issues associated with formal concerns. It was this emphasis that bridged the investigations into literary form with the analysis of formal systems occurring in congruent media such as film. The second strand of thought represents a more dispersed gathering of critical reflection concerned with the notion of a specifically cine matic form of writing. In the years immediately after the end of World War II, the most influential formulation of this idea was by Alexandre Astruc. In “The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: La Caméra-Stylo,” Astruc

“TIME AND HOW TO NOTE IT DOWN” ◆ 55 claims that the value of considering film as a form of writing lies in its foregrounding of a fundamental question: how to express thought?

All thought, like all feeling, is a relationship between one human being and another human being or certain objects which form part of his universe. It is by clarifying these relationships, by making a tangible allusion, that the cinema can really make itself the vehicle of thought.49

For Astruc the postwar period brought a renewed sense of optimism: “From today onwards, it will be possible for the cinema to produce works which are equivalent, in their profundity and meaning, to the novels of [William] Faulkner and [André] Malraux, to the essays of Sartre and [Albert] Camus.”50 The development of 16 mm–film technologies opened the door to a new era of cinematic expression, the era of the caméra-stylo (camera-pen): “I mean that the cinema will gradu ally break free from the tyranny of what is visual, from the image for its own sake, from the immediate and concrete demands of the narrative, to become a means of writing just as flexible and subtle as written language.”51 Instead of slavishly pursuing cinematic equivalents for the ideas found in the work of the great authors, filmmakers could use the caméra-stylo to express a form of thought specific to the cinema. This expansion in cinema’s creative potential meant that the director ceased to be a mere illustrator and became, in the fullest sense of the term, an author. During the postwar period, advances in 16 mm–film technologies paved the way for new styles of filmic writing characterized by both an expansion in the range of content and a dismantling of distinctions between narrative and nonnarrative film. The development that Astruc did not foresee was that cinema’s ability to inscribe thought would also become a matter of new types of narrative voice. In films such as Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog (1955) and Chris Marker’s Letter From Siberia (1957), an off-screen voice poses fundamental questions about the pos-

56 ◆ “TIME AND HOW TO NOTE IT DOWN” sibility of an authoritative point of view: How should we understand these images? What can they not show? How might they be arranged differently? In his review of Marker’s film, André Bazin describes the function of these off-screen voices as generating a sense of verbal intelligence: “Better, it might be said that the basic element is the beauty of what is said and heard, that intelligence flows from the audio element to the visual. The montage has been forged from ear to eye.”52 These narrative voices could also be heard across the Atlantic. But in the New American Cinema, the voice-over tends to shun the big- picture reflections found in films such as Night and Fog in favor of a more personalized engagement with the images on-screen. In Mekas’s Walden, for example, the rise of the antiwar protest movement, the John Lennon and Yoko Ono Montreal bed-in for peace, and the establishment of the New York independent film community are viewed from the perspective of the filmmaker’s day-to-day travails. Mekas’s heavily accented voice-over imbues the film with a sense of fragility that its celebration of documentary immediacy does little to temper. “I haven’t dreamt lately,” the narrator declares at one point. “I don’t seem to remember my dreams any longer. I am afraid to walk barefoot, even in the room, as if some terrible microbes were waiting for me, or I’ll step on glass splinters. . . . Am I really losing slowly everything I had brought with me from the outside?” These reflections evoke what P. Adams Sitney aptly describes as “the solitude of an observer who is seldom at home in society.”53 Pull My Daisy established a precedent for this type of narration. The careful editing of the three different versions of Kerouac’s voice- over by Frank and Leslie emphasizes rather than plays down the voice’s volatile performative function. At times, Kerouac’s description of the material life of the apartment takes on the musicality that serves as a defining aspect of his Spontaneous Prose method:

Dishes, toothbrushes, cockroaches, cockroaches, coffee cock roaches, stove cockroaches, city cockroaches, spot cockroaches,

“TIME AND HOW TO NOTE IT DOWN” ◆ 57 FIGURE 5. Gregory Corso in Pull My Daisy (Robert Frank, 1959). Copyright Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie.

melted cheese cockroaches, flour cockroaches, Chaplin cockroaches, peanut butter cockroaches—cockroach cockroach— cockroach of the eyes—cockroach, mirror, boom, bang—Jung, Freud, Jung, Reich.

In these passages the voice-over is again pointing to something: neither character nor story nor even the messiness of the loft but rather the act of enunciation itself. The dramatic changes in pitch, vocal

58 ◆ “TIME AND HOW TO NOTE IT DOWN” FIGURE 6. Pull My Daisy (Robert Frank, 1959). Copyright Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie.

register, and cadence that define Kerouac’s voice-over invite us to share in the pleasure of this enunciation at the same time as they locate the film and its inhabitants as past. “[Kerouac’s] voice is the last outpost of familiarity before the scene passes into the world and history,” observes Eileen Myles. “He’s what lets ‘us’ in. His friends, their rooms, their lives in their pastness.”54 Just as Frank’s work as a photographer helped Kerouac to grasp a form of writing grounded in the contingent details of everyday life, the

“TIME AND HOW TO NOTE IT DOWN” ◆ 59 process of splicing together the different versions of Kerouac’s voice- over narration helped Frank to understand how the voice may be used to inscribe a film with a range of emotions and temporal registers that both complement and press against the time of the image itself. The legacy of this discovery can be heard in Frank’s own voice-over in films such as Conversations in Vermont, Life Dances On . . . , Home Im provements, and The Present. The lesson of Pull My Daisy, then, is the lesson that, in “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose,” Kerouac attributes to William Carlos Williams: “Time and how to note it down.”55 Nearly sixty years later, Williams’s statement confronts us as a conundrum that makes different demands on the filmmaker, the writer, and the photographer. In part, the value of Frank’s career is that it allows us to chart the intersection of these different responses in a single body of work. It suggests that one way to understand this intersection of media is as an activity of writing.

60 ◆ “TIME AND HOW TO NOTE IT DOWN” 2 HE’S NOT THERE Me and My Brother, One Hour

The world of which I am a part includes Julius Orlovsky. Julius is a cata tonic, a silent man; he is released from a state institution in the care of his brother Peter. Sounds and images pass him and no reaction comes from him. In the course of the film he becomes like all the other people in front of my camera—an actor. At times most of us are silently acting because it would be too painful not to act and too cruel to talk of the truth which exists. . . . To complete this circle Joseph Chaikin, the Actor, plays Julius and becomes me at the same time. —Robert Frank

Robert Frank began work on Me and My Brother with the intention of producing an adaptation of Allen Ginsberg’s long prose poem Kaddish. Despite the fact that Ginsberg had written a script, the project stalled when it failed to attract the necessary financial support. But the time spent working on Kaddish sowed the seeds for another project with striking similarities to Ginsberg’s devastating account of his mother’s mental illness. For fifteen years Julius Orlovsky, the brother of Gins- berg’s partner, Peter Orlovsky, had been a psychiatric patient in Central Islip State Hospital. On January 17, 1965, he was released from hospital into the care of his brother. When Frank began filming their relationship, the two brothers were sharing a flat with Ginsberg on New York’s Lower East Side. In the film Peter talks candidly about his frustrations with Julius’s catatonic behavior: “He gets up, but he doesn’t go to wash his face . . . or brush his teeth or go to the bathroom . . . or start to make breakfast. . . . He just gets up and stares at his mattress and his wrinkled sheet.” In an earlier scene, Peter describes the effects of his brother’s medication to an audience at a poetry reading: “It’s worser

◆ 61 than pot. It’s worser than marijuana—because it disinfocals yours eyes and disinfocals your bowels.” As Peter talks, Julius sits quietly behind his brother on stage, gazing at the audience. When the two poets urge him to speak by placing a microphone near his face, he responds by softly echoing their words: “Say something.” Peter’s struggles with his brother culminate during a trip to San Francisco when Julius disappears. This was not the first time that he had wandered off. In order to deal with the difficulties posed by Julius’s unpredictable behavior and secure additional funding for the project, Frank hired the actor and theater director Joseph Chaikin to

FIGURE 7. Allen Ginsberg, Julius Orlovsky, and Peter Orlovsky in Me and My Brother (Robert Frank, 1968). Copyright Robert Frank.

62 ◆ HE’S NOT THERE FIGURE 8. Peter Orlovsky, Allen Ginsberg, and Julius Orlovsky in Me and My Brother (Robert Frank, 1968). Copyright Robert Frank. play the role of Julius. Chaikin’s performance is complemented by that of a number of other professional actors: Christopher Walken plays the role of a filmmaker shooting Julius’s story; Roscoe Lee Browne takes on the role of a photographer; John Coe plays Julius’s psychiatrist; and Nancy Fish plays an actress who comments on the ethics of filmmaking. When Me and My Brother was released, Jonas Mekas described its blending of fictional and documentary elements as “un- believably phony.” “I seemed to like all of the footage,” he writes. “But

HE’S NOT THERE ◆ 63 I seemed to hate what was done with the footage. I kept cursing the editor.”1 One week later, he continues his discussion of the film: “I dis- liked Frank’s movie because he kept trying (he or the editor) to make it more meaningful, more important, more significant, deeper than the reality itself which was caught by Frank in the footage.”2 Some years after its original release, Frank himself offered an equally critical assessment of the film. In an interview published in Film Com ment, he outlines the changes and difficulties that he had to cope with during the filming. Looking back on how he dealt with these changes, he admits he made a mistake: “I should have just accepted what was there and not try to make it into something else. . . . I really tried to twist it into a shape that I felt the film needed in order to be a full- length film. And now, if I was to re-edit the film or redo it, I would let it be the way the footage came out and not try to over-edit it or force it into telling a specific story.”3 The disconcerting shifts between fictional and documentary approaches, the formal disjunctions between image and sound, and the switching between color and black-and-white film do make Me and My Brother a challenging cinematic experience. But far from diminishing the film’s value, they provide important clues to understanding Frank’s emergence as a filmmaker and his place within the broader renegotiation of documentary and fiction filmmaking that was occurring during the 1960s. Frank began work on Me and My Brother immediately after completing two fiction projects: The Sin of Jesus (1961), an adaptation of a short story by Isaac Babel, and OK End Here (1963), which deals with a relationship that appears to be on the point of collapse. Both films reveal the influence of European filmmakers such as Michelangelo Antonioni, Ingmar Bergman, and Robert Bresson. In OK End Here, especially, the traditional emphasis on plot is replaced by a focus on registering the moments of doubt and confusion that underpin inter personal relationships. Yet while both films constitute milestones in Frank’s development as a filmmaker, they also represent a retreat from the provocative mixture of documentary and fictional elements found

64 ◆ HE’S NOT THERE in Pull My Daisy. The significance of Me and My Brother, I want to suggest, is that it marks a reengagement with the creative possibilities arising from the interaction of these two elements. The three years Frank spent working on the film, employing different approaches and struggling to compensate for the behavior of his central character, helped him to refine the narrative structures and methods of filming that distinguish his career. These structures and methods incorporate an unraveling—of character and story, as well as the filmmaker’s authority over the material being filmed.

CROSSING FRONTIERS “In this film all events and people are real. Whatever is unreal is purely my imagination.” Superimposed on a shot of an open Bible, this statement serves to preface Me and My Brother’s intermingling of documentary and fictional elements. During the second half of the 1960s, these sorts of statements were part of a process of wide-scale formal experimentation. In films such as Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot le fou (1965) and 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (1967), the acknowledgment of the filmmaking process distances the audience from the story and encourages an awareness of its construction and effects. A reflexive engagement with the conventions of fiction is also evident in Me and My Brother. During the prologue, actors playing the roles of Peter and Julius partake in the filming of a sex experiment. Peter tries to justify the filming to his brother: “This is the movies, Julius. A little movie never hurt anybody, especially a love scene. How can you be afraid of a love scene, Julius?” The psychiatrist overseeing the filming echoes Peter’s justifications: “All you have to do is behave however you behave in real life. You don’t have to act.” These justifications remind us of the camera’s tendency to objectify its subjects. More pointedly, they also acknowledge that there might be something exploitative in Frank’s own engagement with his central subject. The overall effect of the prologue is to foreground a set of questions that echo across the

HE’S NOT THERE ◆ 65 new cinemas of the 1960s: How do we film this story? What forms of narration could do justice to its central subject? In Me and My Brother, the constant shifts in perspective and style are a clear indication of Frank’s willingness to take up the formal implications of posing such questions. In mapping the creative influences that helped shape the production of Me and My Brother, we need to pay particular attention to changes in the field of documentary filmmaking. In North America the trigger for much of the discussion of documentary cinema was the emergence of Direct Cinema. Taking advantage of the freedom of movement and intimacy offered by the introduction of lightweight, noiseless cameras, highly sensitive film stock, and portable sound recording equipment, directors such as Richard Leacock, D. A. Penne- baker, Albert and David Maysles, and Frederick Wiseman established a style of documentary filmmaking that shunned the didacticism of earlier documentary styles. The film most often identified as the first major product of Direct Cinema is Primary (1960). Shot by Leacock, Albert Maysles, and Terence Macartney-Filgate, this film exhibited a model of operation and exposition that was to be replicated by a number of films over the next few years. The American film writer Stephen Mamber refers to this model as a “crisis structure”: the films focus on individuals (usually male) caught in an inherently dramatic crisis situation leading to a climax and inevitable resolution.4 Underpinning this model of operation is the belief that individuals under pressure are far less likely to be affected by the filmmaking, thus allowing the filmmaker to capture a more authentic account of the personality under scrutiny. Primary’s status as an exemplar of the new forms of documentary film was confirmed in 1961 when it received Film Culture magazine’s Third Independent Film Award. In the press release announcing the decision, the award committee praises the filmmakers for capturing “scenes of real life with unprecedented authenticity, immediacy, and

66 ◆ HE’S NOT THERE truth.” They achieve this outcome, the press release goes on to claim, by “renouncing old controlled techniques; by letting themselves be guided by the happening scene itself; by concentrating themselves only on man himself, without imposing on him any preconceived ‘form’ or ‘idea’ or ‘importance.’ ”5 The award committee’s statement compares Primary’s achievements with those of the two previous recipients of the award: John Cassavetes’s Shadows and Frank’s Pull My Daisy. Although these earlier films demonstrated new approaches in film style, the article suggests that Primary goes one step further: “By exploring new camera, sound, and lighting methods, it enables the film-maker to pierce deeper into the area of new content as well.”6 For others Primary was neither a turning point nor a significant advance, but rather a continuation of deep-seated problems that lay at the heart of the documentary project. In fact, by the mid-1960s the uncontrolled approach promoted in the work of Leacock, Pennebaker, and the Maysles brothers was the subject of sustained criticism by filmmakers and writers alike. The most substantial rebuttal of Direct Cinema by a North American filmmaker came from Shirley Clarke. “There is no real difference between a traditional fiction film and a documentary,” she is quoted as saying. “I’ve never made a documentary. There is no such trip.”7 For Clarke the fundamental problem was that, although Direct Cinema sought to move away from the didacticism of traditional documentary devices such as voice-over narration and staged encounters, it failed to take adequate account of the filmmaker’s own implication in determining the events on-screen. This failure limited the capacity of these films to engage with a core issue of 1960s cinematic experimentation: the uneasy divide between fiction and documentary. In Clarke’s films the acknowledgment of the filmmaker’s subjectivity corresponds with a focus on individuals whose behavior and position in life draw attention to the inescapably fictive nature of public identity—in other words, the interplay between being and acting. The dramatic tension that sustains our engagement with

HE’S NOT THERE ◆ 67 films such as The Connection (1961), The Cool World (1964), and Por trait of Jason (1967) stems from Clarke’s ability to draw out moments when this performance falters or undergoes a crisis that implicates not only the subject of the filmmaking but also the filmmakers. Based on Jack Gelber’s off-Broadway play of the same name, Clarke’s first feature-length film, The Connection, focuses on the attempts of a documentary filmmaker, Jim Dunn (William Redfield), and his camera man to film a group of jazz musicians and drug addicts waiting to score. During the filming the director grows increasingly frustrated by the hostility of his subjects. We see him pleading with the drug addicts to “act natural”: “I’m not interested in making a Hollywood picture. . . . I’m just trying to make an honest human document.” The junkies respond to the presence of the camera by turning away or offering their own strung-out philosophies about life and society. The volatile interplay between the filmmakers and the film’s subjects culminates when the director shoots up and uses a handheld camera to record details and activities that capture his befuddled attention. Noticing a small cockroach moving along a wall, he patiently records the insect’s perambulations. At the time of the film’s release, Penelope Gilliatt described Dunn’s transformation from a controlling force to a subject in his own right as a deliberate reconceptualization of the place and role of the camera. “In most films,” she observes, “the camera has no identity: it is simply a conveniently agile window through which one can stare without being seen. . . . In The Connection, on the other hand, the camera is always a palpable object.”8 More than a palpable object, the camera functions here as a (re)active force. In The Connection we watch the director cross the line between himself and his subjects. Yet the outcome of this transgression is known before it even occurs. This is because the director’s folly is part of the script. Thus, the insights and revelations generated by the film are predetermined by the fiction. Based on Warren Miller’s best- selling novel about Harlem teenagers, Clarke’s next film, The Cool World, also relies on the supporting architecture of a script. Instead

68 ◆ HE’S NOT THERE of using professional actors, however, the filmmakers used untrained Harlem teenagers, who were chosen and coached by Clarke’s partner and collaborator Carl Lee. The interplay between fiction and documentary is reinforced by the decision to shoot the film on location. Clarke’s incorporation of a number of sequences documenting the street life of Harlem ensures that the film’s location is more than just a backdrop to the story. Echoing the investment in location shooting characteristic of Italian Neorealist dramas of the late 1940s and 1950s, The Cool World blurs the line between elements that preexist the filming and elements that have been consciously created by the filmmakers. The film’s limitations stem from its reliance on a model of narrative exposition found in a number of other late-1950s Hollywood social-problem films. The young actors’ open acknowledgment of the place of the camera disrupts the seamlessness of classical Hollywood storytelling. But the traditional moment of narrative denouement that brings together and resolves the film’s various narrative threads ensures that the filmmaker’s—as well as spectator’s—authority remains unchallenged. Portrait of Jason marks a crucial advance in Clarke’s investigation of the relationship between filmmaker and subject by suspending the possibility of narrative resolution. The film is a direct-to-camera interview with self-declared gay black hustler Jason Holliday, née Aaron Payne, who regales us with stories of his life as a house-boy for rich white women, his childhood in Alabama, his troubled relations with his friends, his belief in the importance of having a gimmick, his encounters with “head-shrinkers,” and his traumatic relationship with his father, “Brother Tough.” He even trials his nightclub imperson- ation of Mae West. When his patter slows down, Clarke calls from off- screen: “What else you got?” Refilling his glass, Jason sets off with more stories, more shtick. If we need to know what drives these theatrics, he is only too proud to tell us: “This is my moment. I’m here . . . on the throne. . . . This is my chance to really feel myself and say: ‘Yeah. I’m the bitch.’ Believe it. You amateur cunts take notice.”

HE’S NOT THERE ◆ 69 Clarke spent twelve hours filming Jason in the living room of her New York apartment. It took this long because of the need to stop filming every ten minutes to reload the cameras. During some of these stoppages, the tape recorder is left to run, and we hear Clarke issuing Jason and the crew with directions. We also hear Jason engaging with the crew and seeking feedback from Clarke and Lee. These conversations affirm a key aspect of the film: as much as the film is about Jason—his stories, his misadventures, his desire to be “the bitch”—it is also about his relationship with the filmmakers. In other words, the film is not merely a portrait of Jason; it is also a portrait of Clarke and Lee. This dual objective becomes increasingly apparent as the film proceeds. The off-screen interjections from Clarke and Lee turn deliberately hurtful and are clearly intended to draw an emotional response. “Are you lonely?” the director asks Jason. Unimpressed with his responses, she begins to taunt him: “You’re not suffering.” Jason’s tears suggest that his façade is crumbling. Yet when Clarke calls a halt to proceedings, he composes himself: “Oh, that was beautiful. I’m happy about the whole thing.” Rather than giving the lie to his tears, this statement highlights the difficulty of arriving at any conclusive assessment of the authenticity of Jason’s performance. In an interview Clarke clarifies that Portrait of Jason was made as a riposte to the views of documentarians such as Leacock and Penne- baker. She points to the fact that Leacock’s “uncontrolled” approach to documentary actually relies on the imposition of a strict process of editorial control: “If you take twelve days of shooting and edit only the climax points, you get crap. My theory was you don’t take out the boring parts—the way someone reaches those climaxes, or an idea or whatever.” She goes on: “We have rarely allowed anyone to really speak for himself for more than a minute at a time. Just imagine what might happen if someone was given his head and allowed to let go for many consecutive hours.”9 We need to treat with caution Clarke’s disavowal of editorial intervention. In Portrait of Jason, the film’s acknowledgment of the technological limitations of the camera and the off-camera

70 ◆ HE’S NOT THERE interjections by the filmmakers suggest that Clarke’s agenda is not to reinstitute documentary objectivity but to contrive something that she explores in both The Connection and The Cool World: a form of performative identity established in and through the process of filmmaking. This is what gives Jason’s performance its particular quality: Clarke’s careful editing and deliberately planned provocations bring our experience of the finished film into contact with the twelve hours of filming that wore away at the nerves of both Jason and the filmmakers and created a particular type of cinematically induced self-exposure. We can now begin to measure the important contribution Clarke’s work makes to changes in American filmmaking during the 1960s, changes that have direct bearing on our ability to understand the context of Frank’s experimentation in Me and My Brother. During the twelve hours of filming, Jason’s story became the story of Clarke and Lee. Echoing the fictional scenario in The Connection, the filmmaker’s own desires and anxieties became part of the film’s story. In foregrounding this disturbance, Portrait of Jason forges a model of filmmaking characterized by a crossing of frontiers—between docu mentary and fiction and between filmmaker and subject. Gilles Deleuze has cogently summarized the aims and agendas of this new style of cinematic storytelling, noting that, as in the work of other key postwar directors such as Cassavetes, Jean Rouch, and Pierre Perrault, what Clarke sets out to grasp “is not the identity of a character, whether real or fictional, through his objective and subjective aspects. It is the becoming of the real character when he himself starts to ‘make fiction,’ when he enters into ‘the flagrant offence of making up legends.’ ”10 Tell- ingly, Deleuze situates the filmmaker as a central part of this process of transformation. No longer a witness nor a detached observer, the filmmaker interposes his or her own desires and ambitions among those of the subject: “What has to be filmed is the frontier, on condition that this is equally crossed by the filmmaker in one direction and by the real character in the opposite direction: time is necessary here; a certain time is necessary which constitutes an integral part of the film.”11

HE’S NOT THERE ◆ 71 FALSIFYING NARRATION That Frank spent the better part of three years working on Me and My Brother is an indication of the extent to which his film embodies this model of cinema. A close examination of the interactions between fiction and documentary, filmmaker and subject that structure the film will allow us to see this connection more clearly. “I started out to do a film about a poem of Ginsberg’s,” Frank told an interviewer, “and it ended up to be a film about Peter Orlovsky’s brother, whose name was Julius. So it continuously changed. Then you sort of focus on this person. And by what happens to him over a longer period of time, the film changes.”12 The filmmaker’s summation suggests an approach in which the style and content of the film are determined by the unfolding of events. We can also read his comments, however, as evidence of a creative tension between, on the one hand, the need to be responsive to contingent events and changes that arise during filming and, on the other, the need to impose on these events and changes an element of formal coherence. To put this as clearly as possible: Me and My Brother lays bare a struggle that recurs throughout Frank’s films between the exhilaration of forging a work out of the events and occurrences that arise during a shoot and the need to find a form of narration capable of conveying the nature of these events and occurrences. Julius’s disappearance triggered a crisis in the production that the filmmaker sought to deal with by hiring an actor. But its most important consequence was to force Frank to work through his own complex relationship to narration. Looking at a sequence early in the film will help to clarify this relationship. It begins with a medium close-up of Julius in the apartment he shares with his brother Peter and Allen Ginsberg. Moments before, we saw a clean-shaven Julius enter the apartment building. Now, however, he sports a neatly trimmed full beard. In his right hand, he holds a cigarette. A pan to the right shows Peter taking a bottle of juice from the fridge. On the table nearby is a book: How to Live with Schizophre nia. From between the book’s pages, Peter retrieves a letter that is from

72 ◆ HE’S NOT THERE the clinic where Julius was a patient. It details Julius’s age and interests and the circumstances surrounding his first psychotic episode while working for the New York City Department of Sanitation:

He was masturbating while on duty. He became excited . . . violently resistive, and was transferred to Kings County Hos- pital on October 31st, 1950. On November 10th, 1950 he was admitted to Central Islip State Hospital. He received electric shock treatment. Diagnosis was schizophrenic—catatonic type.

This moment of narrative exposition coincides with a shift in perspective back to Julius. As Peter reads the letter, the camera pans back to where his brother is standing. Still holding the cigarette, Julius raises his right hand above his head and looks up. This action cues a cut to a new location. In this shot Julius is clean-shaven and dressed in the uniform of a sanitation department worker. He is gazing up at a large metal claw as it descends to collect a pile of garbage. For the next five minutes, we watch Julius, sometimes alone, sometimes with a small boy, move through various locations: the sanitation plant, an aquar- ium, a beach, a city street. Although neither Julius nor the boy speaks, their actions have a sense of quiet purpose. While the boy examines the swirling particles of a snow dome, Julius carefully scrutinizes both sides of a one-dollar bill. The handheld camera also records what is occurring around the central pair: a man in an overcoat and hat touches a bench just before sitting down; a group of elderly men and women walk past and glance at the camera. For a moment it seems that these activities will cause the film to lose sight of the central character, but the camera never fails to return to Julius’s unassuming presence. The penultimate shot is of Julius, once again in his sanitation department uniform, pushing a newspaper along the street with a large broom. When he stops to gaze up at the surrounding buildings, a cut takes us

HE’S NOT THERE ◆ 73 back to the earlier shot of Julius in the apartment with his hand in the air. The sequence ends with Peter concluding his reading of the letter. By matching the shot of Julius in the apartment at the start of the sequence with a variation of the same shot toward the end, Frank encourages the viewer to search the intervening images and sounds for some insight into Julius’s condition. Yet the oblique nature of his actions—as well as the camera’s interest in activities and figures at the

FIGURE 9. Julius Orlovsky in Me and My Brother (Robert Frank, 1968). Copyright Robert Frank.

74 ◆ HE’S NOT THERE FIGURE 10. Julius Orlovsky in Me and My Brother (Robert Frank, 1968). Copyright Robert Frank.

edges of the scene—makes it impossible to determine how they might confirm or contest the diagnosis contained in the letter. The unexplained changes in Julius’s appearance are merely the most obvious in- dications of the instability that defines the film’s narrative. In a slightly later scene involving Julius’s psychiatrist, Julius alternates between appearing clean-shaven and sporting a beard, just as the psychiatrist is shown both with and without a hairpiece. This deliberate disruption of continuity emphasizes the constructed nature of the drama; at the same time, it targets a fundamental principle whereby the process of storytelling can be relied on to provide us with a stable point of view on the story being told.

HE’S NOT THERE ◆ 75 This attack on narrative certitude is a feature of modernist experimentation in literature as well as film. In his essays on the New Novel, Alain Robbe-Grillet claims that the goal of traditional storytelling is to affirm the image of “a stable, coherent, continuous, unequivocal, entirely decipherable, universe.”13 Tracing a trajectory that leads from Gustave Flaubert through to Marcel Proust then to William Faulkner and finally to Samuel Beckett, Robbe-Grillet claims that the disintegration of plot in the modern novel marks the collapse of this convention: “Henceforth, the issue is elsewhere. To tell a story has become strictly impossible.” Immediately after this, he offers a decisive qualification: “Even in Beckett, there is no lack of events, but these are constantly in the process of contesting themselves, jeopardizing themselves, destroying themselves, so that the same sentence may contain an observation and its immediate negation. In short, it is not the anecdote that is lacking, it is only its character of certainty.”14 This qualification encapsulates the uneasy place of storytelling in Me and My Brother. In this film, storytelling has not been abandoned. Rather, it has taken on the task of rendering a world lacking in stable points of reference. “Whether explicitly or not,” Deleuze reminds us, “narration always refers to a system of judgment: even when acquittal takes place due to the benefit of the doubt, or when the guilty is so only because of fate.”15 The rise of what he terms “falsifying narration” shatters the system of judgment. It leads to the creation of pure optical and sound situations that lack the causal linkages of traditional narration. In describing the outcomes of falsifying narration, Deleuze also refers to the rise of characters whose identities are marked by an irreducible multiplicity: ‘“I is an other’ [‘Je est un autre’] has replaced Ego = Ego.”16 We are close to Clarke’s rendition of Jason’s life story in Portrait of Jason and the shifts back and forth between fiction and documentary that define Frank’s engagement with Julius in Me and My Brother. Both Clarke and Frank deal with characters whose situations disrupt the system of judgment. In response both directors develop storytelling methods that take on, rather than contain, the fractured identities of their central subjects.

76 ◆ HE’S NOT THERE Crucially, both directors also subject their own identities to this subjective fracturing: in Portrait of Jason, through the incorporation of Clarke’s off-screen interjections; in Me and My Brother, through the use of fictional proxies. But whereas Clarke’s presentation of Jason’s performance adheres to the parameters of a direct-to-camera interview, Me and My Brother employs a heterogeneous mixture of different filmic styles. Indeed, such is the complexity of the film’s formal structure that it is impossible to predict, from one moment to the next, the stance that Frank takes: documentary, fictional reconstruction, or some blending of the two. At times, the shift in approach happens between sequences—for example, when fictional enactment in the prologue gives way to documentary filming during the poetry reading. At other times it happens within individual shots—for example, when, in the middle of one of their sessions, the actor playing the role of Julius’s psychiatrist turns away from Julius and directs his remarks to the camera. These shifts in the camera’s function are a consequence of the wider undermining of narrative certainty discussed by both Robbe-Grillet and Deleuze. In an article that originally appeared in 1967, Noël Burch notes that in The Chelsea Girls (1966) Andy Warhol’s camera functions variously as a voyeur, a participant, and a distancing device. These shifts, Burch claims, suggest the ambivalence of the roles assumed by Warhol’s characters: “The film is a perpetual interplay of masks, in which the viewer finds it absolutely impossible to determine the part played by improvisation (whether free or within predetermined limits), the part played by the acting out of previously agreed-on gestures, and even the number of lines of dialogue actually decided on beforehand.”17 With Godard these shifts in the camera’s role are addressed in a more systematic manner. In A Married Woman (1964), the alternations in the camera’s relation to the events it records are clearly indicated by the different forms of stylized presentation that the film assumes. In 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, they “provide the film with one of its essential underpinnings.” “The relationship between

HE’S NOT THERE ◆ 77 actor and camera may change at any moment,” Burch proposes, “even in the middle of a shot. . . . At times, the transition is obvious; at times, it becomes evident only after the fact; at times, the exact moment it actually occurs cannot be determined, although the viewer is vaguely aware that ‘there has been one somewhere.’ ”18 Burch’s survey foregrounds something that is also evident in Me and My Brother: an alternating passage of affect from camera to actor and from actor to character. The film emerges as a consequence of these changes in the relationships between its participants. In the end, it is impossible to decide whether Me and My Brother is about Julius or the various approaches adopted by Frank and his collaborators in a valiant attempt to tell Julius’s story. By destabilizing the distinctions between actor and camera, between fiction and documentary, Frank affirms that he too is implicated in the undermining of narrative cohesion.

RADICAL DISCONTINUITY In Me and My Brother, Frank conveys a strong sense of Julius’s disconnected relationship to everyday reality. At the same time, he asserts the capacity of cinema to manifest new forms of audiovisual storytelling. Me and My Brother is a film about Julius and his perception of the world. No less important, it is also about cinema’s ability to transform itself through an engagement with its central subject. At the level of both narrative and audiovisual composition, the chief mechanism for affecting this transformation is discontinuity. In his survey of Euro- pean modernist filmmaking, András Bálint Kovács draws attention to the role played by discontinuity in establishing new models of narration. Discontinuity describes the moment when a film’s reliance on joining independent fragments of images and sounds to establish the sense of a homogeneous surface reality is exposed. This usually occurs through the insertion of gaps or unexplained shifts in the film’s narration—for example, in Me and My Brother, the changes in Julius’s appearance during the discussion with the psychiatrist. But disconti-

78 ◆ HE’S NOT THERE nuity can also extend to the audiovisual fabric of a film. “I call these forms ‘radical,’ ” Kovács writes, “to emphasize their tendency to go beyond the usual measure of breaking or manifesting continuity in narrative art cinema. In both cases the reason for this stylistic ‘excess’ is to reflect the disconnected, alienated, or one-dimensional character of empirical surface reality.”19 Kovács’s exemplar of radical discontinuity is Godard’s Breath less (1960). Here, the director’s use of jump cuts causes actions to be evoked rather than depicted in a coherent manner.20 Clearly influenced by Godard’s playful reworking of cinematic form, Me and My Brother integrates a radically discontinuous narration with a style of serial composition usually associated with avant-garde film. Kovács describes serialism as “a radical form of narration where the logic of juxtaposition is more important than the interior composition of the images, and it can have a variety of different stylistic elements mixed together.”21 But because the juxtaposition of images and styles is at odds with the continuity requirements that underpin narrative forms, he is unwilling to describe serialism as simply a more dispersed version of narrative. Serial arrangement gives rise to a “polyphonic” arrangement of “formal elements running throughout the film independently of whether they have any function with regard to another signifying system.”22 We are now in a position to identify a driving principle of Frank’s work in film as well as photography: the isolation of formal elements so as to create patterns of meaning that resist narrative accommoda- tion. In a 1967 discussion of The Americans, Frank reveals the extent of the care and planning that went into the arrangement of the opening images. “I wanted to create some kind of rhythm,” he explains. “I’m not sure now whether I wanted to have first pictures that didn’t move and then more movement in the pictures later on.”23 Later in the same discussion, he returns to his method of linking images: “I think it had to do more with how much movement was in one photograph, how still was it, that it progressed more and more until there

HE’S NOT THERE ◆ 79 was more movement.”24 This account echoes Kovács’s remarks about the polyphonic nature of serial composition. In The Americans the re- iterations and rhythmic buildup of images structure our experience of the photographs; in Me and My Brother a series of formal echoes and repetitions carry the viewer through the discontinuous narrative. During the sequence that begins with Peter reading the letter from the hospital, a shot of Julius gazing up at the cigarette he holds in his hand is matched to a shot of Julius looking up at the crane at the sanitation plant. The precise nature of the match created by the direction of the central character’s gaze and his exact position in the bottom right-hand corner of the frame suggests a connection between events on either side of the cut. But rather than reinforcing this connection, the subsequent sequence of images fragments it across a variety of activities and viewpoints, only some of which involve Julius directly. Elsewhere in the film, the tension between connection and dispersal involves the continuation of a sound element across a range of loosely connected scenes. This is evident during an encounter between a woman who goes by the name of Kismet Nagy (Nancy Fish), a self- described aging alcoholic actress, and a character simply referred to in the script as a photographer (Roscoe Lee Browne). When these two characters meet in the waiting room of the dental surgery where Julius is having his teeth checked, the woman claims to recognize the photographer from a previous meeting. She then proceeds to speculate about the photographer’s financial status and the nature of his occupation. She also provides the film with its most reflective moment: “Don’t make a movie about making a movie. Make it. . . . Forget about the film— throw away the camera—just get the strip—wouldn’t it be fantastic if you didn’t even have to have a piece of celluloid between you and what you saw?” As if to visualize the consequences of this statement, during the course of Nagy’s monologue we are presented with a montage of different locations and activities: Ginsberg and the Orlovsky brothers going about their early morning routines under the observation of the photographer; Nagy applying eye shadow and false lashes in a vacant

80 ◆ HE’S NOT THERE lot; the photographer flicking through a portfolio of photographs in which fashion shots are interspersed with images from The Americans; documentary footage of Manhattan traffic. Near the end of the monologue, we see the photographer riding the subway. When the film cuts to a close-up, the first few lines of Nagy’s monologue are replayed over the sound of the subway carriage. The replaying of the words marks the conclusion of a sequence whose discontinuities enact the film’s central theme concerning the fractured nature of identity. Yet because it is unclear how the elements in the sequence connect to Julius’s story, the overall effect is to disperse rather than consolidate the film’s dramatic focus. This dispersal of dramatic focus raises a question that lies at the heart of the film’s formal construction: whose story is this? In Me and My Brother, the use of sound to tie together disparate activities and events creates a story that, like the central character, is always on the verge of disappearing or being replaced by other stories. “No sooner is a character established in Frank’s film,” writes Daniel Kane, “than he or she is immediately splintered into other voices, other people, other rooms. . . . Working against coherence, the only totalizing move Frank makes is to consistently enact the fact that identity is amorphous, authority borrowed and dependent on context.”25 In Me and My Brother, coherence is never completely abandoned. Instead, it remains on the verge of disappearing.

ESSAY FILM The idea that somebody or something is on the verge of disappearing neatly sums up the outcome of Frank’s reconfiguration of narrative in Me and My Brother and provides a link to one of postwar cinema’s most innovative genres: the essay film. It was Hans Richter who coined this term in order to describe a form of cinema sitting between documentary and fiction. The primary goal of this third form of cinema, Richter argues, is to make “problems, thoughts, even ideas” perceptible and

HE’S NOT THERE ◆ 81 to “render visible what is not visible.”26 This reflexiveness is evident in Me and My Brother; so too is the other key element of the essay: its tendency toward digression and dispersal. “In English as in French,” observes Adrian Martin, “the word essay implies not only a form, but an activity: to essay, to try out, to test the limits of something.” It is characteristic of the true essay to keep the identity of this something open: “[The essay] gives the impression of discovering what it is about as it goes along—as it observes the world, collects data, makes connections and draws associations. . . . Thus, the true essay must start out without a clear subject, let alone a clear thesis that will be illustrated or confirmed.”27 In Me and My Brother, Frank began with a clearly defined subject. Yet as we have seen, this subject kept changing and eluding the director’s intentions. The challenging thing about the film is that this loss of control is also central to our experience as viewers. The shifts between Julius-the-actor and Julius-the-real-person and the breaks in narrative and audiovisual continuity manifest this loss of control. They also suggest a series of connections that shed light on the nature of Julius’s world. To borrow a term used by Ross Gibson, what emerges in Me and My Brother is an “ensemble” of ideas about Julius grounded in Frank’s own relationship to his central subject.28 We need to be clear about the method used to create these connections. On one level, this involves the use of formal devices such as overlapping sound in order to link otherwise separate scenes and events. Near the start of the film, for example, Frank combines the sound of Ginsberg reading from his poem “Wichita Vortex Sutra” with a shot of Julius walking through a museum wearing headphones. The words of the poem—“revolving my head to my breast like my mad mother / chin abreast at Allah”—recall the connection between Julius’s situation and the film’s origins as an adaptation of Ginsberg’s own tale of familial madness in Kaddish.29 On another level, the connection involves a correspondence between the film’s fictional and documentary agendas. Thus, toward the end of the film, Joseph Chaikin, who plays both himself and Julius, looks directly at the camera and declares: “My

82 ◆ HE’S NOT THERE speech is all used up. I have nothing else to say. I have nothing else to read from. I don’t know who to play.” Is Chaikin still in character? Or is he signaling the conclusion of his performance? Elsewhere, the connection between events involves the repetition of an activity that indicates a larger pattern of behavior. We first become aware that Julius has been located during a scene in which Peter and Gregory Corso listen to Ginsberg reading a letter from Napa State Hospital. The letter describes the behavior of a newly admitted patient, a “George Or- lovsky,” who refuses to answer questions put to him by hospital staff. Ginsberg’s reading of the letter recalls the much earlier scene in which Peter reads the letter from Julius’s clinic. As Ginsberg finishes, the film cuts to black-and-white footage of Julius’s discharge from the hospital. On the soundtrack Frank questions Peter about the events of that day and his reaction to Julius’s newfound lucidity. He wants to know why Peter began to sweep the floors of the hospital: “You must have been out of your mind.” As we watch Peter’s manic sweeping, again, we register the echo of an earlier scene: Julius in his sanitation department uniform sweeping a newspaper along the street. The purpose of these repetitions and overlaps is to enact a dispersal of meaning across different contexts, situations, and figures that parlays Julius’s story into a much larger story—always on the verge of disappearing—about acting, Frank’s own struggles as a filmmaker, and the people and events that surround his central character.

“NO, YOUR NAME” The closest we come to a direct account of Julius’s predicament is during the final moments. For the first time in the film, Julius appears lucid and willing to respond to questions. With the camera positioned on the other side of a glass window, the filmmaker asks him about the shock treatment (“I thought maybe I committed a crime against the state for taking shock treatment that wasn’t at all justifiable”), his views on Ginsberg (“I consider Allen as being just being Allen . . . for what he

HE’S NOT THERE ◆ 83 is”), and Peter (“Peter’s my brother, and he knows about my receiving shock treatment, for what reason, I don’t know”). Frank also asks Julius how he feels about acting. “Acting is something beyond my collaboration,” he responds. “Acting is beyond my thought processes sometimes. . . . It may be a waste of time.” Equally problematic, he believes, is the camera’s claim to truth: “The camera seems like a . . . reflection of disapproval or disgust or . . . or disappointment or unhelpfulness . . . or . . . unexplainability . . . to disclose any real, real truth that might

FIGURE 11. Julius Orlovsky in Me and My Brother (Robert Frank, 1968). Copyright Robert Frank.

84 ◆ HE’S NOT THERE FIGURE 12. Julius Orlovsky in Me and My Brother (Robert Frank, 1968). Copyright Robert Frank.

possibly exist.” Asked where truth may be found, Julius replies: “Inside and outside—the world.” Given all that has happened up to this point, Julius’s astute obser vations represent a triumph—for Frank as well as himself. The extra ordinary thing about these final moments is not simply the quality of Julius’s responses but also the filmmaker’s ability to draw out of the contingent circumstances of filming an image perfectly suited to his central character’s precarious engagement with the world. When Julius delivers his verdict on the camera’s limitations, drops of rain start to cover the surface of the window separating the camera from its central subject. Once again, Julius seems to be on the verge of disappearing.

HE’S NOT THERE ◆ 85 This conjunction of formal and thematic elements suggests an approach that has at its core an acute responsiveness to the discoveries that arise during a shoot. Describing the particular form of attention to be seen in Frank’s photographs, W. S. Di Piero identifies “a prepared- ness for the revelatory pattern in a given scene so natural and primed that it is indistinguishable from mere reflex.”30 One of the things that Frank found both challenging and appealing about film was the extent of the deliberation and interaction with others that it demanded.31 Me and My Brother signals a turning point. It evidences Frank’s capacity to invest the deliberations and procedures of filmmaking with the present-tense revelations and responsiveness that characterize his work as a photographer. This involves placing himself in the picture—not as a controlling force but as someone open to the missteps and fortuitous occurrences that arise during a shoot. It also involves a model of narrative that takes its cue from the correspondences and formal iterations that structure the story told in The Americans. The final echo of this principle occurs when Frank asks Julius to look directly into the camera and say: “My name is Peter.” When Julius obliges, Frank corrects him: “No, your name.” In Me and My Brother, Julius’s inability to reconcile inside and outside coincides with Frank’s struggle to make a film that keeps changing shape. What must not be forgotten is that whereas Julius is dealing with psychological processes beyond his control, Frank has the luxury of being able to step back and draw out of the various difficulties encountered during the shoot a form of cinematic narration capable of reconciling creation with destruction, making with unmaking. It is this capacity to simultaneously evoke and displace an identifiable story that defines Frank’s account of Julius’s predicament in Me and My Brother.

“LET’S PLAY A LITTLE SCENE WITH IT” Two decades after filming Me and My Brother, Frank took part in a television project organized by the French filmmaker Philippe Grandrieux.

86 ◆ HE’S NOT THERE Its premise was very simple: a group of filmmakers and artists were each asked to produce a video comprised of a single, one-hour- long shot. “You can build something in 10 minutes,” Grandrieux observed about the project’s premise. “In 30 minutes it is already becoming difficult to get a sense of a beginning, a middle and an end.”32 Frank’s contribution to the project was C’est vrai! (1990), or, as it was titled in the United States, One Hour. In the video Frank and a small crew of collaborators travel through the streets of Lower Manhattan, sometimes on foot, at other times in the back of a van, recording a series of encounters that occurred between 3:45 p.m. and 4:45 p.m. on July 26, 1990. Jonathan Rosenbaum positions One Hour as part of a tradition of experimental cinema concerned with exploring the unceasing motion of either the protagonist and/or the camera. He refers to Maya Deren’s At Land (1944), Stan Brakhage’s Dog Star Man (1961–1964), and Michael Snow’s camera movement trilogy, Wavelength (1967), Back and Forth (1969), and La région centrale (1971).33 The true extent of Frank’s achievement, he explains, became clear to him only after the publication of a book containing a transcript of the dialogue, a full list of production crew and actors, and a script credited to Frank and Michal Rovner. “Here’s where the mysteries truly begin. How much of Frank’s apparently random drift is precisely plotted, how many seeming chance encounters are staged and intricately coordinated, how much of what we see and hear is extemporaneous? The volatile, unstable mixtures of chance and control can never be entirely sorted out.”34 The first of these undecidable encounters occurs when the crew, consisting of Frank as camera operator, a sound recordist, and the actor Kevin O’Connor, arrives at a group of payphones. Some of the people gathered at this location appear to be passersby—for example, two tourists who have stopped to consult a map. Others clearly have some connection with the project—for example, a man with a briefcase and glasses who engages in an argument with a telephone operator. The difficulty of distinguishing the function of each of these figures is com- pounded by the camera’s movements around the physical space, never

HE’S NOT THERE ◆ 87 remaining with any one activity long enough to enable us to properly ascertain its nature. Our only clue that we are watching a scripted performance is the cleanly captured sound of the man’s phone call that trails behind the camera’s movements. The indicators of a contrived performance are more apparent when the crew jumps into a waiting van and travels to a diner a short distance away. Once inside, the camera focuses on two women who are in the middle of a conversation. As they talk about this and that, the women remain oblivious to the presence of the hovering camera. This scenario is repeated throughout the hour-long video: as it travels through the streets of Lower Manhattan, the camera pauses to eavesdrop on a conversation. These encounters are an extension of what Burch identified in the late 1960s as the “new world of narrative forms involving shifts in the role of the camera (from actual participant to passive spectator, from a mere ‘provocateur’ of events to active dictator of them, and so on).”35 In One Hour the purpose of these shifts is to track the unstable moment when the outlines of a story surface from the swirl of insignificant, quotidian events. Whether these stories are real or fictional, spontaneous or preplanned, matters less than what their enactment reveals about the place in which they occur: the people and the way of life that are drawn into the project’s ever-expanding orbit. This explains why the natural drift of the camera is away from what seems to be the central event and toward what is going on around the scene. For example, later in the video the camera records an encounter between Taylor Mead and Bill Rice, two stalwarts of the New York avant-garde community, across the street from the Anthology Film Archives.36 As the camera looks on, their conversation turns to the wear and tear of city life and the increasingly painful struggle to get by on aging legs. “It’s my legs,” Mead complains. “I can’t move them anymore. They’re so heavy.” Throughout the conversation, the two men blithely disregard the presence of the camera, which occasionally pans away to bring in other figures and points of interest: the tree on the footpath, a bystander in a hat observing the filming.

88 ◆ HE’S NOT THERE Eventually, the camera’s focus shifts to a man, who appears in the background of the shot, wearing dark sunglasses and smoking a ciga rette. Unlike Mead and Rice, this slightly threatening figure stares back at the camera. The silent confrontation continues when the camera follows the man as he walks toward the corner—parting ways only when the camera operator jumps back into the waiting van. In all likelihood, the menacing figure is also an actor whose appearance was planned in advance. But what gives the encounter its charge is the shift in the camera’s relationship to the filming—from invisible bystander to participant in an ambiguous face-off. At approximately thirty-one minutes into the video’s one-hour running time, a new element is introduced. Outside the Angelika Film Center, the crew picks up Peter Orlovsky. The production credits include the statement: “Lines of Peter Orlovsky—Improvised.” 37 Again, whether this is actually true is less important than the impact his behavior has on the terms and conditions of the shoot. Quite soon after his arrival, we hear Frank struggling to rein in his friend’s overwhelm- ing exuberance. “I’ve got a fucking car right there with the door open,” Peter keeps repeating. “Let’s play a little scene with it.” Peter’s inter actions with the director and the rest of the crew cause even those ele ments of the project that were scripted to undergo a transformation. He is cast as a provocateur, forcing everyone around him to improvise and be alert and responsive to the moment of filming. Frank’s struggle to maintain control of this process culminates when he and Peter leave the van and enter the subway. As they wait for the train, Peter’s behavior becomes even more manic. Standing at the edge of the platform, he declares that he’s going to jump down onto the tracks. When he starts to climb down, the filmmaker’s voice takes on an unmistakable note of panic: “No! No! Peter! Stay Here! . . . Come on, Peter! Get Up! Get Up! Get Up!” At these moments Frank appears to lose control of the project. It is no less likely, however, that Peter is merely trying to give the filmmaker what he thinks he wants. In other words, it is not clear whether

HE’S NOT THERE ◆ 89 he is performing for Frank or trying to undermine any possibility of a performance. The probable answer is that he is doing both—at once.38 His behavior recalls Jean Rouch’s famous observation that “there is almost no boundary between documentary film and films of fiction. The cinema, the art of the double, is already the transition from the real world to the imaginary world.”39 As Rouch sees it, the question that arises is, how does one manage this transition while remaining open to the forces and elements that give the cinema its life? He compares filmmaking to a form of “acrobatic gymnastics, where losing one’s footing is the least of the risks.”40 This evocative analogy allows us to grasp the dynamic on-going life of a tradition of filmmaking that takes in both One Hour and Me and My Brother. Both Peter’s manic behavior at the end of One Hour and the much quieter behavior of his younger brother Julius in the closing moments of the earlier film are the outcome of a creative process in which the boundary line between filmmaker and subject, fiction and reality, has become hard to distinguish. That twenty years separates the two works confirms how persistent Frank was in developing narrative forms capable of incorporating this type of risk taking.

90 ◆ HE’S NOT THERE 3 “A BETTER WAY TO LIVE” Conversations in Vermont, Liferaft Earth, About Me: A Musical, Cocksucker Blues

I’d like to make a photo-film and work out a dialogue between the move ment of the camera and the freezing of the still image, between the pres ent and the past, inside and outside, front and back. . . . My photographs will become pauses in its flux, breaths of fresh air, windows on another time, on other places. —Robert Frank

Although they are rarely discussed in histories of documentary filmmaking, Frank’s films and videos constitute one of the most signifi cant manifestations of the intersection between new documentary approaches and forms of cinematic experimentation that emerged in New York during the postwar period. Between 1965 and 1972, Frank directed Me and My Brother, Conversations in Vermont, Liferaft Earth, About Me: A Musical, and Cocksucker Blues.1 A defining feature of this work is his insistence on documenting not only the events and personalities in front of the camera but also his own relationship to the filming. In place of the detached observational style of the films of Richard Leacock, D. A. Pennebaker, and others, the work of filmmakers such as Shirley Clarke, Emile de Antonio, and Frank is based on the inter- relationship between the experiences and doubts of the filmmaker and those of the subjects before the camera. De Antonio speaks for a number of other filmmakers who distance their work from any claim to authorial detachment: “I happen to have strong feelings and some dreams and my prejudice is under and in everything I do.”2 In Frank’s case this concern with acknowledging his own place in the film is an extension of impulses and tensions that inform his

◆ 91 photographic work. The concluding image in The Americans, for example, shows the photographer’s family huddled together in the front seat of a car (see Plate 3). The illuminated headlight in the foreground suggests that the photograph was taken in either the late evening or the early morning. An air of fatigue radiates from the expressions of the car’s inhabitants: while Frank’s daughter, Andrea, has buried her head in her mother’s chest, his first wife, Mary, and son, Pablo, gaze tiredly at the road ahead. Clearly, the journey that produced these famous images has taken its toll on the photographer’s family. At the same time as this image grounds The Americans in Frank’s own situation as a husband and father, it is also revealing about how photography positions us in relation to others: between the people huddled together in the front seat and the photographer who has stepped outside the car, a fundamental distance has arisen. The photographer is both part of the scene he records and, of necessity, removed from its emotions and states of mind. This ambivalent disposition informs both the sequencing of the images across the pages of Frank’s extraordinary book and his eventual turning away from still photography to concentrate on film. At the Wellesley symposium, Frank spoke about his reasons for moving from photography to filmmaking. “That’s one thing I found in my films,” he notes. “Although it’s true that I often feel like an observer, I’m still in it. I’m part of it, definitively. And it’s hard to see what part you’re in as a photographer.”3 He goes on to relate this feeling to his experiences teaching students:

The films are somehow more revealing than photographs. It’s because the filmmaker cannot get away with that instant that might be accidental. He’s got to come up with three minutes, and you see there how he feels, how he goes back, how he looks away, how he runs to something else, or how confused he is looking around. And the same thing happens when I show my movies—the personal movies that deal with my life. I’ve done two or three of them, and after the light goes

92 ◆ “A BETTER WAY TO LIVE” on and I’m out there, I really feel like I’ve taken my clothes off, in a way.4

Frank’s account of the feeling of self-exposure prompts us to consider how exactly one gives voice to the people and events in front of the camera as well as one’s own relationship to the filming. In Con versations in Vermont, the discussions that structure the film cover a range of topics, such as the difficulty of parenting, the struggle for identity, and the craziness of city life. Underpinning these discussions is another set of issues, also grounded in the circumstances of Frank’s family life, the subject of which is the capacity of photography and film to narrate experience. Near the start of OK, End Here, the camera pans to a framed photograph of a small boy on the wall of the apartment occupied by a troubled young couple. The camera’s scrutiny of the photograph suggests that it has some bearing on the sense of malaise hanging over their relationship. Rather than drawing out its significance, Frank allows the photograph to stand for everything not said in the film. Later, the young woman reflects on the feelings conjured by this image: “It’s so hard not to forget. At least photographs stop everything. They stop the passing of time.” Conversations in Ver mont turns this sentiment on its head. The photographs scrutinized by Frank and his children are the remnants of something lost, something that has been unable to withstand the erosions of time.

THE RIDE BYE Conversations in Vermont was funded by a grant from the Dilexi Foun- dation, an offshoot of the influential Dilexi Gallery. In 1968 the foundation reached agreement with the San Francisco television channel KQED TV to produce a twelve-part weekly series designed to showcase the work of contemporary artists. Apart from Frank, the other artists invited to contribute were Julian Beck, Terry Riley, Arlo Acton, Andy Warhol, Frank Zappa, Yvonne Rainer, Walter De Maria, Anna Halprin,

“A BETTER WAY TO LIVE” ◆ 93 Edwin Schlossberg, Robert Nelson, and William T. Wiley. No restric- tions were placed on the form or content of the commissioned work: each artist was free to engage with the medium as she or he saw fit. Frank took advantage of the commission to produce Conversations in Vermont, a work that could sit alongside the new style of documentary reporting that was the mainstay of publicly funded channels such as KQED TV and yet also reflect on the assumptions and procedures informing this style of filmmaking.5 Frank’s willingness to test the limits of nonfiction filmmaking is signaled in the opening moments of the film. The first thing we see in Conversations in Vermont is a white screen accompanied by the pierc- ing sound of a fire siren. For a few seconds the white screen alternates with a close-up of an out-of-focus figure making an adjustment to the camera lens. Although barely noticeable on first viewing, a photograph of a young woman also appears during the opening montage. The out-of-focus figure is Frank himself; the young woman in the photograph is Mary. The voice emanating from a record player located somewhere in the room belongs to the American blues singer Bessie Smith. “What the hell’s the matter,” Frank mumbles, “something’s the matter with the record player.” These moments of preparation foreground the filmmaker’s complex relationship with the events being filmed. In Conversations in Vermont, his role is not that of someone standing back, reflecting on what has happened, but rather of someone struggling with both the media at his disposal and his own feelings about the past. Immediately after Frank completes his adjustments to the camera, the film cuts to a large poster-size contact sheet of images of Mary. The camera pans across the print. After a few seconds the director signals, “That’s it,” and the print is pulled away to reveal a ten-by-eight-inch photograph of a group of black workers. Both Frank and Mary feature in a poster-size contact sheet that is retrieved from underneath the photographs of the black workers. For the rest of the prologue, this method of working through and scrutinizing photographs accompanies the director’s voice-over description of key events in the life of his

94 ◆ “A BETTER WAY TO LIVE” family: the birth of Pablo, Frank’s trip back to Europe with his young family, his return to the United States, and the birth of Andrea. The photographs scrutinized by the camera illustrate these events. But they also serve another purpose, one in which the content of the individual images is less important than the manner of their treatment. Just as Frank’s adjustment of the camera lens reminds us of the partiality

FIGURE 13. Conversations in Vermont (Robert Frank, 1971). Copyright Robert Frank.

“A BETTER WAY TO LIVE” ◆ 95 FIGURE 14. Photograph of Robert Frank and Mary Frank in Conversations in Vermont (Robert Frank, 1971). Copyright Robert Frank.

of the camera’s perspective, the action of picking up a photograph, looking at it for a second or two, and then putting it aside affirms the status of the photographs as material objects: things to be handled and subjected to a process of scrutiny taking place in the present. Frank’s treatment of the photographs exemplifies his desire to under stand what the past, as represented in these images, means now. This desire is personal, relating to his history as a father and husband, and part of a larger creative agenda. Throughout his career Frank has sought to make the single image accountable to the passage of time. In

96 ◆ “A BETTER WAY TO LIVE” the period leading up to The Americans, this desire manifested itself as a feeling of dissatisfaction with the traditional photographic emphasis on “a picture that really said it all.”6 “I decided that there had to be a more sustained form of visual [expression],” he recalls in an interview. “There had to be more pictures that would sustain an idea or a vision or something. I couldn’t just depend on that one singular photograph any more. You have to develop; you have to go through different rooms.”7 The carefully constructed sequence of images in The Americans represents the culmination of this search for a more sustained form of photographic expression. The shift away from the single image is also evident in the photographs that Frank refers to as his “last project in photography”: a 1958 series of images of Manhattan street life taken while he was riding on a moving bus (see Plates 4a and 4b). In a letter to the curator Philip Brookman written in 1977, Frank describes the experience of taking these photographs and why, so many years later, he remains drawn to what they reveal:

The Bus carries me thru the City, I look out the window, I look at the people on the street, it amazes me, they are standing up . . . looking (like me) at the street, the Sun and the Traffic Lights. It had to do with desperation and endurance—I have always felt that about living in New York. Compassion and probably some understanding for New Yorks Concrete and its people, walking . . . waiting . . . standing up . . . holding hands . . . the summer of 1958. [. . .] I like to see them one after another. It’s a ride bye and not a flashy backy.8

For a number of writers, the bus photographs represent the point at which Frank’s interest in a more extended form of communication turns inevitably toward film. “Because he was in motion when the photographs were made,” explains Sarah Greenough, “and because many of the people depicted were also moving, the images often appear to be still frames from a film, as if the bus were a dolly and the window a

“A BETTER WAY TO LIVE” ◆ 97 viewfinder.”9 Greenough is right to draw an analogy between the motion of the bus and the movement of a camera on a dolly. But the resemblance to film frames is also due to the presentation of the images. In The Americans the images appear individually on the right-hand pages of the book, accompanied by blank pages on the left. This ensures that the impact of each image is drawn from its individual quali ties as well as its place in the sequence. The impact of the bus series derives, however, from the sense of movement that comes from the placement of the images side by side on the page. Rather than simulat- ing the type of movement found in film, the bus photographs use the printed page to establish an intermediate space that draws on the attributes of both media. “I think these are my best photographs,” Frank writes in another letter to Brookman, “looking at them and knowing that I was thinking about making films.”10 No doubt, one of the things that attracted Frank to film was the opportunity to bring to life the flow of experience captured in the bus series. Yet the consequence of this engagement was not a straight forward rejection of photography. Rather, it gave rise to new methods of treating images. The 1971 diptych Mabou shows two panoramas of the bay in front of the filmmaker’s house taken some years apart and at quite different points in the seasons (see Plate 5). Both images are collages comprised of slices of cut-up photographs arranged along a horizontal axis to form a more or less continuous panorama. In the bottom left-hand corner of the top image, Frank has written: “Yes it’s later now . . . The ice is breaking up / The water will be warm and blue / The boats will be out there / the hills will look green again.” These reflections continue in the image below: “We will go back to New York: / Just stay here and watch the weather and TV / June is looking through the microscope / I will do something, isn’t it wonderful just to be alive.” Mabou is about the changes brought about by the passing of time. The combination of words and images creates a sense of weariness as well as wonderment at having made it this far. Equally, the work is also about the desire to make the single image accountable to the passing

98 ◆ “A BETTER WAY TO LIVE” of time. “It was a deliberate attempt to show that for me the picture itself had ceased to exist,” Frank explains in an interview. “It really expresses the way I felt about photography—that if I did it now it would be spliced together.”11 For Frank, then, it is the process by which images are treated rather than simply the visual properties of the images themselves that determines their value. Film’s capacity to convey duration ensures that it is better equipped than photography to render the flux and uncertainty of the present. But the key thing for Frank is to develop methods that renew, transform, or subvert this capacity. In Conversations in Vermont, his method of piling up images, as well as his presentation of these images in the form of poster-size contact sheets, exemplifies this principle. Instead of seeing the past through the lens of a single definitive moment, the filmmaker’s treatment of the photographs creates the impression of a succession of loosely connected moments. The basis of this connection is Frank’s biography as a father, husband, and artist, as well as the physical process of laying one image on top of another. This method of arranging still images brings photography closer to film, yet it also brings film closer to photography by imbuing the mise-en-scène with the type of contiguities and juxtapositions that play a central role in serial photography. In Conversations in Vermont, there is a strong sense that what will be discovered about the past will be discovered as a result of this coming together and mutual displacement of media. This is what gives the film its formal instability as well as its autobiographical urgency.

CONVERSATIONAL ACTS Conversations in Vermont looks forward to the physical processes and ways of working that were to characterize Frank’s return to photography. It also consolidates a style of first-person voice-over narration that was to become a dominant formal feature of his filmmaking. Frank’s heavily accented voice positions him as an outsider in relation to the

“A BETTER WAY TO LIVE” ◆ 99 broader culture as well as the lives and experiences of his children. As we listen to his conversations with his children, we become aware of an experiential divide in both what these figures say and how they say it. In films such as Walden and Lost Lost Lost, Jonas Mekas achieves a similar effect. “There is something plaintive in the voices of both filmmakers,” Amy Taubin observes, “suggesting feelings of loss too deep to be assuaged by the images on the screen. And although Mekas and Frank have both lived in New York for over a half century, their speech remains heavily accented with the sounds of their first languages.”12 Far from leading to the affirmation of subjective authority, Frank’s grounding of the issues covered in Conversations in Vermont in his own viewpoint lends the film a feeling of psychological fragility. “This film is about the past,” the filmmaker declares at the start of the film. A little later, he revises this statement: “This film is about the past and the present. The present comes back in actual film footage which I took where my children now go to school. This means they left New York and they are in a different place, now.” Frank’s narration achieves the effect of simultaneously establishing and undermining a framework for understanding the events covered in the film. Although we are encouraged to view the footage of Pablo and Andrea in Vermont as events taking place in the present—things as they are, now—and the photographs scrutinized by the camera as standing for the past, the voice-over narration also displaces this understanding by putting the Vermont material in the past tense, as events that occurred at an earlier point in time. Likewise, the film’s treatment of the photographs imbues these images with a life in the present. This disruption of past and present is continued during the conversations with Pablo and Andrea, the first of which begins with a shot of a ten-by-eight-inch print of a photograph taken a few months after Frank’s arrival in the United States. The image, published with the title Men of Air, New York, shows an inflatable trapeze artist floating above the streets of Manhattan. The contrast between the crowd of people in the foreground and the suspended figure above their heads

100 ◆ “A BETTER WAY TO LIVE” creates a feeling of physical as well as psychological estrangement. We barely have time to register this impression before the camera moves to a close-up of a poster-size contact sheet resting underneath. The printed strips of negatives show Pablo and Mary together on a bed. On the soundtrack we can hear Pablo talking to his father: “I can see how easy it would be to make mistakes. . . . Not that it’s a mistake to have children. But once you have them then you could start making mistakes. But . . . with your own kids, you’ll be creating whatever happens to them.” For the next few moments, Pablo’s conversation with his father can be heard as the camera pans back and forth across the contact sheet. Both the conversation between father and son and the camera’s scrutiny of the contact sheet are dealing with the same thing: the past, or, more precisely, what the past means, now. Frank’s decision to grant image and sound a degree of autonomy suggests, however, that this past cannot be reduced to a single perspective. In Conversations in Ver mont, we are always piecing together bits of information from various sources, each with its own distinctive interpretation of the past. These differences become explicit when the film cuts to a shot of Pablo in the present day. “I don’t even remember what was happening then,” he tells his father. “I don’t remember any of those pictures. . . . I just remember that . . . there wasn’t much going on.” “There was plenty going on,” his father shoots back. He then proceeds to remind Pablo of some of the troubles that, for him at least, made this period so memo rable. When the school bell rings, the camera follows the filmmaker and his son as they slowly walk toward the house, continuing their conversation. The uninterrupted handheld shot that tracks their conversation down to the house where Andrea is waiting and through to the kitchen creates a feeling of people talking in the present, of a conversation that is open and unpredictable in its twists and turns. This type of conversation is a hallmark of the film Primary, created by Rob- ert Leacock, Robert Drew, Pennebaker, and Albert Maysles. In developing a documentary style grounded in the chronological unfolding of events, the filmmakers were aided by the emergence of lightweight

“A BETTER WAY TO LIVE” ◆ 101 portable tape recorders able to record sound synchronous with the camera. Previously, recording synchronous sound required an array of cumbersome technology. “The moment we had to shoot dialogue,” Leacock recalls, “everything had to be locked down, the whole nature of the film changed. The whole thing seemed to stop.”13 The new portable film technology ensured that dialogue and conversations could emerge directly from the ebb and flow of the filming. The handheld camera’s close observation of its subjects and the use of direct sound align Conversations in Vermont with the work of these influential documentarians. Yet Frank’s insistence on incorporating his own participation in these conversations represents a rebuttal of one of the key tenets of Direct Cinema filmmaking: the detachment of the filmmaker from the events being filmed. In fact, the more Pablo and Andrea hold back or refuse to engage with the events of the past, the more their father’s own viewpoints and recollections come to the fore. This has the effect of making the film both more personal and more clearly about the terms and conditions of its own operation. Some- thing similar occurs in Frank’s next film, Liferaft Earth. Near the start of this film, the filmmaker anxiously walks back and forth in front of the camera, trying to explain what happened to him during his docu mentation of the Hunger Show, a week-long hunger strike organized to draw attention to overpopulation and the shortage of food in developing nations. To separate the protesters from bystanders and the media, the organizers of the event constructed an inflatable wall, dubbed Life raft Earth, that spanned the perimeter of the protest’s location. “It was good to be there,” Frank recalls, “and to fast and to think about what we are doing and what we could do. And this is the reason why all of a sudden I decided to stand, myself, in front of the camera and talk about what happened to me out there at the Liferaft.” He thanks those who helped with the film, singling out the protest’s organizers, Stewart Brand and Hugh Romney. A little later, we hear more about his experiences: “I want to tell the people who will see this film, I want to tell them how deep I felt about it, about being on the Liferaft and how bad

102 ◆ “A BETTER WAY TO LIVE” I felt to leave the Liferaft that night when it rained so hard and the next morning when the survivors decided to move and continue fasting but I didn’t have the guts.” Frank’s admission of personal failure establishes a connection between his own experiences and those of the people in the film. In contrast to the one-sided revelations that dominate in other styles of documentary cinema, his films model an understanding of filmmaking as “a conversational act.”14 Regardless of whether he is partaking in this conversation directly, as in Conversations in Vermont and Liferaft Earth, or through the use of on-screen proxies, as in Me and My Brother and About Me: A Musical, what matters is dissolving the boundary between filmmaker and film. In Conversations in Vermont, this is evident in the filmmaker’s discussions with Pablo. “It got more difficult the older you got,” he tells his son. “We got more apart it seems.” He admits to being partly to blame for this breakdown, referring to his tightness with Mary and their determination to live their lives as artists and not “give in to the children.” Conversations in Vermont is about taking stock of the consequences of these types of decisions, decisions that are drawn from the filmmaker’s own history as a parent and are indica tive of larger shifts in the cultural fabric of the United States. Indeed, as the film unfolds, it becomes clear that Frank’s determination to get Pablo and Andrea to talk about the changes in their lives is motivated by a desire to also understand how America has changed. Just as The Americans frames its portrayal of postwar life from the point of view of someone newly arrived, someone struggling to make sense of a country at once familiar and strange, Conversations in Vermont grounds its engagement with American counterculture in the circumstances of Frank’s own family history. How do we make our way in a world lacking in stable points of reference? Is it possible to reconcile our individual needs and perspectives with those of others? These are some of the broader questions that inform Frank’s conversations with his children. Pablo, especially, is deeply concerned with the issue of individual responsibility. “All I can

“A BETTER WAY TO LIVE” ◆ 103 really say,” he tells his father, “is that now . . . I feel the burden of bringing myself up. . . . I care a lot more about what I am. But I agree there’s a lot to worry about.” “In New York,” his father replies, “the pressure was too strong. It just left you no time.” The struggle to find one’s place in a world that is ever changing is a central theme in Frank’s work, one that he puts down to the influence of Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and Samuel Beckett, writers and philosophers whose appeal lies in their rigorous skepticism and rejection of absolute truths. In the work of each of these figures, the self is seen not as a stable point of reference but on a threshold between inside and outside worlds. The question that we need to address is, how does Frank’s treatment of the photographs dramatize this uneasy relationship between inside and outside worlds? In the introduction to a monograph on his photographic work published in 1983 by the Centre national de la photographie in Paris, Frank expresses the wish to create a film that would bring together the private aspects of his life and his work: “A film which would show how the two poles of this dichotomy join, interlace, are at variance, and fight each other.”15 He describes the role his photographs will play in this interaction: “I want to use these souvenirs of the past as strange objects from another age. They are partly hidden and curiously resonant, bringing information, messages which may or may not be welcome, may or may not be real. Disturbing objects which have a tale to tell or just lie low mutely.”16 Conversations in Vermont is very much the prototype for such a film, a film in which the auto biographical concerns that dominate Frank’s more recent work coincide with a reengage ment with preexisting images. The photographs that are scanned by the camera, picked up for a moment, looked at, and then put aside enable Frank to reflect on the significance of the past and configure the present differently. Philippe Dubois contrasts Frank’s rough handling of the photographs in Conversations in Vermont to Raymond Depardon’s systematic treatment of still images in Les années déclic (1984) and Agnès

104 ◆ “A BETTER WAY TO LIVE” Varda’s highly focused investigation of a single photograph in Ulysse (1982): “Frank, however, sets forth a distraught treatise on photographs, a work based on multiplicity, disorder, accumulation, explo- sion, a chaos constructed out of fragments, a pile of odds and ends.”17 Dubois’s description of Frank’s handling of the images overlooks something very important: in Conversations in Vermont, the decisions as to which images to look at, for how long, and why are not Frank’s

FIGURE 15. Robert Frank and Pablo Frank in Conversations in Vermont (Robert Frank, 1971). Copyright Robert Frank.

“A BETTER WAY TO LIVE” ◆ 105 FIGURE 16. Photographs of Pablo Frank, Robert Frank, and Mary Frank in Conversations in Vermont (Robert Frank, 1971). Copyright Robert Frank.

alone but also determined by his children. In an interview he describes the film as “very successful . . . because it was the most honest film I’ve ever done.”18 Later in the same interview, he claims that the film enabled him to establish a dialogue with his children. The photographs play a crucial role in this dialogue by enabling those who have been in front of the camera to “talk back” to the images produced, even if this involves denying their significance. The conversations between Frank and his children lend the photographs a point of view that is neither that of the camera nor that of the photographer but that of the subjects

106 ◆ “A BETTER WAY TO LIVE” of the photographs themselves. For a brief moment, the photographs heal the wounds of the past. They do so not on their own but by being brought into a conversation with the present.

SOMETHING BETTER Three years after finishing Conversations in Vermont, Frank penned the following dedication in his book The Lines of My Hand: “Above all for Pablo and Andrea, who are trying to find a better way to live.” These words echo the tail end of his final conversation with his children at the Vermont boarding school. “I’m really very happy that you’re up here,” he tells them. “And that’s part of it . . . what I want to say in this film . . . and to show that there are other ways . . . that there are ways where it can be better.” These remarks crystallize the dilemma driving the filmmaker: How can he show these “other ways”? In other words, how can he capture in images and words not only the tensions, mis- understandings, and failures of communication that are encapsulated in his complex relationship with his children but also the possibility of something better? The photographs that constitute so much of the film are one of the ways in which Frank addresses this dilemma; another way is through music. Conversations in Vermont concludes with an extended handheld shot of a choral performance by the student choir. At the start of the shot, the camera picks out Andrea. As the song culminates, the camera zooms in to a close-up of the face of an unidentified female student. The light coming from behind her head momen- tarily blurs the outline of her face. At the end of the performance, the students slowly file out of the room. As we watch them leave, Frank thanks the people who helped him make the film and, especially, his children. He then does something that he has not previously done in the film: he gives the film its title: “I call this film Conversations in Ver mont.” The fact that it is only now, after the children’s singing, that we finally learn what the film is called is no small matter. It is as if something very important has formed in the wake of this performance, both

“A BETTER WAY TO LIVE” ◆ 107 a tangible understanding of what the “better way” to which Frank refers looks and sounds like and, as a result of this articulation, a sense of the film’s identity. In Conversations in Vermont, the close-up of the young female choir member suggests an externalization of feeling that does not rely on words. A distinguishing feature of Frank’s films is that these acts of self-expression also have a collective function. “Does the singing help a lot to get that close contact?” the filmmaker asks Pablo. The singing that concludes the film is the expression of a desire for something better and its fleeting actualization. In About Me: A Musical, music plays an even more prominent role. Funded by the American Film Institute to produce a film about music in America, Frank incorporated this theme into a reflection on his life and career. For the most part, the film comprises an extended scene in which the young actress (Lynn Reyner) playing the role of the director is questioned by a group of visitors. “Are you happy?” asks one of the guests. “I heard that you were separated. What about the children?” “I’ve been working in this country for twenty fucking years,” she responds.

I’m forty-three years old. I come from Switzerland. I went to school there, and I came to this country to try my luck in America as a photographer making money, getting married, having children, going on trips, having affairs, watching my children grow up, being a success and a failure, trying to make more money, trying to be an artist, and then the trouble with my husband, and then my children go away, and then my children have problems, then my husband left. . . . Wait, wait, I said that [regaining her composure]. My mother’s blind. I went to see her.

The musical performances that interrupt this self-conscious dramatization bridge the film’s portrayal of Frank’s personal history and a larger social history. The young chanteuse and her two accompanists

108 ◆ “A BETTER WAY TO LIVE” performing “Baby It’s You,” Allen Ginsberg singing a raucous folk song while Peter Orlovsky dances wildly in the background, the Hope Freaks playing music on a hillside in Alloy, New Mexico, these interludes are a welcome relief from the awkward silences that punctuate the interrogation and the means by which the process of looking inward coincides with a process of looking outward. In their account of the anthropological role of music, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari identify three ways in which music interacts with daily life. First, it can shore up a feeling of courage: “A child in the dark, gripped with fear, comforts himself by singing under his breath. . . . The song is like a rough sketch of a calming and stabilising, calm and stable, center in the heart of chaos.”19 Second, it can consolidate an interior space in order to facilitate the accomplishment of a task. Sonorous or vocal components create “a wall of sound, or at least a wall with some sonic bricks in it.” They give as an example a child hum- ming so as to summon up the resolve to do homework or a housewife having a radio on in the background “as she marshals the antichaos forces of her work.” Third, it can establish a connection with others. “One launches forth,” they propose, “hazards an improvisation. But to improvise is to join with the World, or meld with it. One ventures from home on the thread of a tune.”20 All three of these functions are at work in Frank’s engagement with music. It is the third function, however, whereby music serves to facilitate a connection that has a particular relevance to the formal as well as thematic operation of his films. Near the end of About Me: A Musical, the director’s on-screen proxy is asked by one of her inquisitors: “What is it that music gives you at this particular time in your life?” She begins to formulate a reply: “It expresses what words . . .” Before she can finish her sentence, the film cuts to a hillside in New Mexico where a group of young musicians, referred to in the credits as the Hope Freaks, are engaged in a collective improvisation. When the performance comes to an end, two small children start tapping on a xylophone. The sound they produce carries through to the commencement of the next scene, which takes

“A BETTER WAY TO LIVE” ◆ 109 place at a state prison in Texas. A handheld shot follows a group of black inmates as they make their way along the prison corridor, past the checkpoints and bored-looking guards. As we follow them, the first notes of a gospel hymn bridge the long walk down the corridor to a scene in which the inmates are filmed singing a cappella. For the men the gospel hymn is both a lament and the expression of something better. When they finish their performance, the inmates are asked how long they have spent in prison as well as the length of their various sentences. “Eight and a half years. . . . Life,” says one. We cannot say for sure how this scene connects to the other musical performances or the dramatization of Frank’s life story. Nevertheless, in the move between scenes a connection has indeed been established, one in which the sonority and affective power of the song take the place of direct narrative connections. The value of music is, in other words, its ability to facilitate a type of serial composition in which disparate elements of filmic content—documentary, fictional reenactment, reflexive commentary—are brought together. The outcome is a set of meanings and associations that are difficult to pin down, that require us to go out on a limb and invest something of ourselves in the proceedings. Following through with this, we can say that About Me: A Musical is a film about Frank. More than that, it is also about the creation of a work that enacts a dispersal of its autobiographical intentions.

STORIES FROM THE STREETS Near the end of About Me: A Musical, the actress playing the role of Robert Frank addresses the camera: “I hope you got what you wanted. It’s true, I don’t believe in words. But you can always add something of your own to make it honest. I mean, why tell my story? Why not tell theirs or his or Vera’s or Janey’s or Sheila’s or yours?” Walking toward the apartment windows, she continues to list the other possible sources for stories: “The pimps, the whores . . . the pushcart salesman, the dealer, the guy going to work down there in his Cadillac, the lady

110 ◆ “A BETTER WAY TO LIVE” walking her kids, the lady walking her dog.” The film then cuts to a series of direct-to- camera answers by passersby who are asked what they would make a film about: “discrimination,” “sports,” “the way the city has been going to pot,” “the streets,” “drug addicts.” The final answer comes from an ebullient old man: “About myself. What do you think I am?” He then pulls out a toy whistle: “Look at what I’m doing. You ever see anything like it? Want to see?” We know that one of the things that drew Frank to film was the requirement that he communicate his thoughts to others. The old man performing “Those Were The Days” on his whistle or the black prison inmates singing the gospel hymn position Frank’s shift from photography to film as the consoli- dation of a particular form of communication that does not seek to master experience by insisting that it conform to a narrative structure with a beginning, middle, and end but rather is able to retain both its strangeness and its beauty. His films convey an engagement with the world that is open and available to things, one that shrinks from making categorical judgments. Something important is happening out there, they suggest, something that speaks directly to what is “in here.” The self-consciousness that defines Conversations in Vermont, Liferaft Earth, and About Me: A Musical is motivated by the search for a form of cinematic narration capable of evoking this interplay of inside and outside, filmmaker and world. Contrary to what Frank sometimes suggests, words do play a part in this process. They allow the filmmaker to relate his own doubts and insecurities to those of the people in front of the camera. Viewed in the broader context of his career, words also facilitate a return to photography. “There’s one thing that I’m sorry about,” he told an audience at Yale University in 1971, “that I haven’t been made to use words before and try to be forced in some way to think about words.”21 In the photographs produced since these comments, Frank has made good on this regret. He uses the interaction between words and images to reflect on the choices governing his career, his aspirations and concerns, and his methods. This development coincided with his use in the mid-1970s of

“A BETTER WAY TO LIVE” ◆ 111 a Polaroid Land 196 camera that took small 3¼-by- 4¼-inch positive/ negative black-and-white film. The appeal of the Polaroid format lay in the instantaneity of the images as well as the opportunity to intervene in the images by inscribing brief thoughts and statements on the still- fluid surface of the print or directly onto the negative. The purpose of this writing, Frank explains, was “to say what I felt, more than really what I saw. That’s when I started to scratch in what I felt on the picture.”22 Elsewhere, he adds, “The picture itself has ceased to exist.”23 Even though the picture may no longer exist, something has taken its place: a method of combining image and text, inside and outside, so as to make the image accountable to the passing of time. These changes in Frank’s working methods are prefigured in the diptych Mabou. They also form the subject of the later work Mabou, Nova Scotia (1977) (see Plate 6). In this image we see two of Frank’s early photographs, Political Rally—Chicago (1956) and London to New York (1953), pegged to a string line that runs parallel to the line of the horizon separating the ocean from a foreboding expanse of sky. Along- side these two prints is a developed-out print on which we see the word “words.” The power of this image lies in the mismatch between the vast expanse of sky and the photographs draped on the line. No longer safely accommodated in the pages of a book or tucked away behind glass on a gallery wall, the photographs are exposed to the elements. No longer just images, they are also material things that will weather and fade. The presence of “words” points to an affinity between the struggle to communicate and the demonumentalized vision of photography on display in this image. No longer a matter of images or words, the struggle to communicate will take the form of an arrangement of images and words placed on equal footing.

ASHEN FRAGMENTS During the early 1970s, Frank was far from the only filmmaker interested in exploring the relationship between words and photographic

112 ◆ “A BETTER WAY TO LIVE” images. A few years after Frank directed Conversations in Vermont, the experimental filmmaker and writer Hollis Frampton placed thirteen photographs, one after the other, on an electric hot plate. Nearly all of the images document different aspects of Frampton’s friendships and career during a period spanning the late 1950s to the mid-1960s. As the spiral pattern of the hot plate burns through the surface of the photograph, slowly transforming the print into a flaming carbonized residue, a monotone voice-over reads brief descriptions of the events and people represented in the image. The trouble is that the descriptions and the images are out of sync. The descriptions refer not to the image on the screen but to the image that follows. By the time we see the image to which the story refers, a new story has already begun to demand our attention. Over time (nostalgia) has come to be recognized as one of the defining works of structural film: a broad category of experimental cinema that came to prominence in the mid-1960s. David E. James describes structural film as distinguished by “a general subordination of interest in representation, especially of narrative, and a corresponding emphasis on the materials and resources of the medium, on the conditions of production and display, and on the specific kinds of signification of which film is capable.”24 Understood accordingly, the combustion of the photographs allegorizes the passage of the photogram: the individual photographic unit that appears on the transparent strip of celluloid and that, when pressed into motion by the projector, creates the illusion of movement. “Even the animation effect of the disappearing photogram,” observes Garrett Stewart, “is evoked by the wriggling dance of ashen fragments as they writhe and buckle in disintegration on the hot plate, long after the image itself has passed from visibility.”25 My particular interest in (nostalgia) lies in using its engagement with the materiality of film to link Conversations in Vermont to a broader context of postwar cinematic experimentation.26 Both films stage an “end” to photography, or, at least, a particular conception of photography’s ability to picture the past. In the final monologue in

“A BETTER WAY TO LIVE” ◆ 113 114 ◆ “A BETTER WAY TO LIVE” FIGURES 17, 18, AND 19. Photograph of Hollis Frampton in (nostalgia) (Hollis Frampton, 1971).

(nostalgia), the narrator confesses that he has largely given up taking photographs: “This has been partly through design and partly through laziness. I think I expose fewer than fifty negatives a year now.” He then refers to a moment in the recent past when he felt the urge to make a photograph. The outcome was an image that contained an unexpected detail—the reflection of something captured in a factory window and then reflected again in the rearview mirror of a truck door. After en- larging this detail, the features of the image were rendered “hopelessly ambiguous.” “Nevertheless,” the narrator concludes, “what I believe I

“A BETTER WAY TO LIVE” ◆ 115 see recorded, in that speck of film, fills me with such fear, such utter dread and loathing, that I think I shall never dare to make another photograph again.” He urges us to look at the photograph: “Do you see what I see?” Despite this prompting, when the time comes, all that we see is a black screen that does not smoke or combust but remains resolutely black. Like (nostalgia), Conversations in Vermont constitutes a farewell to photography, the terms of which are drawn from the breakdown of the filmmaker’s first marriage. In Frank’s final “New York Letter” for Creative Camera, he explains his decision to shift his attention away from photography: “A wife can stop loving you; photography? I loved it, spent my talents and energy on it, I was committed to it; but when respectability and success became part of it, then it was time to look for a new mistress or wife.”27 Just before these comments, he remarks caustically: “It will take less time to give up my wife, I speculate.” In Conversations in Vermont, this sad alignment of life and work is under lined by Mary’s role in the film’s prologue as Frank’s collaborator: it is her hand that picks up and moves the photographs that accompany the filmmaker’s off-screen narration; it is she who shares the screen with Frank and the piles of photographs that document their disinte- grating life together. The rough treatment of the photographs stands in for the fracturing of their relationship and a general disillusionment with the medium’s ability to render experience. But an important qualification needs to be made, one that applies equally to Conversations in Vermont and (nostalgia). In both films the farewell to photography coincides with an activation of the surface of the photograph as an arena for expression. Just as the carboniza- tion of the photographs in (nostalgia) releases a range of emotions and sensations, the physical handling of the prints in Conversations in Vermont by Frank, Mary, and their children dramatizes the complex affinities linking each of these individuals to the past. “Something irreparable has happened before our very eyes,” writes Dubois about the burning of the prints in (nostalgia). “We are left with the shrivelled

116 ◆ “A BETTER WAY TO LIVE” fragments of a life that in the end is little more than ashes.”28 In Con versations in Vermont, the handling of the photographs also signals a decisive change. The terms of this change are conveyed in the scrutiny of the photographs by the filmmaker and his wife and children, as well as the camera. No longer static indexes of a past time, the photographs are part of an unceasing puzzling over meaning.

NO PLACE In Conversations in Vermont, photographs function as places of con- testation and debate. The process of weathering evoked in Mabou, Nova Scotia is encapsulated in the rough handling of the prints, as well as in Pablo’s rebuttal of his father’s attachment to the photographs: “I don’t remember any of these pictures.” Pablo’s response suggests a breach between the circumstances of the present and the past represented in the photographs. This breach brings to mind the mismatch between images and words in Frampton’s landmark film. An inability to reconcile past and present also lies at the heart of Hazel Motes’s portentous declaration in Flannery O’Connor’s 1952 novel Wise Blood: “Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it. Where is there a place for you to be? No place. Nothing outside you can give you a place.”29 On more than one occasion, Frank refers to these lines as a succinct description of his sense of the unstable relationship between past and present.30 Etymologically speaking, the idea of no place is directly connected to the idea of utopia. From the moment when statesman-philosopher Thomas More, in the sixteenth century, first coined the term, “utopia” has been associated with the establishment of an ideal society: a place that marks both a new beginning and a reorganization of political and social structures. During the 1960s this interpretation informed the creation of a range of alternative communities and forms of public protest, such as those documented in Liferaft Earth.

“A BETTER WAY TO LIVE” ◆ 117 Halfway through this film, the director admits that his decision to abandon the protest was a mistake. He returns to the protest, which has since relocated to the Portola Institute, situated in the hills above San Francisco. On the final day of the action, Frank and his cameraman, Danny Lyon, walk among the hunger strikers, asking: “Are you still alive? Do you have anything to say?” Each person reflects on his or her own motivation for joining the protest. One of the last to be filmed is a young woman. Smiling ecstatically, she looks at the camera and says: “You fucking media whores. Creeps. Taking pictures.” Clearly affected by her ordeal, she turns away and adds: “I can’t stand up much longer, Robert.” Panning away from the young woman, the camera comes to rest on a young man in a large blue smock. “I have enjoyed tasting the void for six days,” he declares. “My body is beginning to taste good.” Most unnerving of all is the fixed grin of a young man who stares intently at the camera. These figures embody the aspirations and idealism that defined an extraordinary period in American history. Yet for all their determination and intent, their anonymity renders them lost to history. Wandering among the remaining protesters, Frank’s camera creates the possibility of a rendezvous between these anony- mous figures and the present. Three years later, the ecstatic expressions of the young protesters reappear in a much darker guise in Cocksucker Blues, Frank’s insider account of the 1972 tour of the United States by the Rolling Stones. In this film the utopic aspirations evident in Liferaft Earth are replaced by a disturbing sense of psychological free fall. “The tour was like being on a space ship,” the filmmaker recalls. “The drugs, the incredible speed at which everything has to be kept moving. You are kept away from everybody else really. You are always protected.”31 This disconnec- tion is embodied in the lifestyle of the band members, shunted from one hotel room to the next; it is also conveyed through the activities of the unidentified figures who occupy the outer edges of the social whirl formed by the band. Divorced from a larger collective context, the anonymity of these figures is of a quality different from that of the

118 ◆ “A BETTER WAY TO LIVE” young protesters in Liferaft Earth—more vulnerable and tenuous in its singularity. About half an hour into the film’s running time, the camera observes a distressed young woman sitting against a wall. Crouched in front of her is a man wearing a shirt torn at the back. Noticing the camera’s presence, she buries her hand in her lap. Why is she so upset? What is the man doing? More unsettling is a longer scene in which a naked woman lies on a bed rubbing what looks to be semen on her stomach. Just off camera, a man that we glimpsed a few seconds earlier offers a running commentary on her actions. What is the relationship between these two people? What connection do the events occurring in this room have to the events occurring in all of the other rooms that the camera inhabits? We pass through these rooms unable to shake the impression of having seen too much yet able to understand too little. In Cocksucker Blues the desire to connect the various incidents and events revealed by the camera occurs hand in hand with the realiza- tion that this wished-for connection is no longer possible. The outcome is a style of cinematic narration that is deliberately fragmented. This is evident in the constant movement between spaces and events as well as the inclusion of images that suggest a meaning grasped in passing—for example, the shot of a hand reaching out of a prison window or the brief shots of a white roadside cross inscribed with the words “Repent Now.” Only on-screen for a few seconds, these images suggest a mysterious level of connection between things large and small, central and incidental that is gleaned by the mobile camera. Fragmentation also leaves its mark on the presentation of the musical performances. Characterized by the same quality of rough intimacy that distinguishes the footage of the offstage activities, the footage of the band’s onstage performances is often interrupted by a cut to something occurring elsewhere—for example, when the film jumps from Mick Jagger performing “Brown Sugar” to a shot of fans outside the auditorium rushing toward the filmmakers or when the sound of the singer’s voice introducing the members of the band accompanies footage of Keith Richards and Mick Taylor trying to fall asleep on the

“A BETTER WAY TO LIVE” ◆ 119 airplane. By interrupting the performances in this manner, Frank is able to conjure an aspect of the music that would not have been possible otherwise: its connection to an understanding of human history figured as transitory and fleeting. In Conversations in Vermont, the social changes documented in Life raft Earth and Cocksucker Blues also inform the film’s account of the Vermont boarding school where the filmmaker’s children reside. Near the start of the film, we see Pablo and Andrea cleaning the stables and helping to prepare supper; later, we listen in as Pablo talks about his difficulties in adjusting to the school. Frank picks up on these remarks later in the film when he proposes that attending the school has finally provided his children with something they have always wanted: a “normal” environment. “It’s an absolute mistake to think this is the normal,” Pablo responds. “We’ve all come from the normal to this.” At these moments, Conversations in Vermont wavers between social documentary and something much more personal. The photographs passed between Frank and his children embody these competing tendencies: they are parts of a celebrated body of work and, at the same time, family snapshots the significance of which is inextricably tied to the figures depicted in the images. “It’s some kind of a family album,” Frank observes in the film’s prologue. Like the images that we collect in our own albums, the photographs scrutinized by Frank, Mary, Pablo, and Andrea do not halt the passing of time. Instead, they stand in for the tensions and transformations that arise from the inevitable failure of such a desire. The emotional impact of watching Conversations in Vermont is heightened by the knowledge that what lies ahead for Frank and his children will tip the aspirations associated with the idea of no place irrevocably in the direction suggested by the protagonist in O’Connor’s novel.

120 ◆ “A BETTER WAY TO LIVE” 4 “THE FIRE OF PAIN” Life Dances On . . . , Home Improvements, The Present

The films I have made are the map of my journey thru all this . . . living. It starts out as “scrap book footage.” There is no script, there is plenty of intuition. It gets confusing to piece together these moments of rehearsed banalities, embarrassed documentation, fear of telling the truth and somewhere the fearful truth seems to endure. —Robert Frank

In Home Improvements Frank films his friend Gunther Moses drilling a hole in a stack of black-and-white photographic prints. Over the noise of the drill, the filmmaker announces: “What I would like to . . . is to drive a spike through, you know, and nail them in.” To ensure that he has pierced all the images, Moses pulls the prints apart and repeats the drilling. His thoroughness impresses Frank: “And then you start again, huh.” Shortly after, the video switches location to the filmmaker’s home in Mabou. It is early morning, and he is preparing to drive a load of garbage down to the road that runs past his house. “I have to scrape the windshield,” he tells us. “Here is the scraper and here is the windshield.” Down at the road, he kills time by filming views of the house, the bags of garbage waiting to be collected, and the tire tracks on the dirt road. When the truck arrives, the driver is surprised by the presence of the camera. “It’s a big moment,” Frank yells out to the slightly confused garbage man as he picks up the bags of rubbish and throws them into the back of the truck. The destruction of the photographs and the ceremonial disposal of the garbage have been interpreted as Frank’s attempt to “nail down” his past and “prevent it from impinging so sharply, emphatically and

◆ 121 frequently on his present.”1 Sarah Greenough is referring here to the weighty legacy of Frank’s history as a photographer and, in particular, to the ongoing impact of the images presented in The Americans. In the scene immediately preceding the destruction of the prints, the filmmaker reads aloud a letter written to John Szarkowski, the director of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, in which he offers to donate to the museum all of his negatives spanning the period 1944 to 1970. He also lets Szarkowski know that he will no longer be involved in the preparation of an exhibition being organized by his former publisher Robert Delpire. “I’m tired,” he explains. “Living the life I choose is now stronger than I was then.” Earlier in the video, the filmmaker trains his camera on a swirling mass of plastic bags and sheets of paper outside his apartment windows in Bleecker Street in Lower Manhat- tan. With the sound of Ravel’s Boléro playing in the background, he sums up the state of play: “It’s Christmas Day. It’s cold. It’s 1984. My camera looks down Bleecker Street. I’m listening to the music, and I’m looking at the Christmas wrappers blowing in the wind, and I’m thinking of Kerouac when he said being famous is like old newspapers blowing down Bleecker Street.” The feelings of fatigue and disillusionment expressed in Home Improvements can be traced to the ruptures and personal tragedies that define Frank’s biography. In 1969 he separated from his first wife, Mary. The following year, along with his current wife, the artist June Leaf, he bought a house in Mabou on Cape Breton Island, Nova Sco- tia. From this point on, his life would be divided between his home in Mabou and his studio and apartment in Manhattan. Overshadowing these changes, on December 28, 1974, his daughter, Andrea, died in an airplane crash near Tikal, Guatemala. She was twenty years old. Com- ing just after the disappearance of his friend and former collaborator Danny Seymour, Andrea’s death both changes everything and triggers an acceleration of tendencies already evident in Frank’s work. “Most of the images he has made since then,” writes W. S. Di Piero, “register or recall the grief of that event in a ripped, pictorial idiom. His art . . . has

122 ◆ “THE FIRE OF PAIN” been recast to meet a changed experience of the world.”2 There can be no doubt that by the time of his daughter’s death, Frank was exploring pathways back to photography that, in part, were enabled by his work in film. These pathways involve using words and phrases scratched into the negative or inscribed on the surface of the print as well as creating images composed of a number of separate prints brought together in a single work. The ceremonial destruction of the photographs in Home Improvements is a continuation of these developments. It affirms that the desire to escape his photographic past coincides with the search for new methods of treating still images. The weighty legacy that he seeks to renegotiate is at one and the same time personal and also linked to a history of creative experimentation that spans different art forms and media. “More and more my language appears to me like a veil which one has to tear apart in order to get to those things (or the nothingness) lying behind it.”3 Samuel Beckett wrote these words in 1937 in a letter in which he looks forward to a time “when language is best used where it is most efficiently abused.”4 He goes on to outline a scenario that sounds uncannily familiar: “To drill one hole after another into [language] until that which lurks behind, be it something or nothing, starts seeping through—I cannot imagine a higher goal for today’s writer.” Pursuing the implications of this scenario, he asks:

Is there any reason why that terrifyingly arbitrary materiality of the word surface should not be dissolved, as for example the sound surface of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony is de- voured by huge black pauses, so that for pages on end we cannot perceive it as other than a dizzying path of sounds connecting unfathomable chasms of silence?5

Although Frank has never referred to Beckett’s letter when discussing his destruction of the prints in Home Improvements, this fascinating correspondence positions his actions as part of a larger testing of the

“THE FIRE OF PAIN” ◆ 123 material limits of representational forms. For Beckett this involves as- serting that words have a sonic surface that can be interrupted or dissolved. For Frank it is a matter of bringing into relief the implications of the image’s paper qualities. “To me [photography] stood still,” he told an audience at George Eastman House in 1967. “I was always faced with the paper like a painter who’s faced with the empty canvas.”6 Not surprisingly, when he returned to working with still images, he looked to make the surface of the paper matter. The 1978 image Halifax Infirmary is comprised of four rows of Polaroid photographs depicting events occurring in and around a hospital patient’s bed (see Plate 7). On one of the Polaroids, Frank has written, “room 554,” and below this, “mr lawson” and “pain.” The final photograph in the series shows an empty bed with the date “sept 26.” Reinforcing the work’s tone of emotional and physical distress is the statement running underneath the collage: “the wind will blow the fire of pain across everyone in time.” Frank’s place in the story is indicated by an image of his hospital identification tag at the bottom of the page, directly beneath that of Mr. Lawson. The function of words in this image is to furnish the outlines of a story about Mr. Lawson. They also allow us to see something in the image that is not visible as such: a meaning or affect that arises through the photographer’s encounter with the surface of the print. “My struggle with words,” Frank explains, “is that, that I want to get away from that picture—the idea of a picture.” Later in the same discussion, he clarifies this imperative: “It isn’t in the pictures. The pictures are a necessity: you do them. And then the way you present them, and the way you put them together—it can strengthen the simpleness of the visual series.”7 Frank’s observations foreground two actions that need to be elaborated as clearly as possible. The first involves a violation of the photograph’s pictorial capacity; the second involves an engagement with the photographic surface as a space on which to write.8 We already know that, in a number of interviews, Frank links his interest in combining words and images to the experience of making films. The question that

124 ◆ “THE FIRE OF PAIN” has yet to be considered is, how does the mutual implication of media that defines Frank’s approach leave its mark on the narrative structures and the forms of address employed in the trilogy Life Dances On . . . , Home Improvements, and The Present? Prompting this question is the assumption that we need to treat his work in photography, film, and video not as separate pursuits but as related aspects of a broader process of experimentation occurring between media. “It’s through form that the artist can find a way out, by giving form to the unformed.”9 Beckett’s dictum affirms the importance of grounding our investigation of the volatile registers of feeling that characterize Frank’s work in formal matters. In the trilogy under discussion, the screen functions as a space in which distinctions between past and present, inside and outside are continually blurred. Looking at these three productions also allows us to consider how Frank’s methods changed in the wake of his involvement with a new medium of image making, home video.

WORDS Life Dances On . . . begins with the dedication, “In memory of my daughter Andrea, 1954–1974.” Immediately following, an outtake from Conversations in Vermont shows the filmmaker preparing to talk to Andrea in the stables of the Vermont boarding school where she and her brother, Pablo, resided at the time. Both appear a little awkward. Frank asks his daughter if she would ever consider moving back to the city. “I would never live there and bring up my children, as the city is now,” she replies. Rather than dwelling on the poignancy of Andrea’s response, the filmmaker completes the opening dedication, “and for my friend Danny Seymour 1945—?” An outtake from Cocksucker Blues shows Seymour listening to the Rolling Stones. Turning to the camera, he draws deeply on the joint he has in his hand and passes it to the cameraman. With the music still playing, the film cuts to the title card: “Life Dances On . . . .” More than a pithy title, these words are a response to the experience of loss recounted in the film’s opening

“THE FIRE OF PAIN” ◆ 125 moments. Death has touched Frank’s family and friends, but he continues to work, continues to test his own feelings of internal disquiet against the unceasing motion of the world out there. Immediately after the credit sequence, the film turns its attention to three individuals whose lives are teetering on the brink. The first of these is Pablo. A decade earlier, Conversations in Vermont revealed Pablo as a young man concerned with finding his way in the world. Ten years later, he is in trouble. He responds to the camera’s presence by engaging in a series of non sequiturs: “January 12th and June 24th. What will the volcanoes on the West Coast do? Then, after that, it’s Mars and the moon. Baseball and Mack Trucks. Kentucky strip.” “No,” Frank pleads from off-screen. “I would just like to know why you . . . think you can’t enjoy life like other people . . . why you have to carry the whole world on your shoulder like I carry this heavy instrument?” Pablo’s reply is heartbreaking in its evasiveness: “Because I don’t like . . . earth’s gravity. I want to see what the gravity is like on the other planets.” Pablo allows himself to be filmed. He responds to his father’s questions. But the outcome is a verbal performance that fuels the filmmaker’s anxiety about his son’s state of mind. The second figure is Billy, a mentally disturbed Bowery resident who believes that people can read his thoughts. Staring directly at the camera, he addresses himself to “all the mental telepathists”: “I know you people are reading my mind. You don’t fool me one bit, not one minute, you’re not fooling me. I know you can read my mind. . . . I can be three thousand miles away from you and you can read my mind.” Billy’s strange thought patterns are echoed in the activities of Marty Greenbaum, an artist and friend of the filmmaker. Marty is making phone calls to an automated operator dispensing winning lottery numbers. These numbers are part of some sort of artwork. Before we can work out the logic of his actions, the film cuts to a heated argument he is having with an unidentified man on a street corner. “I’m going to laugh at you, man,” he taunts his adversary. “That must be why you’re making the film,” the young man replies. “It gives you something to

126 ◆ “THE FIRE OF PAIN” laugh at.” With the argument continuing on the soundtrack, the film cuts to a hillside in Nova Scotia. A man holds up a developed-out print on which we read “words.” He then replaces this print with a series of prints of Frank’s early photographs. Panning away from the images, the camera alights on a man chopping wood. On the soundtrack the young man’s angry words condemn the uselessness not just of Marty’s endeavors but, by implication, of all forms of creative expression: “It’s really pathetic that a man goes as long as you’ve gone to do something this trite. . . . To make such a fucking artificial scene like this and think you’re actually doing something of consequence.” Two things are occurring simultaneously during these opening six or seven minutes. First is the establishment of a deep feeling of unease around the people and activities recorded by the camera, and second is the creation of a sequence in which images are brought together on the basis of a series of echoes and associations rather than an identifiable narrative structure. The purpose of these echoes and associations is to suggest a connection between the external world and the filmmaker’s own feelings and responses. In Life Dances On . . . , June Leaf looks at the camera and asks: “Why do you want to make these pictures?” Everything that happens after this point speaks directly to Frank’s use of the screen as both a window on the world and a surface on which to inscribe his own responses and feelings. In front of an open door- way that looks out onto the coastline below the filmmaker’s house, a partially hidden figure holds up a souvenir model of the Empire State Building. After a few seconds, a Day of the Dead toy skeleton replaces the souvenir. The figure holding the toy skeleton then turns the key on the back of the toy, and we watch it perform a macabre dance. The souvenir of the Empire State Building reminds us of the filmmaker’s arrival in the United States as a twenty-two- year- old photographer, just as the dancing skeleton recalls the deaths that are commemorated in the film’s prologue. Even the background chatter of the local radio station announcing the birth of baby girls at the Inverness Hospital speaks to us of Frank’s painful history as a father. Outside the house,

“THE FIRE OF PAIN” ◆ 127 the world moves relentlessly forward; inside, the filmmaker is using what is at hand to sketch the outlines of a story grounded in his own biography and career as an artist. In such a process the screen matters as a space on which to present, rather than simply tell, a story. Frank’s method of arranging objects in front of the camera con tinues when the film cuts to a shot of A Loud Song, a photobook by Danny Seymour. As we watch a hand turning the pages, Seymour’s father recalls his son’s openness and generosity. The filmmaker’s

FIGURE 20. Life Dances On . . . (Robert Frank, 1980). Copyright Robert Frank.

128 ◆ “THE FIRE OF PAIN” FIGURE 21. Life Dances On . . . (Robert Frank, 1980). Copyright Robert Frank.

voice-over then takes over and recounts the details of his friend’s disappearance on a boat journey from South America back to the United States. His opening words coincide with the start of a series of super impositions, the first of which is a close-up of an eye superimposed on a shot of a deserted Nova Scotia coastline. In the right-hand corner of this shot is a dog sitting on the sand. We can describe this image as a superimposition. But it might be more accurate to describe the process of its construction as involving the searing of one image by another. In

“THE FIRE OF PAIN” ◆ 129 Life Dances On . . . , the eye does more than simply survey the external world captured in the image. More forcefully, it also seeks to impose itself on the scene. The chiming of a clock serves to bridge this superimposition to a series of panning shots of artworks featuring images of Andrea. The voice-over describes the circumstances of Andrea’s death: “She had come to say goodbye to me here in Mabou,” Frank tells us. “She came up with her boyfriend, Tom, and she left on Thanksgiving that same year.” The filmmaker’s voice is then replaced by the sound of a local radio announcer reporting on the weather conditions. As we listen to these details, a series of superimpositions bring together images of Andrea and Danny Seymour with images of objects and artworks on the floors and walls of Frank’s studio. These superimpositions seem less precise, less carefully plotted; we might say that the process of superimposition has become more speculative. The filmmaker is using the manipulation of images to work through and understand experience. The final shot in the sequence shows the top half of a telegraph pole. In the background, the ocean waves are heading toward the shore. After about ten seconds, the camera zooms out to a wide shot of the snow-covered coastline. The extended shot of the telegraph pole encapsulates the filmmaker’s feelings of isolation and grief as well as a method of looking at the world—not to see anything in particular but to chart the threshold between inner and outer worlds, between the turbulence of what is in here and the cold force of what is out there.

“IT WAS DARK” Frank originally intended to make a film commemorating Andrea and Danny using 8 mm–film footage that he had shot when his daughter was living with him in Canada. Disastrously, this footage was lost by the post office en route to a film laboratory. A few years later, he returned to the unfinished project. Instead of the 8 mm footage, he used images that had been shot years before and combined them with

130 ◆ “THE FIRE OF PAIN” newly filmed footage. “Like finding pieces for a puzzle,” he explains, “you find [pieces] here and there, and you put it together.”10 Frank’s desire to commemorate Andrea and Danny by using footage already at hand marks a continuation of the practice, begun in Conversations in Vermont, of reflecting on the past by means of an engagement with preexisting images. On a deeper level, it illustrates a fundamental principle whereby the function or value of any image is determined by its treatment in the present. This principle connects Frank’s work in film to the impulses that define his return to photography. The process of combining and rearranging preexisting images enables Frank to bring together different registers of time as well as feeling. It also lends a ceremonial weight to the expression of grief. This self-conscious presentation of emotion also characterizes Frank’s video work. When he began experimenting with video in the early 1980s, Frank was following in the footsteps of a number of other filmmakers and artists who were drawn to the video image’s instantaneity and “liveness.” The benefit of this instantaneity was that it allowed Frank to mark more directly his own relationship to the image. “When the video camera is on, I always feel that it is a kind of ‘moment of truth,’ ” he told an interviewer. “Working with film never gives you this feeling of intimacy. There are too many machines involved and too many other people. You are alone with your video camera. It’s like a pencil. You can say things that you could never say with film.”11 Home Improvements begins with an archetypal home-video scenario: a cake covered with lighted candles emerges from the darkness as a group of people sings “Happy Birthday to You.” Over these images Frank inscribes the video’s title as well as the place and time of the filming: “Nova Scotia / New York / November ’83–March ’84.” We then see the filmmaker in close-up, reflecting on the celebration: “Well the cake was wonderful, the visit is good, and I’m fifty-nine, and, tomor- row, I’ll be a day older.” Frank’s words echo those of innumerable other birthday party recipients trying to reassure the organizers that their efforts have been appreciated; they also affirm the video’s underlying

“THE FIRE OF PAIN” ◆ 131 theme: the passage of time and the threats to our health and happiness that come with age. Immediately after the filmmaker’s response to his birthday party, the video cuts to a shot of a foolscap writing pad resting on a table. On top of the pad is a pen. Although there are no words on the pad, Frank reads aloud the contents of a letter he has written to himself: “Dear Robert, you’re worried. I’m worried about June. I’m worried what she has is serious. I listen to her when she sleeps. Her breathing worries me.” He then cuts to a close-up of a tray containing a sheet of paper and pieces of charcoal. An off-screen figure shakes the tray vigorously and inscribes the word “fight” on the sheet of paper. Frank then reads aloud a series of admonitions: “Fight. Fight. Wait. Win. Lose. Survive. OK. Listen again.” His words are accompanied by a shot of his reflection in a mirror; in the background we can hear the sound of water dripping. A pan down from the mirror reveals the source of this sound to be a cup placed under a leaking faucet. The next cut switches our attention to a toy mask into which a cigarette has been inserted. When the camera pans away, we alight on a writing pad containing Frank’s thoughts about the death of a close friend and his wife’s impending biopsy: “I watch in terror + fear / for her life for her / as this is our life / Terror in my life.” Just below this heartfelt confession are the words “Mabou—first snow.” Tracing these opening moments in such detail brings to the fore two central aspects of Frank’s use of video. The first is its cultivation of an impression of lived proximity. In Home Improvements we move from the life-changing implications of June’s biopsy to the banal insistence of a leaking faucet. The basis of this shift is the proximity of these events in the filmmaker’s field of attention. The second consequence is an extrapolation from the first. Much like the writing pad or the sheet of paper covered with charcoal shards, video enables a form of direct communication involving the filmmaker, his experience of the world, and the spectator. The closest equivalent to this type of direct communication is the written diary. Diary writing differs from autobiography

132 ◆ “THE FIRE OF PAIN” in the inherently provisional nature of its reflections; its focus is on conveying the unfolding of one day after another. This concentration on the present does not exclude reflection on the past. Each time the diarist sits down to write, he or she reflects on events that may have happened that day, that week, or that year. The distinguishing feature of this reflection is that it seeks to understand past events from the point of view of the present. Frank’s contemporary Jonas Mekas speaks eloquently about the affinities between his filmic and written diaries:

FIGURE 22. Home Improvements (Robert Frank, 1985). Copyright Robert Frank.

“THE FIRE OF PAIN” ◆ 133 At first I thought that there was a basic difference between the written diary which one writes in the evening, and which is a reflective process, and the filmed diary. In my film diary, I thought, I was doing something different: I was capturing life, bits of it, as it happens. But I realized very soon that it wasn’t that different at all. When I am filming, I am also reflecting. I was thinking that I was only reacting to the actual reality. I do not have much control over reality at all, and everything is determined by my memory, my past. So that this “direct” filming becomes also a mode of reflection. Same way, I came to realize that writing a diary is not merely reflecting, looking back. Your day, as it comes back to you during the moment of writing, is measured, sorted out, accepted, refused, and reevaluated by what and how one is at the moment when one writes it all down.12

In Mekas’s Walden the footage of New York streets buried in snow or Central Park covered in spring flowers is steeped in an impression of documentary immediacy. The affective force of this footage also stems from a set of processes, both in-camera and implemented during the editing stage, whereby the filmmaker inscribes his own responses and feelings to the world captured by the camera. This interplay between the affirmation of a present moment captured on-screen and the incorporation of this moment as part of a process of diaristic reflection gives the film its distinctive tone. The world preserved in these diaries is a world that the filmmaker looks back on as always already lost. The voice-over records this loss: it both celebrates the events depicted on- screen and acknowledges their passing. In Home Improvements Frank uses the mobility of the video camera to reflect on things that have happened in the past and to give due weight to things that are most immediate or pressing. The shots of the artworks scattered around the studio, the footage of June inside the car watching the waves battering the foreshore, the close-up of a fly

134 ◆ “THE FIRE OF PAIN” moving along a window: the purpose of these sights and sounds is to evoke a fragile feeling of happiness and provide the backdrop to Frank’s ruminations on June’s biopsy and Pablo’s ongoing struggles. During the course of the video, June overcomes her health crisis. The filmmaker’s obvious relief is tempered by his grief about Pablo’s deteriorating mental and physical health. As he leafs through a series of photographs, he tries to understand the possible causes of Pablo’s troubles:

Is it growing up with parents that are both artists and do not have enough time for their children? Is it losing his sister when she is only twenty? Getting sick with cancer, having an operation? Not being able to hold a girlfriend? . . . He travels. He goes to California, looking for something, UFOs, or religion, or help. Finally, he seeks help in a hospital in Delaware, and after that more hospitals. Finally, the Bronx, a psychiatric treatment center in the Bronx, Ward no. 4. . . . Pablo, I promise you I wont give up, and, one day soon, you will be better.

After visiting his son in the psychiatric treatment center, Frank uses the video camera to record his troubled thoughts during the journey home: “As I walk back from the visit with Pablo . . . I always have hope, but I realize that . . . I would try. And I think it means a lot to him if I try. He knows when I try. I just don’t know how long I can do it.” The jumpy images of the nondescript hospital buildings and the moments when the filmmaker pauses to gather his thoughts ground the footage in his physical and emotional state of being. They also encapsulate a method of using video that Philippe Dubois describes as “a form of looking and thinking that functions continuously and as if live with regard to everything. . . . [Video as] a way of breathing through images, of being intimately joined with them, a way of posing questions and attempting answers.”13 This is a view of video as always present, within easy reach of hand, eye, and voice.

“THE FIRE OF PAIN” ◆ 135 Later in the same scene, Frank points the camera at an airplane flying high above the hospital. He then pans down to a minivan driving past the hospital and ends the shot with another pan to the building housing the psychiatric treatment center. On the soundtrack his voice- over connects these sights and sounds to his grief about Pablo: “There the people are flying away . . . and there the people are traveling . . . and there the people are being locked up.” In Home Improvements every image functions as a point of contact between the world out there and the filmmaker’s troubled spirit. What is remarkable is that this interplay appears spontaneously generated. During the subway ride home, Frank’s attention ranges across a variety of activities and points of interest: defaced advertising posters, a group of young men posing with their portable cassette deck, the furtive glance of a woman making her way from one carriage to the next. The final shot in the sequence begins with an unidentified figure rising from the opposite seat; on the wall behind is the bottom edge of an advertisement for a cold remedy proclaiming the word “symptoms.” Directly below, someone has spray-painted the words “It was dark.” This spontaneously composed shot demonstrates the filmmaker’s ability to draw out of the contingent circumstances of everyday life a rendition of his own troubled spirit. His attentiveness to things makes the world out there not only his world but, by implication, our world as well.

THE VIDEO STILLED The shot of the graffiti-smeared seat lasts for approximately fourteen seconds: longer than we need to register what the words say but just long enough to institute a change in the image’s status. Raymond Bellour argues that in the history of the modern cinema, the stilled image has served to facilitate “the relentless search for another time, for a break in time.”14 He refers to the final freeze frame in François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959) as the defining instance when the flow of cinematic images is brought to a halt and the experience of time

136 ◆ “THE FIRE OF PAIN” FIGURE 23. Home Improvements (Robert Frank, 1985). Copyright Robert Frank. rendered in a film tips closer to that which characterizes our relationship to photography. Serge Daney describes this same moment as an example of filmic images revealing their photographic substructure: “Like a corpse to the ashes that in any case it is (ashes to ashes, frames to frames . . .).”15 In Home Improvements the motion of the subway carriage ensures that the shot of the graffiti-smeared seat is never completely still. Despite this movement, it too represents a moment of pause or suspension that fundamentally alters our relationship to the

“THE FIRE OF PAIN” ◆ 137 moving image. It does so by enacting a return to a material base that involves not a return to photography but rather a return to writing. Just as the words inscribed on the Polaroids in Halifax Infirmary translate the surface of the print into a space for writing, the words that dominate the shot of the graffiti-smeared seat turn the screen into a surface on which we witness a form of writing that happens as if by chance, that is drawn from both the disorder of the world and the author’s troubled spirit. Frank’s turn to video thus opened the door to an exponential in- crease in his ability to intervene in the image and treat the screen as a space in which visual and linguistic matter worked hand in hand. For our purposes it also provides the means to bridge two histories or practices of writing central to his career: the filmic and the photographic. Photography, film, video, written text, the more we consider Frank’s engagement with these different media, the harder it becomes for us to contain the implications of this engagement solely in terms of the individual media in question. Increasingly, we find ourselves dealing with a form of writing that is intermedial in its operations and implications.

ROADS NOT TAKEN In the decade following the release of Home Improvements, Frank directed three films: Candy Mountain, codirected with Rudy Wurlitzer, who also wrote the film’s script; Hunter (1989); and Last Supper (1992). In this same period he also directed Run (1989), a music video for the British band New Order, as well as two other video productions: C’est vrai! (One Hour), for the French TV channel La Sept, and Moving Pic tures, screened as part of a career retrospective at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Looking back, it was the experience of codirect ing the feature-length Candy Mountain that proved decisive. “There is so much money,” he muses, “so many people involved, so many compromises to be made, that you might as well go into it in a big way and

138 ◆ “THE FIRE OF PAIN” do it right if you have the talent, or work as a small wheel in these productions.”16 Elsewhere, he elaborates on the nature of these challenges: “I think the most difficult thing was to realize that there could be very little improvisation. I mean, you have to stick to the shooting schedule, you had so much time, you couldn’t change the camera angles. After a while, I settled for it. . . . I wouldn’t do it like this again.”17 Frank’s dissatisfaction with Candy Mountain clearly has its roots in the size and scale of the production. Modest by commercial filmmaking standards, it stands as his most expensive film. But reading between the lines, his dissatisfaction also has to do with a more fundamental difference between the film’s operation and his usual way of working—namely, its adherence to a character-based model of narrative exposition.18 The film tells the story of a young musician, Julius Book, attempting to track down a master guitar maker, Elmore Silk, who has turned his back on the trappings of fame and commercial success. During the course of his journey to find the reclusive guitar maker, Book loses everything that he had at the start: his girlfriend, the small amount of money provided by Silk’s former business partners, his car, and, finally, his dream of using the quest to launch his own career. The film’s tone and digressive structure recall a style of road movie that came to prominence during the late 1960s and 1970s. In films such as Five Easy Pieces (1970), Two-Lane Blacktop (1971), and The Last Detail (1973), the journey serves as a pretext for a series of delays and distractions that enable a different type of narrative content to emerge.19 In Candy Mountain this reorientation is evident in Book’s encounters with a host of peripheral characters, a significant number of whom are played by well-known musicians, such as Joe Strummer, Dr. John, Leon Redbone, and Rita MacNeil. The presence of these per- formers imbues the film with a dramatic rhythm and pacing more akin to that found in documentary forms. In the final shot Book is shown walking along the highway, attempting to hitch a ride back to New York. His mission to get Silk to agree to the terms of a deal cooked up by his former associates has gone bust.

“THE FIRE OF PAIN” ◆ 139 As he walks, the camera gradually pulls away. His disappearance from view is the culmination of the film’s gradual unraveling of the central character’s dramatic prominence. In terms of the trajectory of Frank’s career, the final moments of Candy Mountain also mark the unraveling of his connection to a model of narrative cinema that draws its creative energy from modifying—rather than abandoning—traditional genres and themes. One consequence of this was the exclusion of Frank’s work from critical discussions of independent American cinema. An- other much more productive outcome was his return to the style of first-person diary narration that emerged in Home Improvements.

“LOOK OUT” In the interview in which Frank discusses his dissatisfaction with the model of filmmaking exemplified by Candy Mountain, he emphasizes the value of using video to bypass the costs and compromises of commercial filmmaking. The trigger for these comments is a discussion of The Present, a video that he had been working on with his editor, Laura Israel, for a number of years and that continues both the form and substance of issues explored in Home Improvements. “It’s like the suite of it, the continuation,” he explains. “It deals with my life and it tells it only like you could tell it; in that way with a video and your voice.”20 Like its predecessor, The Present begins with a temporal marker: “Monday . . . .” This is followed by a shot of a four-pane window. The light coming through the window is so strong that very little of the outside world is visible. “I’m glad I found my camera,” Frank’s voice- over announces. “Now I can film. But I don’t know what. I don’t know what story I will tell.” Panning away from the window, he searches the room for something that will prompt a story: we catch sight of an old chair in the corner; resting on the chair is a rectangular box draped in fabric. On top of the fabric are two ornamental fish. Next to the chair is a desk on which sit a typewriter and canisters containing an assort- ment of pens and brushes. “I really should be able to find a story,” the

140 ◆ “THE FIRE OF PAIN” filmmaker continues. “Don’t you think so? Don’t we know? Isn’t it all there?” He then takes stock of all the other possible sources of stories in the room: “It could be just mirrors. It could be the beds. It could be the lights just waiting to be lit up. Light up little lights. Light up.” Finally, he decides: “I’m going to start the film with this picture. What’s behind that board?” But rather than revealing what is behind the board, the video cuts to an image familiar to viewers of Home Improvements: a fly making its way along the windowpane. “All these flies make little dots on the window,” Frank muses. “Then the other ones come and smell it and drop down out of fatigue or ecstasy.” The sequence ends with the camera looking through a different window at the yard outside: “And I look out the window. . . . And then it’s the memory.” This uncertainty about storytelling is nothing new. It goes back to Frank’s aversion to the model of photographic storytelling propagated by Life magazine: “Those goddamned stories with a beginning and an end.” Much of what follows in his career—the allusive sequencing of images that defines The Americans, the disjunctions of image and sound that characterize his film and video work, the incorporation of words and brief statements in his more recent photographs—is driven by a desire to “stand up to those stories but not be like them.” In The Present this ambivalent engagement with storytelling coincides with an event that threatens its collapse. On November 12, 1994, Pablo died of cancer. (The rectangular box draped in fabric contains his ashes.) The camera movement from the window to the various items in the room to a different window maps Frank’s feelings of paralysis in the face of this loss and his attempt to energize his troubled thoughts. It also sets up a tension between inside and outside, between past and present that operates throughout the video. The various windows through which we view the world mark the contested zone between these states. Later in the video, the camera surveys the contents of another room. “How can I sort out my thoughts?” Frank asks. “How can I go and look into this drawer full of pages and pieces of paper from the

“THE FIRE OF PAIN” ◆ 141 life of Pablo?” The jumble of letters, postcards, and drawings reminds the filmmaker of his son’s difficult life. The act of training the camera on the world outside the window provides some relief from the pain of these memories. “Look out the window,” he urges. “Look out. More, more. It’s good. What a nice window. He should look out those windows. He should see the tree behind them.” It says a lot about the filmmaker’s troubled disposition in The Present that as he says this the camera is trained not on a window but on a mirror in whose distorted surface the outline of the tree outside is reflected. Early in the video, the camera observes an old stag that has strayed into the front yard of his house in Mabou. On the soundtrack we hear him trying to coax the animal to come closer to the house: “C’mon old bugger. C’mon!” Then, for no apparent reason, he shoos the deer away. “Why did you do that?” June’s off-screen voice asks. Like the distorted reflection of the tree captured in the mirror, Frank’s contradictory actions charge the threshold between inside and outside worlds and suggest a deep unease about the possibility of transforming his conflicted feelings into some sort of story. Immediately after the encounter with the deer, the video cuts to a shot from inside the filmmaker’s New York apartment. “New windows at Bleecker Street,” the voice-over announces. “And that’s the view.” The camera then scans the uninspiring vista. “Nice corner; dead tree.” But as in the encounter with the stag, Frank is unable to maintain his engagement. “Ah, it’s just wasting fucking film,” he grumbles. The next shot underlines his predicament by providing a point of contrast: the members of a film crew on the street below are calmly going about their business, measuring focal lengths and sharing a smoke. Cutting away from the view of the street, the camera settles on a pile of photographs, letters, and notes on Frank’s desk. Among this pile of unsorted material is the filmmaker’s diary, open at the pages commemorating Andrea’s life. Below a drawing of two hands joined at the wrist so as to look like an angel’s wings, we read the words “andrea frank /

142 ◆ “THE FIRE OF PAIN” 1954–1974.” The video then cuts to a photograph. “And this is Andrea,” the filmmaker announces. “Today she would be forty. And maybe she would have children. . . . I don’t know what she thinks.” Like Frank, we can only guess at what Andrea was thinking at the moment when she gazed at the camera. But in the careful manner in which he cali- brates our perspective in this sequence—from the world outside the window to the material clutter on the desk to the words in his diary to,

FIGURE 24. The Present (Robert Frank, 1996). Copyright Robert Frank.

“THE FIRE OF PAIN” ◆ 143 FIGURE 25. The Present (Robert Frank, 1996). Copyright Robert Frank.

finally, the photograph of Andrea looking directly at the camera—he presents us with the outline of a story that is about the interaction of inside and outside worlds, the past and the present, a story held together by what appears to be a meandering movement from one thing to the next, from one room to the next. “The camera is no fly on the wall,” observes Greil Marcus of Frank’s method, “rather a fly looking for a place to light, and it doesn’t necessarily find one.”21

144 ◆ “THE FIRE OF PAIN” TIME IS OUT OF JOINT “I’m going on a trip,” the filmmaker tells us in the following shot, “and I have to make sure that the sink will not overflow with the water that’s dripping from the faucet. And I’m going to close the door, and I am going to go out. . . . But before going out, a last look at the house . . . just like in a film.” Frank knows the value of these journeys away from home. One way or another, he has been journeying all his life. His travels between New York and Nova Scotia echo the earlier journeys from Switzerland to America and back to Europe, as well as the famous journey across the United States on the Guggenheim Fellowship. In- deed, the journey has a formal as well as a biographical significance in his career. In The Americans it links the variety of people, places, and activities rendered in the photographs to an overarching narrative structure. The distinctive thing about the book’s rendition of the journey resides in the allusive and nonlinear way that it unfolds. In The Present the self-consciousness that characterizes the filmmaker’s deliberations about how to start also characterizes his account of the journey. Immediately after announcing what has to be done, he launches into a self-excoriating outburst: “Blah! Blah! Blah!” This suggests that the trip has become one more routine act undertaken without function or purpose. It also reinforces a sentiment evident in earlier films such as About Me: A Musical and Life Dances On . . . that words are inadequate to the task of conveying the filmmaker’s troubled feelings. This sentiment becomes stronger at the same time as words and statements take on an increasingly dominant role in his work. I am thinking of not only the epigraphs and autobiographical statements inscribed on the photographs but also the use of voice-over and the shots of diary entries in Home Improvements and The Present. This implies that it is not language itself that Frank distrusts but rather its tendency to impose on events an artificial coherence and meaning. His response is to emphasize the performative capacity of language. In Halifax Infirmary the role of language is to make us conscious of

“THE FIRE OF PAIN” ◆ 145 a struggle to communicate. Similarly, in The Present the filmmaker’s voice-over enacts a struggle to keep moving forward and resist the de- bilitating consequences of past events. “Not much time left,” says Frank as the camera fixes on a clock that stands on a table. “Cannot forget the address book.” The camera then pans to a pile of prints and folders. “Put my negatives away. Order all my tables.” Three times he repeats this directive. The repetition of statements brings into relief his role as narrator; it also confirms that his struggle to embark on a journey and the difficulty he experiences in organizing his thoughts stem from the same thing: the feeling that time is out of joint. Weighed down by memory and a corresponding loss of direction, time moves slowly. Yet at other moments, it moves too fast. Just after Frank announces that he is going on a trip, we are introduced to a longtime friend, the designer Werner Zyrd. Accompanied by the sound of classical music emanating from the speakers of his hi-fi system, Werner holds his cap over his heart, like a dutiful member of some civilian army corp. His playfulness leaves us unprepared for the revelation that follows shortly after: Werner is in the hospital, and dying. “I’m almost sure I will not see him again,” the filmmaker declares. “Goodbye Werner.” A pan across the pages of Frank’s diary comes to rest on the following statement: “New Year’s day 1996. Werner died in Zurich.” This abrupt shift from life to death is echoed in the fate of a neighbor’s dog that spends its time staring out of the window. “What does he see?” Frank asks his neighbor. “He just looks out the window?” Is this beautiful animal a stand-in for the filmmaker, we wonder, who also spends his time looking out windows at the world around him? Before we can come to a conclusion, the video presents a shot of the dog’s owner sitting where the dog had sat. From off-screen the filmmaker inquires about the dog’s whereabouts. “He might have saw something or ran into something,” the owner replies. “Might have got caught in a trap.” Seconds later, the camera fixes on a shot of a crow feeding on scraps in the yard outside the filmmaker’s window. In the background we can hear an animal wailing. Is it the missing dog or some other

146 ◆ “THE FIRE OF PAIN” creature? Rather than securing an answer, we are left with a disturbing impression of time running away and lives turning to dust.

THE PASSAGES OF THOUGHT Instead of a narrative with a beginning, a middle, and an end, The Pres ent enacts a highly personal struggle to narrate and account for the legacy of past events. Near the start of the video, our attention is drawn to a dead tree framed in the new window of Frank’s Bleecker Street apartment. This tree, or one just like it, was visible when the camera peered into the distorted mirror. In the conversation that follows this shot, we are again reminded of the tree. “We just have more gray hairs,” June concludes, “and we are thicker. . . . We are as tough as an old tree. Isn’t that true . . . like an old tree.” The video then cuts to a black-and-white photograph of the dead tree, which the filmmaker lowers to reveal the actual tree in the courtyard. “Remember every goddam twig,” he muses. After a series of shots of artworks and photographs commemorating Pablo, the video returns to the Bleecker Street apartment. It is night- time. The only light is drawn from the courtyard outside the apartment windows. As the camera slowly moves through the darkened rooms, we hear a woman reading from a letter about Pablo. Silhouetted in the apartment window are the branches of the tree outside. It is impossible to know for sure why Frank keeps returning to the dead tree or what connection it may have to Pablo’s life. But in the interlacing of the two things, The Present conveys something that is inherently elusive: the associations and leaps across different contexts that characterize the passages of thought. The philosopher Henri Bergson describes perception as “an occasion for remembering.” “In all that goes by that name,” he writes, “there is already some work of our memory.”22 For Bergson perception is structured around an inter twining of past and present. Similarly, Frank’s ordering of images seeks to convey that always-displaced moment when the perception of one thing turns into the memory or thought about something else. “I am

“THE FIRE OF PAIN” ◆ 147 making souvenirs,” he writes in a letter composed in 1985. “I am making memory because that is what I know, that is what I learned to know about, that is hopefully an expression of my true feeling.”23 This transformation of external experience into a vessel for memory relies on a method of linking images and sounds, at once precise yet unencumbered by an overt narrative agenda, that is able to suggest the possibility of associations and meanings that come to us unbidden. Toward the end of The Present, the filmmaker trains his camera on three crows feeding on the scraps in his yard. “I think every day I should have some footage,” he says. “But it would be better to have footage of people. . . . Every day, I want to make a little piece of video. And I find that people are very good and . . . very expressive.” This statement exemplifies the principle of using the video camera as one might a diary to record the passage of time. This does not rule out the possibility of a story. But it does ensure that the story emerges from the perceptions, recollections, afterthoughts, and correspondences that are part of living. And sure enough, a few minutes after making this statement, the filmmaker declares: “Early morning. End of Janu- ary. It’s going to be a crow’s movie. It’s going to be a movie about the black crows that come and feed there.” The appearance of the black crows that feed in the yard provides Frank with the opportunity to align his “diary method” with the requirements of a story. No less important, it enables him to make tangible a method of looking at the world that is alive to moments of fleeting correspondence between inside and outside, past and present. “In this movie in which death is so ubiquitous, and so real,” Kent Jones notes, “the sight of three black crows against a white background has a special lilt. . . . The world has a way of offering metaphors at the most unlikely moments, in the least likely settings.”24 True enough, but the three black crows conjure something that is both more mysterious and more direct than a metaphor for the deaths of Andrea, Pablo, and Werner. They alert us to the trace in the outer world of something that comes from within, a memory that seems to seek us out and find us.

148 ◆ “THE FIRE OF PAIN” FIGURE 26. The Present (Robert Frank, 1996). Copyright Robert Frank.

ERASING MEMORY Toward the end of The Present, Frank announces the impending visit of his young friend Yuiji: “Maybe he will stay in this room. On this bed, with this window.” After surveying the room where his friend will stay, the filmmaker cuts to a shot of himself reflected in the glass surface of what appears to be a large mirror. “Today,” he declares, “I’m going to ask Yuiji to erase the word ‘memory.’ ” The camera then pans down to reveal the word “memory” painted on the glass surface. In the next shot, Yuiji commences his appointed task. Almost immediately,

“THE FIRE OF PAIN” ◆ 149 FIGURE 27. Robert Frank and Yuiji in The Present (Robert Frank, 1996). Copyright Robert Frank.

it becomes apparent that memory cannot be easily erased. “It’s very difficult to erase memory,” says Frank. “It’s actually impossible,” Yuiji replies. He then asks: “How many years you stay like this?” “Seventy- two years,” Frank jokes. The filmmaker’s playful response is confirmed in a close-up of the glass surface that reveals the outcome of Yuiji’s toil: all that remains of the word “memory” are the first two letters, “me.” Ten years earlier, Frank filmed another friend engaged in a ceremonial act of erasure that echoes Yuiji’s struggle with “memory”: Gunther

150 ◆ “THE FIRE OF PAIN” Moses’s boring into and, in the process, defacing Frank’s prints. De- spite what Home Improvements suggests, the perforation of the photographic prints did not result in their disposal. They remained for some time in the filmmaker’s basement, before being retrieved and used in an artwork. Untitled shows the stack of perforated prints wrapped in wire and nailed to a piece of plywood (see Plate 8). Befitting the vio- lence inflicted on the prints, the uppermost image on the stack is of a bull with a sword embedded in its back. Underneath the prints are a number of faded thermal prints of scenes from Home Improvements that have been attached to a sheet of plastic. Near the center of this arrangement is an image of the filmmaker with the camera raised to his eye, filming himself filming. “I’m always doing the same images,” his voice-over specifies at this point in the video. “I’m always looking outside, trying to look inside, trying to tell something that’s true. But maybe nothing is really true . . . except . . . what’s out there and what’s out there is always different.” Jammed between the demands of a tur- bulent inner life and the ever-changing realities of an external world, Frank’s photographs, films, and videos exemplify a method of working the purpose of which is to draw out the qualities of media. This is done not to distance the viewer but, as the painter Francis Bacon once put it, to “return the onlooker to life more violently.”25 In Untitled the rapidly fading thermal prints and the curled edges of the perforated photographs testify to the precariousness and cost of this autobiographical alignment of life and work. In The Present the competing forces driving Frank’s work are evident in Yuiji’s struggle with the word “memory.” They are also evident in the activities of someone we have seen before: Marty Greenbaum. As in Life Dances On . . . , Marty is engaged in a game of chance. In the closing moments of The Present, he shakes a glass jar filled with tiny objects in front of the camera. “It’s all about time in, time out,” he tells us. “When to play the game.” We then see him rolling a pair of dice, looking for some type of correspondence in the results: “Ten . . . Seven.

“THE FIRE OF PAIN” ◆ 151 I lost. But, so what? That’s the question.” So what? is the question that Frank constantly asks of his work. It is a question that affirms the significance of things that can’t be foreseen, things that undermine our best intentions, in art and life. His ability to invest this question with genuine pathos is closely linked to the experience of loss that lies at the heart of both his biography as an artist and his artistic method. “the wind will blow the fire of pain across everyone in time”: running underneath the Polaroid images of Mr. Lawson in Halifax In firmary, this statement acts like a memento mori addressed to those who have survived the destruction as well as those who have yet to experience its pain. It also stands for the obligation that drives Frank’s most personal work: the creation of a place in the present for those who have passed.

152 ◆ “THE FIRE OF PAIN” 5 FRAGMENTS SHORED AGAINST MY RUINS Moving Pictures, True Story

Instead of writing about my films, I will make a film (video) about photographs leading (me) to moving images. Fragments of saved up memories—my notebooks filled with images: names, Heroes, Postcards, language (words) moving inside that frame. Pushing towards another— scene—Is there an obsession in these fragments? To reveal and to hide the truth. —Robert Frank

“ Woke up. Had some tea. Mosquitos everywhere. Last night, the dream took me way back. Everyone was still alive. The way I remembered them thirty years ago. But now with this holy Arab music playing, I’m at the beginning of something . . . something new. It’s late or early in Cairo. It would be better to talk when it gets dark.” Spoken in a tone that is just above a whisper, these melancholic reflections accompany Frank’s shadow as it travels along the wall of a room, its crablike movements suggesting the presence of figures that have passed from our dreams to our waking hours. True Story is about how the past inhabits the present—in dreams, in memories, and, most of all, in the images that stand in for these memories. “I remember that month of January in Tokyo, or rather I remember the images I filmed of the month of January in Tokyo. They have substituted themselves for my memory. They are my memory.” This is how the narrator in Chris Marker’s Sun less describes the interplay of media and memory. Framed as a series of letters written by a cameraman to a female acquaintance, the narration works alongside the images to present an extended meditation on the operations of memory and forgetting at a personal and a broader historical level. The reading of the letters also suggests a dimension of

◆ 153 experience that exists independently of the images. Filtered through the voice of the female acquaintance, the cameraman’s letters mark both the substitution of memory by media and the residue of something that resists this substitution. This final chapter will consolidate our understanding of the formal methods that distinguish Frank’s treatment of images by considering the interplay of media and memory in two of his most important late- career works: Moving Pictures and True Story. Produced to coincide with a major retrospective organized by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., Moving Pictures pays tribute to some of the artists who inspired and influenced Frank over the years: Harry Smith, Raoul Hague, Allen Ginsberg, June Leaf, and Jean-Luc Godard. Frank’s portrait of these figures constitutes one aspect of a larger reflection on time and aging. In the catalog to the retrospective, he describes the video’s composite structure: “Fragments of saved up memories—my notebooks filled with images: names, Heroes, Postcards, language (words) moving inside that frame. Pushing towards another—scene.”1 He then asks a fundamental question: “Is there an obsession in these fragments? To reveal and to hide the truth.” Moving Pictures is an auto biography of sorts, one that endeavors to unsettle our assumptions about the manner in which a life story should operate. Ten years later, Frank returned to the project of collecting and working through the fragments of his life. True Story reuses footage and sequences from Moving Pictures. But it also introduces figures and events that do not feature in the earlier video—for example, his friend and former colleague at Harper’s Bazaar Louis Faurer; his son, Pablo; and photographs from an early trip to Peru. True Story also deals more directly with Frank’s state of health as he approached his eightieth year. What links the two works is a way of working in which the effort to reflect on the past involves a reencounter with images of that past. The key question is, how is this managed? How does Frank present the encounter between himself and the images that constitute his past? This is a question about the filmmaker’s methods, of course.

154 ◆ FRAGMENTS SHORED AGAINST MY RUINS More precisely, it concerns how these methods renew and extend the material qualities of the media he employs. In the preceding chapters, I have paid particular attention to those moments in the photographs, films, and videos when the struggle to render experience defines itself as a struggle with the material qualities of the medium involved. I now want to consider the relationship between medium and method as it bears on the treatment of memory. In Moving Pictures and True Story, images do not so much act as substitutes for Frank’s memory as intervene, or mediate, between now and then, between the I that remembers and the I that is present in the work.

FLEETING ENCOUNTERS “I have an obsession in my life / for Fragments which reveal / and hide truth.” Appearing near the start of Moving Pictures, this statement is a key to the video’s structure and a warning not to expect that the fragments of images and writings can be brought together to form a definitive account. In other words, the fragments remain fragments: their incompleteness is essential to the video’s invocation of the past. The question then becomes, how does this essential incompleteness serve as the basis of Frank’s method? We can begin to answer this by noting that, for Frank, fragmentation involves more than a process of interruption or cutting things short; it also involves a process of moving between—between past and present as well as between images and text. Words are everywhere in Moving Pictures: they are superimposed on the images, are inscribed on the surface of the photographic prints perused by the camera, and cover the pages of the filmmaker’s notebooks and letters. Words serve as carriers of information and viewpoints that may or may not be related to the video’s biographical account and draw attention to its fabricated nature, its character as something written. The overall effect of these words and images is to disperse the filmmaker’s place in the video across a range of different media and moments in time.

FRAGMENTS SHORED AGAINST MY RUINS ◆ 155 Moving Pictures begins with a shot of the director standing behind the headstone that marks his parents’s grave in Zurich. As he smokes, he counts the rocks lined along the top of the headstone, each one an indication of a mourner’s visit. Because the video is entirely silent, Frank’s thoughts are inscribed in capital letters across the screen: “two—four—six—e ight—twelve . . . 13 visitors / that’s not many.” This use of text marks an extension of the role that writing plays in Frank’s photographs. In images such as Halifax Infirmary and Brattleboro, Vermont, the words written on the surface of the prints express feelings and emotions that relate to the scenes depicted. Crucially, they also make us conscious of a gap, between the images and the experiences with which they are associated as well as between then and now. Similarly, in Moving Pictures the words laid over the top of the images speak for the on-screen figures and instigate a subtle displacement. The words are like epitaphs: they undercut the sense of liveness or immediacy of which video is especially capable by suggesting a time when the voices of the on-screen figures have been rendered silent. The call to remember the past is reiterated in a shot of a sheet of paper being pulled through a typewriter. Typed on it in capital letters is the word “memory.” This shot heralds the appearance of a number of photographs that range from the time when Frank returned to Europe in 1949 to the period in the early 1970s when he began experi menting with the Polaroid format. The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben claims that the urgency implied by a photograph has nothing to do with aesthetic factors: “It is, rather, a demand for redemption. The photograph is always more than an image: it is the site of a gap, a sublime breach between the sensible and the intelligible, between copy and reality, between a memory and a hope.”2 In a related manner, the photographs that Frank places before his camera enact a complex mix of imperatives and demands. The still images are reminders of people—friends, family members—no longer present. As such, they are part of a process of commemoration that coincides with an often violent reconfiguration of the photograph’s descriptive elements. In

156 ◆ FRAGMENTS SHORED AGAINST MY RUINS interviews Frank has linked his treatment of the prints to the over- whelming sensation of pastness generated by the still image. “You do your work as a photographer, and everything immediately becomes past,” he observes. “The photographer’s picture is always surrounded by a kind of romantic glamour—no matter what you do, and how you twist it.”3 In Home Improvements Frank’s challenge to this “romantic glamour” is laid down in a scene in which he films his friend Gunther Moses drilling holes through a large stack of some of his best-known photographs. Less violent but more far reaching in its effect is the gesture, first enacted in Me and My Brother and repeated in Conversations in Vermont, Home Improvements, Moving Pictures, and True Story, whereby the filmmaker trains his camera on a hand moving through a pile of photographic prints. At times the photographs are turned the right way around; at other times one image is laid over the top of another; slightly different again is the action whereby the camera adjusts its view by either panning across or moving closer to a print. Regardless of the particular method employed, the handling of the photographs lends a material dimension to the work of memory. It also suggests a relationship with the past that is anchored in the demands and circumstances of the present. Frank’s handling of photographs has as its goal the creation of a fleeting encounter in which the interaction of different moments of time produces something unanticipated about the past and the present.

PALIMPSESTS Another way to put this is to say that his approach to the past is palimp sestic: he uses the material properties of the image to generate the suggestion of independent moments of time coexisting. This is why the action of placing one photograph on top of another is so important in his films and videos. Often when he does this, the edges of the print underneath remain visible: thus, one image does not obliterate

FRAGMENTS SHORED AGAINST MY RUINS ◆ 157 a previous image; rather, it covers it, so as to suggest a layering. The result is a structure that the nineteenth-century British author and essayist Thomas De Quincey refers to as “involuted,” a term that describes the way in which “our deepest thoughts and feelings pass to us through perplexed combinations of concrete objects . . . in compound experiences incapable of being disentangled.”4 Creating such a result requires a high degree of skill in the art of bringing apparently dissimilar things together and making fleeting connections between different media and moments in time. Just after the dedication to Frank’s friends and influences, Moving Pictures cuts to a clip from Keep Busy (1975), the filming of which had begun a few months after the death of his daughter, Andrea. “That film was like a life saver,” he told an interviewer. “For the first time in five years I worked. So—just for that alone I’m very attached to the film.”5 The importance of finding ways to keep working is central also to the video’s portrait of June Leaf. In Moving Pictures she first appears hard at work in her studio. In the video’s presentation of this labor, June’s never- still hands have a mesmeric force: we watch them manipulating the mechanics of the mobile sculptures, tracing the patterns of a heart across her chest, rolling a brush across the surface of a sheet of paper, and even engaging in wry mischief by playfully enacting the castration of a male figure in one of her paintings. Such is the involuted structure that determines Frank’s treatment of the past that in thinking about June, he is also led to think about his first wife, Mary, who appears in a series of still images taken just after the birth of Pablo. In one of these, Mary is feeding her newborn son; in another, Pablo appears perched on a toy horse at the seaside. Rather than looking at the camera, his attention is focused on his mother, whose hands are visible at the edge of the frame. Taken a few years later, a third image shows Mary at the water’s edge, walking toward the camera. Because the image is on-screen for only a few seconds, we barely have time to notice the silhouette of a tiny figure trailing in the shadows: the long hair and outline of a dress indicate that the

158 ◆ FRAGMENTS SHORED AGAINST MY RUINS FIGURE 28. Moving Pictures (Robert Frank, 1994). Copyright Robert Frank. darkened figure is not Pablo but his sister, Andrea, whose memory is forever associated with the production of Keep Busy. The sequence draws to a close with a photograph that breaks the spell cast by this haunting image: it shows a television camera trained on a group of actors. After panning across the photograph, Frank’s camera pauses on a close-up of the unmistakable face of Peter Lorre, who is looking directly at the photographer. This is not the first time that Frank’s camera has been drawn to the gaze of a figure in one of his photographs. According to Hans Belting, the distinctive feature of photographic perception lies in the exchange between two types of gaze: the

FRAGMENTS SHORED AGAINST MY RUINS ◆ 159 FIGURE 29. June Leaf in Moving Pictures (Robert Frank, 1994). Copyright Robert Frank.

recorded and the recognizing gaze.6 The recorded gaze is the gaze cast upon the world by the camera. Even when a photograph appears to be randomly generated, we associate this gaze with that of a photographer. The recognizing gaze occurs when, in viewing an image, we appropriate the recorded gaze as our own: “We see the world with the gaze of another, a past gaze, but we trust that it could also be our present gaze.”7 A distinguishing feature of Frank’s work is that this appropriation often becomes the source of formal tension. In the photobook The Lines of My Hand, the incorporation of autobiographical reflections and statements that run alongside, underneath, or across the images registers

160 ◆ FRAGMENTS SHORED AGAINST MY RUINS a discordance between then and now, recorded and recognizing gaze. “[The photographs] return as images of a bygone gaze that Frank once directed at the world,” writes Belting. “The pictures store the time of their making, initially in an invisible way, which then becomes visible when it is examined with the eyes of remembrance.”8 Belting’s discussion of Frank’s photographs can be applied also to the films and videos. Here, the tension between recorded and recognizing gaze involves a method of scrutinizing and arranging images of the past so as to make us conscious of their place in the present. “Everything stirring, elusive, and uncanny about the form of photography itself, even before the superaddition of the content,” writes Gar- rett Stewart, “is not simply redoubled by the submission to cinematic camerawork. . . . [It] is squared, raised to the power of its own twice- bracketed preservation.”9 In Moving Pictures the video camera’s scrutiny of Lorre’s gaze achieves this raising of the stakes; at the same time, it actualizes the gaze of a third figure, whose presence plays a crucial role in the palimpsestic layering of media and moments in time: that of the spectator, who both shares Frank’s gaze at the image and re- frames its viewpoint to suit his or her own preoccupations.

THE LISTENING EYE Not always apparent on first or, even, second viewing, the connections and juxtapositions that structure Frank’s autobiographical reflections become clearer the more often we watch Moving Pictures. But such is the relentless movement of cutting short and moving between media that our claims regarding their significance can be only provisional. By insisting that the fragments remain fragments, Moving Pictures is a further example of the essayist style of filmic presentation. “In the essay,” Theodor Adorno asserts, “concepts do not build a continuum of operations, thought does not advance in a single direction, rather the aspects of the argument interweave as in a carpet.”10 Adorno links the distinctive operations of the essay to a Romantic conception of the fragment, one

FRAGMENTS SHORED AGAINST MY RUINS ◆ 161 that is defined by an essential incompleteness: “Even in its manner of delivery the essay refuses to behave as though it had deduced its object and had exhausted the topic. Self-relativization is immanent in its form; it must be constructed in such a way that it could always, and at any point, break off. It thinks in fragments just as reality is fragmented.”11 In Marker’s Sunless this process of “thinking in fragments” is evident in the precredit sequence. Over a black screen the voice of the female narrator begins: “The first image he told me about was of three children on a road in Iceland, in 1965.” The film then cuts to three young girls walking together on a grassy field. After eight seconds the black screen reappears and with it the woman’s voice-over: “He said that for him it was the image of happiness and also that he had tried several times to link it to other images. . . . But it never worked.” Another cut reveals a Vietnam War–era fighter plane being lowered beneath the deck of an aircraft carrier. When this brief shot is replaced by the reappearance of the black screen, the female narrator places the film’s arrangement of images and black screen in the context of her friend’s failed attempt to picture happiness: “He wrote me: ‘One day, I’ll have to put it all alone at the beginning of a film with a long piece of black leader. If they don’t see happiness in the picture, at least they’ll see the black.’ ” In this by-now-famous opening, Marker uses the repeated insertion of the black leader to disrupt the spatial and temporal flow of the narration and ensure that the fragmentation that defines the cameraman’s recollections is built into the structure of the film itself. Marker’s insistence on disrupting the flow of the narration is evident also in the use of the female narrator’s voice to relay the thoughts of the fictional cameraman. By prefacing the reading of the letters with “He wrote . . .” or “He told me . . . ,” the voice-over links the images on-screen to the thoughts and experiences of the cameraman and suggests a fundamental break in this relationship. This brings us to perhaps the most important aspect of the filmic essay as it pertains to Frank, as well as several other filmmakers: its

162 ◆ FRAGMENTS SHORED AGAINST MY RUINS disruption of the relationship between experience and expression.12 In Moving Pictures Frank’s replacement of sound by written text suggests a dispersal of the self across media. At the same time, the presence of the written text gives the screen new purpose and functioning. “The screen becomes treated as a writing tablet, the word, as a kind of matter that develops, between sense and nonsense, in a multiplicity of directions.”13 Raymond Bellour is referring here to the filmmaker whose influence is explicitly acknowledged in Moving Pictures: Godard. As Bellour sees it, one of the great boons of video is bringing the moving image closer to literature and language: “Literature, for the positions of enunciation, the nature of the creative gesture, the indeterminacy of the works, their reflexive capabilities. Language, in the sense where words are now, more and more, at one with the image.”14 We can now pinpoint the link between the use of text in the work of Frank and God- ard and Marker’s use of the epistolary form in Sunless. In the work of all three, writing enters the picture—directly in the case of Frank and Godard, indirectly in that of Marker—to enable a reconfiguration of the relationship between self and world. And for all three, also, this effort coincides with a reconsideration of the screen’s purpose and value. In Moving Pictures a telling moment occurs when Frank films God- ard at a question-and-answer session. On the screen Frank transcribes a question put to Godard by a member of the audience: “how do you explain the endless torrent of words in your last film?” Godard replies: “these words i take from the tissue of litera ture, a culture belonging to the whole world which has been profoundly used.” He then adds an important afterthought: “what you say never fits what you see. the eye should learn to listen before it looks.” Frank has good reason to transcribe Godard’s response. Speaking and seeing, looking and listening, for the essayist these activities are not necessarily complementary ways of engaging with the world. Rather, they function as elements in a productive disorientation of the self.

FRAGMENTS SHORED AGAINST MY RUINS ◆ 163 TIME’S DEFORMATIONS Frank’s obsession with the fragment as both a form and a method is derived from a keen awareness of the depredations that accompany the passing of time. In Moving Pictures this is first registered in the opening scene at the graveyard in Zurich. Apart from his troubled thoughts, Frank’s only companions are the rocks on his parents’ headstone. Later, the camera pans across the headstone on the grave of Jack Kerouac. The purpose of the camera’s movements is to trace the closing line

FIGURE 30. Harry Smith in Moving Pictures (Robert Frank, 1994). Copyright Robert Frank.

164 ◆ FRAGMENTS SHORED AGAINST MY RUINS of On the Road that is inscribed on the headstone’s marble surface: “Nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty.” Earlier, a close-up of the pages of Frank’s diary revealed the words “Hague dies.” Beside this terse note is a newspaper cutting announcing the death of Frank’s friend, the sculptor Raoul Hague. As if to rage against the finality of Hague’s passing, the next shot reveals the ailing sculptor on

FIGURE 31. Harry Smith in Moving Pictures (Robert Frank, 1994). Copyright Robert Frank.

FRAGMENTS SHORED AGAINST MY RUINS ◆ 165 his bed—a breathing apparatus, it seems, is all that keeps him alive. The final representative of the cost of time passing is the musicologist and experimental filmmaker Harry Smith. With a cigarette dangling from his mouth and surrounded by his paintings, books, film reels, and creative paraphernalia, Smith appears remarkably energetic. Yet the troubles that come with old age are also close at hand. “today is your birthday,” the screen announces. “how does it feel.” Smith’s response is emphatic: “it sucks. . . . it sucks.” Such is his disgust and anger that he tosses aside something he was holding and storms out of frame. In discussions about his own career, Frank has often referred to the link between feelings of anger and the drive to create. “A lot of my work has been done when I had a certain amount of anger in me,” he once told a workshop. “I think anger is better than complacency . . . when everything is brought to you on a plate.”15 In Moving Pictures his linking of Smith’s response to black-and-white footage of people protesting against the policies of Richard Nixon illustrates this point. At one point we watch a group of protesters lying prostrate on a busy sidewalk; the arrangement of their prone bodies is intended to remind us of the carnage caused by war. When the camera pans up to the face of a police officer looking at the protesters, Frank cuts to another pan across a photograph showing U.S. Navy and U.S. Army cadets standing at attention. As the camera pans back the other way, the partially cut-off face of Richard Nixon appears in the bottom right-hand corner of the photograph. A selection of photographs taken during the same tumultuous period in American history follows: scenes from Ameri can political life interspersed with scenes from Frank’s private life. Into this selection Frank inserts what is perhaps the most disturbing piece of film footage in all his work. It shows the body of a dead horse that has been washed onto rocks. The sequence ends with a series of photographs of the snow-covered landscape surrounding his home in Mabou. In the middle of this presentation, the filmmaker includes a brief panning shot of a text describing the course of his career. We

166 ◆ FRAGMENTS SHORED AGAINST MY RUINS can just make out the following sentences: “Every year the ice melts, the winds and tides take the broken up pieces out to sea. It is also the portrait of a man waiting for another Spring another Spring another vision another dream.”

THE CORPUS AS MOSAIC Moving Pictures thus provides the viewer with a history of Frank’s career, told through a layering and juxtaposition of media and moments in time. The success of such a method relies on the spectator’s willingness to look closely—and repeatedly—at what is being presented as well as the capacity of video montage to create a connection between past and present, still and moving images. In a discussion of Histoire(s) du cinéma (1989–98), Jacques Rancière notes that Godard’s project of constructing a history of the twentieth century using video hinges on what he terms “the dual power of each image—that of condensing a multiplicity of gestures signifying a time and that of being combined with all those images endowed with the same power.”16 Godard’s method involves using the resources of one medium—video—to constitute “the imaginary of another.” “With cinema images, Godard wants to do what cinema itself has not done,” Rancière writes, “because it betrayed its vocation by sacrificing the fraternity of metaphors to the business of stories. By detaching metaphors from stories in order to fashion a different ‘history’ out of them, Godard fashions the cinema that has not existed. But he does so by means of video montage.”17 In Moving Pictures and True Story, Frank also uses video montage to elicit from preexisting images and films a different history. But whereas Godard takes as his subject the history of the twentieth century, Frank focuses more directly on the experiences and images that constitute his own biography. Both Moving Pictures and True Story return to the residue of previous work in order to create the possibility of a new understanding of the conditions determining the present. Frank’s constant reengagement with his previous work unsettles the

FRAGMENTS SHORED AGAINST MY RUINS ◆ 167 principles of progression and “completedness” upon which we rely in constructing a corpus of work. Each individual work has its own integ- rity, one that is specific to its terms of operation. Each work is also defined, however, by its potential for being reinscribed and reinterpreted in a later work. Taken together, these elements resemble a type of mosaic in which each tessera retains its individuality, its own autonomy, and at the same time functions as a powerful constituent element in a totality that is undergoing (re)construction.

TRUE STORY There is another reason why, over the past two decades, Frank has felt compelled to return to his previous work. This has to do with the bur- geoning public recognition of the significance of his career. Ten years after the staging of Robert Frank: Moving Out at the National Gallery of Art, the Tate Modern presented Robert Frank: Storylines. The aim of the exhibition was to showcase what Vicente Todoli, the gallery director, referred to as “the breadth of Frank’s oeuvre” as well as “the narrative and sequential aspects of his practice.”18 For any artist the recognition and accolades that come with such events also carry the requirement that he or she give an account of the motivations and intentions behind the work. Frank’s inclination has been to deal with this requirement by producing moving-image works that look back over his career. In a similar vein, I want to suggest that we view the relationship between the presentation of the work on the walls of the galleries and the act of retrospection in the videos as critical rather than merely complementary. Over the course of his career, Frank has constantly challenged the tendency of photographic images to simply speak of the past. In his films and videos, the reviewing and handling of the photographs is designed to locate their meaning and affect in the present. If we pursue this line of thought, it is easy to see that a crucial function of both Moving Pictures and True Story is to safeguard what the large-scale retrospective threatens to take away: the work’s place

168 ◆ FRAGMENTS SHORED AGAINST MY RUINS in the present. “The photograph as object—I never believed in that,” Frank rued in an interview, “now I have to.”19 By enabling him to show the photographs differently, both Moving Pictures and True Story resist the tendency to objectify the images. Underscoring this concern is the extension of a long tradition, drawn from the Romantics, in which one of the governing conditions of the work of art is its capacity to reflect on the conditions of its own production. For Frank this involves tracing the connections between past and present and showing us the places and contexts in which the work occurs. Near the start of True Story, we see the director filming his reflection in the window of his house in Mabou. As usual, June is hard at work in her studio. As the camera surveys the grounds around the house, we hear Kismet Nagy’s monologue from Me and My Brother: “Don’t make a movie about making a movie. Make it. . . . Forget about the film— throw away the camera—just get the strip—wouldn’t it be fantastic if you didn’t even have to have a piece of celluloid between you and what you saw?” The sequence ends with a shaky handheld close-up of Frank smiling awkwardly at the camera. The interaction of Nagy’s words and the images affirms the filmmaker’s concern with establishing a form of direct communication between the details of his everyday life and the spectator. Yet the integration of a monologue from a film made three decades earlier forefronts something that complicates this dream of direct communication: the shadowing of the present by the past. The impulses that drive Frank’s work are also addressed—and parodied—in a direct-to-camera monologue in which the filmmaker outlines his plans for the next few days:

I’m gonna brush my teeth. . . . So that’s me . . . and June is gonna go and photograph her paintings and then she’s gonna go to the hospital and then I’m gonna see Cats and then we’re gonna find out and then we are gonna have dinner and then we are gonna go to sleep and then we’re gonna think and June is gonna have a dream about Pablo and the next day we’re

FRAGMENTS SHORED AGAINST MY RUINS ◆ 169 gonna get up and we have breakfast and then June is gonna go on a plane and she’s gonna go to Mabou and I’m gonna be alone and I have to go to take a substitute body and then I’m gonna not take a substitute body and then I’m gonna . . . fuck around here in . . . the apartment in the house and then I’m gonna watch Doug putting in the nails and then I’m gonna watch Bleecker Street and then I’m gonna go and fly to Mabou on Monday and that’s the story. Cut.

This paratactic arrangement of scenes from Frank’s everyday routine links the preceding sequence, in which we watch the scene from Life Dances On . . . of Marty Greenbaum arguing with a young man who accuses him of mistaking triteness for something of consequence, to the sequence of shots immediately after that detail the inconse- quential events happening in and around the filmmaker’s apartment in Lower Manhattan: the tail end of a conversation with June about the difference between film and video, the ringing of a telephone, a man talking on the telephone about the graffiti on the wall outside his apartment, an abandoned vehicle being lifted onto the back of a truck, a man wearing a hooded jacket watching something off-screen while the camera surreptitiously watches him. Nothing here is developed or brought together in such a way as to meet the requirements of a story. It is this lack of sustained exposition, however, that enables these events to play their part in a larger story, the subject of which is a method of connecting images and sounds so as to evoke the disjointed nature of Frank’s environment. In True Story one type of narration based on the explication of a story is replaced by a form of paratactic narration based on the explication of a method. The explication of this method is extended via the recollections of two figures that played a significant role in Frank’s life. The first is the photographer Louis Faurer, who describes how he and Frank made sense of the chaos of New York City: “Everything within this area here that’s called New York City he found incredulous. So Robert used to

170 ◆ FRAGMENTS SHORED AGAINST MY RUINS say all the time: ‘What a town. . . . What a town. . . . What a town.’ We thought people were funny. . . . We thought the sadness of it made us laugh.” As we listen to Faurer, the camera peruses some of Frank’s best-known early photographs. These images are then replaced by a clip from Life Dances On . . . that shows Billy walking down the street touching various items on the footpath. The second figure is Kazuhiko Motomura, the publisher of the original Japanese edition of The Lines of My Hand. Again in voice-over, Motomura describes the book’s distinctive approach: “It presents his own path solely through his photos. Most photographers edit their photos one after another but this book offers more than just a collection of his work. It is also the path of how he had imagined and cultivated himself.” These comments identify a feature common to Frank’s work in photography, film, and video: a desire to embed the biographical in the forms and structures of the work. The implications and consequences of this desire are suggested in the footage that accompanies Motomura’s voice-over; it shows a copy of the drawing that is used on the cover of The Lines of My Hand being blown this way and that by the passing street traffic. The footage of the abandoned drawing echoes the moment in Home Improvements when the filmmaker trains his camera on the swirling mass of wrapping paper outside his windows at Bleecker Street while recalling Kerouac’s adage about the impermanence of fame. For Frank nothing lasts, not even—or especially—the work that seeks to account for this destruction. In turn, this view of human history links his body of work to an understanding of allegory that is summed up by Walter Benjamin: “Whereas in the symbol destruction is idealized and the transfigured face of nature is fleetingly revealed in the light of redemption, in allegory the observer is confronted with the facies hippocratica of history as a petrified, primordial landscape.”20 Benjamin maintains that allegory is “the form in which man’s subjection to nature is most obvious and it significantly gives rise not only to the enigmatic question of human existence as such, but also of the biographical histo- ricity of the individual.”21 Much more than simply a technique or an

FRAGMENTS SHORED AGAINST MY RUINS ◆ 171 aesthetic device, allegory is also a way of viewing human history as transitory. Frank’s allegorical method manifests itself in an explicit strategy of fragmentation that disrupts the totalizing claims of biographical storytelling. Tied in with this is an emphasis on the image’s subjection to the forces of time and history. In True Story this is evident in the camera’s perusal of the piles of photographs that dominate the spaces that Frank inhabits. On a photograph of the frozen ice flows in the bay in front of Frank’s house in Mabou, we read: “Hold Still Keep Going.”

172 ◆ FRAGMENTS SHORED AGAINST MY RUINS Near the top of another photograph of a field of daisies are the words “Pour la fille.” Panning down a collage of three images of a solitary fence post on which a rubber mask has been attached, the camera reveals the words “Blind,” “Faith,” and “Love.” The words inscribed on the images suggest the outpourings of a troubled subjectivity. But the distinctive element about the interaction of visual image and linguistic sign is its resistance to a clearly defined meaning. Instead, we are left to ponder everything not shown or said, everything that has fallen away or been lost in the passage of time. This is what makes the work

FRAGMENTS SHORED AGAINST MY RUINS ◆ 173 FIGURE 34. True Story (Robert Frank, 2004/2008). Copyright Robert Frank.

allegorical: Frank’s ability to draw our eye to those aspects of the image that speak of the impermanence of meaning. In True Story this is reinforced by the obsessive scrutiny of the photographs. “Photographs. . . . Just photographs,” the filmmaker muses as he takes us through a selection of images that show Pablo and Andrea as children as well as images from Paris and Peru. “Old and new . . . old and new.” In one aspect he is absolutely right. These are just more photographs. But the feeling of loss conveyed by the interaction of the images and the filmmaker’s voice turns these images into meeting points between an inevitable transience and a longing for endurance. Later in the video, an off-screen figure flicks through an issue of the French journal Neuf that features photographs taken by Frank on a

174 ◆ FRAGMENTS SHORED AGAINST MY RUINS FIGURE 35. True Story (Robert Frank, 2004/2008). Copyright Robert Frank.

trip to Peru. On the soundtrack a voice reads from the accompanying text. The video then cuts to a shot of a room in which a home-movie screen has been set up. In front of the projector is a box containing a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle of Niagara Falls. Accompanied by the whirring sound of the projector, the filmmaker’s voice quietly remembers the trip to Peru: “Fifty-five years ago I’ve been to Peru. I was twenty-four . . . one thousand years ago. . . . It’s always running . . . the light is on. . . . One thousand pieces.” Frank then cuts to a close-up of the box resting on a wooden block. “One thousand pieces. . . . I’ve never been to Niagara . . . Falls.” The faltering pace of the voice-over and the sound of the projector whirring and then coming to a stop generate an impression of things running down, of memories blurring

FRAGMENTS SHORED AGAINST MY RUINS ◆ 175 and becoming indistinct. Yet the interaction of images and sounds also enacts a narrative method that leaves open the possibility of enigmatic connections. These connections will not necessarily make good the losses that the passage of time inevitably brings, but at the very least they ensure that these losses continue to trouble the present.

THE TREE Approximately halfway through, True Story appears to change tack. The camera shifts its gaze away from the piles of images and memo rabilia to the verdant natural environment surrounding Frank’s home in Mabou. Along with this change in outlook comes a change in the method of narration: the seemingly haphazard movement from one event to the next is replaced by a linear movement associated with traditional storytelling. The story told is about Frank’s efforts to prop up a tree, a magnificent old tree that over the years has protected his house from the neighbors but now is in danger of falling down. The first thing the filmmaker shows us is the trunk of another tree that he has cut down to serve as a crutch for the old tree. Having carefully measured the required length and cut the trunk accordingly, he discovers that it is too heavy for him to move. The first person he enlists to move the trunk also finds it too heavy. Three days pass with no action, then eight days. Eventually, and after a great deal of angst, he finds a friend who is capable of doing the job. By pushing the trunk end over end, he moves the makeshift crutch into place. Like all good tales, Frank’s account of his efforts to prop up the old tree operates on an allegorical as well as a literal level. The manu facturing of the crutch serves as a metaphor for the filmmaker’s de- pendence on the support of others—in particular, June, whose calm presence counters his agitation about not being able to find anyone to move the trunk. Over a shot of the ailing tree, Frank lists his own ail- ments: “Crutches of various sizes, splints. . . . You’ve got to look after the old man, bones rot, elbows give away. No bending of the knees, swollen

176 ◆ FRAGMENTS SHORED AGAINST MY RUINS toes, nails falling out, gum disease, itching, pain, irregular heartbeat, no more pissing, constipation: it’s a grim picture. That’s the way it is. Today. September 3rd.” The melancholic disposition, Benjamin tells us, is characterized by a feeling of “distance between the self and the surrounding world to the point of alienation from the body.”22 Coexistent with this feeling is an immersion in objects that have been detached from their everyday functioning. “Melancholy betrays the world for the sake of knowledge,” he writes. “But in its tenacious self-absorption it embraces dead objects in its contemplation, in order to redeem them.”23 Frank’s engagement with objects exemplifies this coming together of melancholic vision and allegorical technique. The old tree, as well as the piles of letters, photographs, and souvenirs that, through the scrutiny of the camera’s eye, take on the status of significant fragments: Frank returns to these things again and again because the knowledge they provide is fleeting and cannot be divorced from an essential destruction. Panning across a crumbling poster print depicting a man on his death bed surrounded by the members of his family, Frank is taken aback by what he sees: in one of the panels, a group of women with their arms raised seem to be guiding the man’s passage from this world to the next. “Jesus Christ! What is that?” he exclaims. In the next shot this panel is captured in a Polaroid that is part of a serial work under construction. The camera pans down and across the two rows of Polaroids that comprise the work. In between the two rows is a handwritten text that the filmmaker proceeds to read aloud: “Whatever was on his mind—it it.” In the move from the camera’s scrutiny of the crumbling print to its reappearance in a work under construction, we see evidence of the obsessive, never completed nature of the melancholic disposition that drives Frank’s work. The melancholic can never be done with things because they can never be done with him. They have become part of him or, better still, part of a compulsive puzzling over meaning that is drawn to the phenomena of a decaying world. “The emergence of melancholia as a mode of creativity,” says Max Pensky, “consists of the development of a relationship between subjectivity as such and the

FRAGMENTS SHORED AGAINST MY RUINS ◆ 177 physiognomy of its object realm; that is ‘a motorial reaction’ between the contemplating subject and a ‘concretely structured world.’ ”24 In True Story the task that Frank sets himself is to show how this “motorial reaction” operates—in other words, how the interaction between his own contemplating subjectivity and a concrete world gives rise to images that straddle the border of inner and outer worlds.

PABLO’S LETTER “I’m glad I made the films, because there’ll be something left over . . . that wouldn’t be here anymore.”25 Frank’s allegorical method ensures the preservation of what has passed—not in the form of a monument but in the form of a work whose material structure is determined by an inevitable experience of loss. To the already developed picture of this method, we can add one more moment when an unstable arrangement of words and images brings the then and the now together. The sequence opens as the camera scans a diary entry dated Wednesday, May 7. The entry tells of the side effects of a blood-pressure medication prescribed by the filmmaker’s doctor: “Now what—No more erections / Life is a slow Fade.” Panning down the page, the camera comes to rest on the lines: “Life seems to go one way / but we go against it / swimming up stream.” Life goes one way, but media and memory go another. As if to illustrate this logic, the filmmaker cuts from the diary entry to home-video footage shot some years earlier of a day at the seashore with Pablo and June. From behind the camera, Frank holds up a light bulb: “I found this on the beach.” “And now you don’t care if the sun goes out,” jokes Pablo. Frank’s inventory of the object world continues when he holds up a crab claw. “What is this hand saying?” he wonders. In this sequence the primary object of the camera’s scrutiny is Pablo. His body and hair still wet from the ocean, he seems to be a picture of health. In the final shot we see him bent over at the water’s edge looking for something among the tiny pebbles. As the camera

178 ◆ FRAGMENTS SHORED AGAINST MY RUINS zooms out, the filmmaker calls to his son: “Hey Pablo. . . . What are you looking for?” The next shot returns us to the present. Laid out on a desk is a letter written by Pablo. To call it a letter does not do justice to the artistry of its complex word games, visual patterns, and use of collage. It is less a letter and more the map of some mysterious journey. As the camera scans the words, Frank reflects on his son’s troubled life: “He wanted to say . . . everything but he wanted to get rid of his loneliness . . . of being . . . alone.” Between the footage of Pablo on the beach and the camera’s close scrutiny of his extraordinary letter, Frank’s voice-over has established a connection that guides us from the past to the present, from Pablo as he was at a particular point in his life to what remains of his talents

FIGURE 36. Pablo Frank in True Story (Robert Frank, 2004/2008). Copyright Robert Frank.

FRAGMENTS SHORED AGAINST MY RUINS ◆ 179 FIGURE 37. True Story (Robert Frank, 2004/2008). Copyright Robert Frank.

and struggles after his passing. If we have listened closely enough, we would realize that at the heart of this connection is the echo of a phrase across the cut: “What are you looking for?” The shot of the letter provides an answer to the question, one immersed in the complex textual patterns that cover the letter’s surface. Pablo’s letter thus takes its place alongside all the other objects and images that Frank asks us to look at. “Here it is,” he seems to be saying. Look for yourself. In showing us these things, his intention is to convey the disquiet that the past generates in him, today. “The past is ‘contemporaneous’ with the present that it has been,” writes Gilles Deleuze. “The past and the present do not denote two successive moments, but two elements which coexist: One is the present, which does not cease to pass, and the other is the past, which does not cease to be but through which all presents pass.”26 Frank’s ruminations on the past exhibit a deep affinity with this fundamental principle. In delineating the operation of memory in his work,

180 ◆ FRAGMENTS SHORED AGAINST MY RUINS we must acknowledge something else that is born out in the cut from the home-video footage to the shot of Pablo’s letter—namely, the very real possibility that we have not listened closely enough and that the movement between these two points in time has been too abrupt or too quick and has caused us to lose our way. This is not mere quib- bling. Rather, it demonstrates that Frank’s method involves allowing this chance to play out. To do otherwise would be to deny the fragmentation that is the distinguishing feature of his method and view of human history.

MAKING A MESS “But I’d rather be outside,” Frank’s voice-over confides as he shifts his gaze from Pablo’s letter to a row of three poplar trees framed in a window. “You see outside . . . the trees that I planted. . . . Yeah, I’m proud of that.” Rather than venturing back out to the fresh air and the trees, the filmmaker turns his attention to the interior of another room. Along one of the walls is a cot covered with bags; strewn on the floor are papers and letters. “This is the little room,” Frank whispers as he crosses the threshold. Moving through the room, his gaze falls on an old Royal typewriter on a small table: “I’m very proud of this typewriter. . . . Mr. Marshall gave it to me.” Although it is not clear exactly what he is trying to find, his voice-over hints at a deeper purpose: “It . . . comes down to the tiniest little details.” From among the piles of material, he retrieves a large plastic still camera. In the next shot he points out a paperback edition of Edgar Allan Poe’s Selected Writings nestled next to the typewriter. “Jesus Christ, he knew a lot. . . . Between the typewriter and what I can learn from books and what I can remember from the letters, I can make a real mess.” Typewriter, camera, book, these are Frank’s tools of trade. Just as revealing in this regard are the filmmaker’s movements around the room. His passage from one thing to the next suggests a method that appears haphazard yet is able to alert us to patterns and correspondences.

FRAGMENTS SHORED AGAINST MY RUINS ◆ 181 Hence, the row of three trees that he proudly displays connects to the old tree that had to be propped up, as well as the three crows that appear outside the window in the final shot. In both True Story and The Present, the appearance of the black crows is a reminder of the people whose passing Frank commemorates. Furthermore, in both videos the distinguishing feature of these associations is that they seem to have been made on the run, drawn from the circumstances of Frank’s everyday life. “Connections are made and metaphors are generated as naturally as breathing,” Kent Jones observes of Frank’s method, “and then we’re on to the next thought, the next sensation, the next realiza- tion, the next instant of forgetting, dreaming, free-associating.”27 In the realm of philosophy, the term used to describe such a method is ars inveniendi, the “art of invention.” Adorno refers to this principle to illustrate his account of “exact fantasy”: “fantasy which abides strictly within the material which the sciences present to it, and reaches beyond them only in the smallest aspects of their arrangement: aspects . . . which fantasy itself must originally generate.”28 A little further, he describes “exact fantasy” as a manner of responding to “the questions of a pre-given reality each time, through a fantasy which rearranges the elements of the question without going beyond the cir- cumference of the elements.”29 Exact fantasy is distinguished, then, by a fidelity to phenomena that does not rule out subjective projection or the arrangement of preexisting elements but rather strives for “the mutual mediation of subject and object without allowing either to get the upper hand.”30 In the final shot of True Story, the camera focuses on three crows perched on a series of sticks that have been arranged in an upright formation, perhaps for this very purpose. Although the three crows appear to have landed from out of the blue, the filmmaker has taken steps to prepare for their arrival. The arrival of the crows is also forecast by the image of the black bird adorning the cover of the paperback that sits next to his typewriter. Inside the book is Poe’s famous poem “The Raven,” in which the grieving narrator is driven to distraction by a bird

182 ◆ FRAGMENTS SHORED AGAINST MY RUINS that has flown into his room. The appearance of the three crows is thus both carefully arranged and independent of the filmmaker’s control. They carry with them an allegorical vision that hovers on the border of inside and outside worlds. The tension between these two realms is captured in the final exchange between the filmmaker and the creatures outside his window. From behind the camera, he recites a list of dissimilar things, the kind of list that is used to test a person’s memory: “Fish . . . scissor . . . dime . . . car . . . table . . . balance.” At this point, the filmmaker’s voice-over starts to get louder. No longer talking to himself, he addresses the crows perched side by side across the screen: “You heard me? You heard me? [screaming] You heard me, you fucking crows!” This final outburst conveys the anger and rage that lurk behind Frank’s reflections on his son’s difficult life and the fate of others once close to him. As ancient harbingers of death, the crows provide an appropriate recipient for his anger. However, their role here is to also unravel the neatness of the design by remaining indifferent to the filmmaker’s screaming—not talking back but simply carrying on, regardless. Propping up dead trees, making inventories of discarded objects, venting one’s anger on the local bird life, these activities manifest the restless energy and extravagance that drives Frank’s melancholic method. At the end of True Story, the crows remain perched on the sticks. They will leave as and when they decide to. They will go, but given the filmmaker’s way of working, it is more than likely that they will reappear, elsewhere, in another video, perhaps, or a photographic collage. These creatures belong to the world outside the window and are part of the endless interrogation of media and memory that distinguishes his method.

FRAGMENTS SHORED AGAINST MY RUINS ◆ 183 This page intentionally left blank Coda THE CIRCLE Paper Route

Paper Route is a twenty-three-minute video portrait of Bobby Mac Millan as he delivers the morning paper to the residents in and around Frank’s hometown of Mabou. From the first delivery in front of a group of stores to the last on the doorstep of his own house, the filmmaker rides along with Bobby, learning about the nature of his route, the path that he follows through the town and surrounding districts, and the customers that he services. The questions that Frank puts to Bobby regarding his customers are not of the general type that we might expect a documentary filmmaker to ask his subject but rather the specific sort that one puts to one’s neighbor: “What’s the father doing?” “Is his wife still alive?” “And the mother lives in this house?” It says a lot about the profile of the community that much of the discussion is about people retiring, handing over the running of farms to their children, or passing away. Because the next delivery is always just ahead, the stories that Bobby tells about his customers are not really stories but fragments of stories the full dimensions of which remain to be told. The filming took place during the morning of March 5, 2002. At the start of the journey, apart from patches of snow-covered road illuminated by the car headlights, everything around the vehicle is shrouded in darkness. As the journey progresses, the first glimmers of predawn light illuminate more and more of the surrounding landscape, its dwellings, and its people. Most of the time, Bobby either deposits the newspapers in the roadside mailboxes or else drives up to each house and tosses it near the door. Occasionally, we see him scurrying back to the car after placing the paper against the screen door. In one instance he hands the paper to a middle-aged female customer who walks up

◆ 185 to the car in her robe—a little perturbed to find herself being filmed. “Don’t film this,” she chides. “Get lost.” The final customer is the filmmaker himself. As the car approaches his house, Frank asks Bobby to toss the paper onto the step. Although Bobby’s throw misses its mark, Frank deems his efforts to be good enough. Shortly after, an intertitle announces that on the morning of the filming, “Bobby MacMillan de- livered 158 copies of the Herald-Tribune in and around Mabou.” The final shot in the video shows Bobby resting in his lounge chair with his shoes off and a vacuum cleaner at his feet. “Now, Mr. MacMillan, how do you feel about being filmed?” Many years previously, at the conclusion of Me and My Brother, Frank had asked Julius Orlovsky a similar question. From the other side of a rain-speckled window, Julius describes the camera as “a reflection of disapproval or disgust.” Bobby has no such qualms. His response to the filmmaker’s question is direct and affirmative: “Good!” “Good?” enquires Frank. “Yeah.” Paper Route exemplifies Frank’s method of using the details and activities of everyday life to think about larger things: community, aging, the passage of time. The story of Bobby’s paper route is, in other words, a version of the type of story that characterizes Frank’s work, a story that, as has been said about the essay, “acquires its depth from pene- trating deeply into a matter, not from referring it back to something else.”1 After completing the first part of the route, Bobby announces: “So we made the circle, Robert. . . . You understand, now?” From behind the camera, the filmmaker responds: “We made the circle. . . . That’s what we all do, you know.” If we were to go back forty-three years, we would hear a prefiguring of this response in Jack Kerouac’s voice-over in Pull My Daisy. The lessons learned in this film about the capacity of the voice to convey a feeling of time passing and experiences too fleeting to be grasped inform Frank’s own voice-over reflections in Conversations in Vermont, Life Dances On . . . , Home Improvements, The Present, and True Story. Rather than reprising the claims and arguments already put forward about this work, I want to complete the circle by looking at the opening few minutes of Paper

186 ◆ CODA Route. If we return to the start of the video, we can fill in some crucial textual details and begin to position Bobby’s paper route as part of a larger story concerning the forces and impulses driving Frank’s career and its place in postwar American art.

STORY A STORY B Paper Route commences with a vertical pan down a series of images that have been attached to a backing board. Three of the images are individual photographs; the other four are Polaroids that have been rephotographed and printed on a single sheet. When the video cuts to a position closer to the work, the camera’s panning movement reveals snatches of typed statements running along the bottom of the images. In the next shot, the camera zooms out from a close-up of a strip of text to reveal an image that shows six sheets of Polaroids arranged side by side along a wall. In order to capture the entire arrangement in a single image, two separate images have been overlapped and rephotographed. Underneath the two prints that make up the composite image are the words “Story A Story B.” Frank then cuts to another collage. Memory for the Children (2001–2) uses all but one of the same images that appear in Story A Story B (2002). The main difference lies in the arrangement of the images: in Memory for the Children the six sheets of Polaroids form a rectangular composition of two rows of three. The other distinguishing feature is the inclusion of the words “Leaving Home Coming Home” hand printed across the image’s surface. The cut from one work to the other is preceded by the commencement of a voice-over spoken in halting English by an unidentified woman. Her words are drawn from the snatches of typed text that appear on the sheets of images:

Story A. Story B. The voyage of an old man with important memories. Leaving home. Coming home. Square photos not even a diary. My secret remains my secret. Story B. Happy

CODA ◆ 187 Boy. Happy Girl. For the children the world of the past. Leav- ing home. Coming home. Maybe for the last winter.

These words hint at the details of a life story made up of a series of return journeys. What prevents these details from coalescing into a story is the fragmentation that defines both the composition of the words and the arrangement of the images. For the record, the words and images presented at the start of Paper Route are drawn from three distinct works: Story A Story B, Memory for the Children, and My Father’s Coat N.Y.C. (2001). Yet because of the correspondences between these works, we appear to be dealing with a single work, the constitutive elements of which are constantly being rearranged and reordered. This is to say that what the filmmaker is showing us in these opening moments is a compositional process that is defined by an element of “unfinishedness.” Hence, as the camera pans down the loosely attached panels of Memory for the Children, it seems as if the work is in danger of breaking apart and becoming dispersed in the street life visi ble in the background of the shot. “It’s not the beautiful photograph,” Frank has explained about his way of working with still images. “It just means a passage of time.”2 The move from photography to filmmaking was driven by a desire to pursue this objective in a form more naturally equipped to render the fluctuations of time and experience. The photographic compositions displayed at the start of Paper Route confirm Frank’s use of lessons learned in film about the sequencing and juxtaposition of images and words to negotiate a return to the still image. Frank’s reflections on the forces and elements driving his work continue when the video shifts from the streets around his apartment and studio in Lower Manhattan to the snow-covered ground in front of his home in Mabou. In the foreground a large spherically shaped rock rests on a fence post. On the soundtrack the filmmaker’s voice announces: “I’m standing in the fog. . . . I simply wait for the crows to cry for food.” By now it should be clear that the crows that populate Frank’s work are not just any crows. They are what Chris Marker calls

188 ◆ CODA FIGURE 38. Paper Route (Robert Frank, 2002). Copyright Robert Frank.

FIGURE 39. Photograph of Bobby MacMillan in Paper Route (Robert Frank, 2002). Copyright Robert Frank. “message-bearing crows.”3 When he was asked how the winter landscape in Mabou affected his work, Frank described his attachment to the crows: “The only thing that’s here are these black crows. They’re really company; you begin to watch them and feed them. You get to be their friend and they know you, too. It’s the first time I had a relationship with animals.”4 The crows function as pivot points between the filmmaker, his thoughts and internal deliberations, and the outside world. Their appearance registers the moment when something internal finds a response or correlative in the world outside the self. A distinguishing feature of Frank’s work is that this moment is defined by a precise labor of imagination and an element of fortuitousness. “I like a certain disorder; then I can find something in it,” the filmmaker maintains in the same discussion. “I’m like the crows who pick food out of the garbage. They get the good pieces.”5 Frank’s crow-like method of composition culminates when he cuts from the snow-covered ground to a shot of his reflection in a mirror. “What to do in the dark?” he asks. The video then cuts to a series of close-up shots of black-and- white Polaroids. In a number of these, we can see elements of the compositions that figured previously. In another image we can see the smiling figure of a man carrying a newspaper. As the camera scans the images, the filmmaker’s voice-over continues his line of thought: “Waiting until it gets lighter, I begin to think about the paper root . . . paper root . . . paper route. Yeah, the paper route. Getting the news on Tuesday.” Like everything else in the opening two and a half minutes, the story of Bobby’s paper route is drawn out of the circumstances that determine Frank’s everyday life: the dark winter mornings, the isolation of life in Mabou, and, not least important, the lingering vocal peculiarities of his heavily accented English as it struggles to pronounce the word “route.” Nothing here is invented. Yet everything is subject to a careful process of orchestration and rearrangement intended to convey how the everyday world is experienced. “Film was an opportunity to learn how to communicate,” Frank once noted. “That was maybe the most important thing to me, per-

190 ◆ CODA sonally. It helps you to talk in real life, too.”6 In Paper Route he seems to do little else. The type of talk that passes between the filmmaker and Bobby should not be taken for granted. Its ease and conviviality are the marks of a genuine rapport between the filmmaker and his subject. But the struggle to communicate referred to by Frank involves something other than everyday conversation. It involves the struggle to give creative expression to the subjective processes at the heart of the work. This challenge motivated his switch to film. It also defines the formal ruptures that distinguish his return to photography. W. S. Di Piero claims that in Brattleboro, Vermont the words inscribed across the image’s surface charge the space separating the artist’s own seeing mind and the picture.7 I am not suggesting that the psychic turbulence evident in the photographic work produced during the 1970s also characterizes Paper Route. Rather, what is consistent is the desire to communicate the often troubled relationship of the seeing mind to the world rendered in the image. In Paper Route this involves a negotiation of two interconnected agendas: on the one hand, a documentary agenda focused on the details of Bobby’s early morning labor and, on the other, an autobiographical agenda that takes as its subject the forces and impulses driving the filmmaker’s work. Linking the two is a particular method of looking. The gaze that scans the Polaroids at the start of the video is the same as that which examines the snow-covered landscape rushing past the vehicle. This is the gaze of the filmmaker, conveyed through the camera’s restless scrutiny of his surroundings. Indeed, from early on in the development of Frank’s career in film, our involvement with his work has depended less on the identification of a story or set of characters than it has on our ability to engage with an activity of looking. The array of doors, windows, and mirrors that recur in his work act as frames within frames; their purpose is to visualize the activity of looking. Pur- suing a similar point, the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy describes the work of the Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami as “an education in looking at the world, with a look at this world where cinema dwells.”8

CODA ◆ 191 He adds that Kiarostami’s purpose is to animate the gaze—make it “vigilant”: “First and foremost, his films are . . . eye openers.”9 For both Kiarostami and Frank, looking embodies a disposition or way of being in the world. Nancy describes this disposition as an “ethos” or “a con- duct in regard to the world.”10 In this study I have preferred to call it a method, thereby foregrounding the creative decisions that determine the filmmaker’s relationship to the medium. My claim is that a distinctive feature of Frank’s method is its melancholic obsession with the losses incurred with the passage of time. To reiterate a point made earlier, melancholy cannot be reduced to a mood: it is primarily a creative disposition or method of constructing knowledge that is based on an immersion in the life of things. As such, it becomes manifest during those moments when something usually overlooked or discarded—for example, the swirling mass of Christmas wrappers seen through the windows at Bleecker Street or the details of a tattered poster print or the crows feeding on scraps in the yard at Mabou—is transformed into a cipher of enigmatic wisdom. It marries this compulsive looking with words that are spoken as much to one’s self as to an external listener. Frank’s melancholy method is also expressed in his tendency to return to preexisting photographs and films so as to signal their place in the present. He uses this process of looking again to stage an ongoing puzzling over meaning that gives the films and videos their distinctive tone and quality of “unfinishedness.” Frank’s melancholy method is, finally, an ability to seize hold of those instances when the blurring of inside and outside worlds seems to happen automatically. In Paper Route, for example, the cracks that run across Bobby’s windscreen create a layering of representative space similar to the effect produced by the inscription of words across the surface of the photographs. In both cases the act of seeing is rendered visible through its disruption. No longer something transparent, the picture plane operates as a space of mediation that registers the fluctuations of feeling and emotion that determine the filmmaker’s everyday life. The rhizomatic pattern that runs the length and breadth of

192 ◆ CODA Bobby’s windscreen is both part of the world that precedes the filmmaker’s arrival and also a key element in a carefully constructed mise- en-scène. It brings to mind all the other instances in his films and videos of a process of writing that happens as if by chance.

AWAKENING THE EYE The interaction between the passing landscape and the cracked windscreen in Paper Route also recalls a much earlier journey undertaken by the filmmaker. In his account of their trip to Florida, Kerouac is amazed at Frank’s ability to “snap something that’s on the move in front of him, and through an unwashed windscreen at that.”11 By observing Frank’s

method of working, Kerouac is able to conjure a form of writing capable of doing justice to the dislocating forces and elements of everyday life. The paratactic bursts of description register the impact of these forces and elements on both the writer’s consciousness and the process of writing. Coinciding with this disturbance of syntax and grammati- cal structure is another element that links Kerouac’s literary endeavors and Frank’s approach in his photographic and filmic work. When the two travelers stop at a barbershop that Frank had photographed five years earlier and share a cup of coffee with the eighty-year-old owner, Mr. Bryan, Kerouac describes a place frozen in time: “Barber shop

194 ◆ CODA hasnt changed since Photographer Frank was by here about five years ago to photograph the shop from the street door, even the bottles on the shelf are all the same and apparently havent been moved.”12 The experience of time generated by the visit to the barbershop becomes clearer a little further in the same passage:

A little ways down a country road, to the colored houses of McClellanville, a Negro funeral, Strawhat Charlie with razor scar looking out the window of his black shiny car, “Yay” . . . And the graves, simple mounds covered with clam shells, sometimes one symbolic Coca Cola bottle. Things you cant capture in words, the moody poem of death.13

Kerouac’s description brings together two conceptions of time that bear directly on the operation of Frank’s work: time as a medium that enables the possibility of experience and memory and time as a force of ruination. In a comparison of Frank’s photographic approach with that of his early mentor Walker Evans, Leslie Baier notes a mutual interest in the passage of time, its costs, and its depredations. But whereas Evans “seems to record the tangible effects of time and change on objects,” Frank’s approach endeavors to capture “the actual process of change and transformation itself”: “The best of Frank’s photographs convey an impression of implicit transformation, as if he has caught the scene at the very instant when expectancy is becoming climax.”14 Given what we know of Frank’s career—his abandonment of the search for a single image “that really said it all,”15 his switch to filmmaking, and the application of lessons learned in film in his photographic compositions—the long journey from The Americans to the present is best understood in neither exclusively photographic nor filmic terms but as evidence of a method that draws on and reinterprets the material attributes of both media. At the very end of his account of the trip to Florida, Kerouac claims that the outcome of watching Frank work is something all-encompassing:

CODA ◆ 195 “It’s the American Road and it awakens the eye every time.”16 Half a century later, the journey that the filmmaker undertakes with Bobby Mac- Millan in Paper Route appears to have none of the grand dimensions that Kerouac describes. Going from one mailbox to the next, Bobby’s journey is defined more by its interruptions and predetermined pathways than by the type of flight across the open road associated with Ker- ouac’s writings. In this sense, the small-scale nature of Bobby’s journey is well suited to the small-scale nature of the home-video format that has become Frank’s primary medium. Nevertheless, this change of scale does not rule out the possibility of extracting from the rush of images recorded by the video camera the type of big-picture insight that constitutes the subject of Kerouac’s reflections. After completing the penultimate delivery, Bobby’s car speeds toward the part of the coast where the filmmaker built his own home. As the car approaches the house, the ice-covered bay that features in a number of his photographs can be seen through the windscreen. Seeing it from this perspective, one is immediately struck by the enormousness of the frozen expanse of water. The sight of the frozen horizon clarifies much of what Frank has said about the reasons for his movements between Mabou and New York: two worlds, two visions, two conceptions of one’s place in the bigger picture: “All of a sudden you are in the company of something very powerful. And that alone has affected my life and made me a better person. It has made me more aware of something elementary.”17 Pressed to elaborate, he makes a telling point about his photographic method: “Well, obviously, nature is what is in front of you. But certainly in my photographs what I wanted to photograph was not really what was in front of my eyes but what was inside. That was what made me want to pick up a camera.”18 Frank’s comments link the methods informing his film and photographic work to a larger history of creative experimentation. “In a poem of this sort one is trying to record the precise instant when a thing outward and objective transforms itself, or darts into a thing inward and subjective.”19 Ezra Pound’s description of the intention behind his poem “In a Station of the Metro” clearly resonates with what

196 ◆ CODA Frank is trying to achieve. For these two artists, there is something disturbing in this passage, at least in terms of the structures and methods of rendering emotion. “Emotion is an organiser of form,” writes Pound.20 In Frank’s case it would be better to say that emotion is registered as a disorganization of form that paves the way for new, more precise methods of rendering emotion. The original impetus for this study was that while we know a great deal about the methods that determine the communication of emotion in Frank’s photographic work, we know relatively little about the crea tive decisions and formal structures that shape his films and videos. Rectifying this imbalance has the potential to enrich our understanding of the history of independent filmmaking as well as its encounters with the history of other media: photography, video, and writing. “You got eyes” was the message that Kerouac offered Frank at the end of his introduction to The Americans. The message that Frank’s career as a filmmaker has for us will take some time to grasp. Yet already it is clear that its implications extend across a range of media and forms of creative practice.

CODA ◆ 197 This page intentionally left blank NOTES

INTRODUCTION 1 Dziga Vertov, “From Kino-Eye to Radio Eye,” in Kino-eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, ed. with an introduction by Annette Michelson, trans. Kevin O’Brien (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 87. 2 Robert Frank, The Lines of My Hand (New York: Pantheon Books, 1989). 3 Robert Frank, “Highway 61 Revisited,” Robert Frank interviewed by Mar- laine Glicksman, Film Comment 23, no. 4 (July–August 1987): 37. 4 Robert Frank, quoted in Robert Enright and Meeka Walsh, “Possibly, Everything: An Interview with Robert Frank,” Border Crossings 32, no. 1 (March–May 2013): 34. 5 Henry Luce Robinson, quoted in Looking at Life Magazine, ed. Erika Doss (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001), 2. 6 Other magazines that published Frank’s work at this time included McCall’s, Vogue, and Look. 7 Robert Frank, quoted in William S. Johnson, “History—His Story,” in Rochester Film and Photo Consortium Occasional Papers 2, ed. W. S. Johnson (Rochester, N.Y.: George Eastman House, 1989), 31. 8 Sarah Greenough, “Resisting Intelligence: Zurich to New York,” in Sarah Greenough, Looking In: Robert Frank’s The Americans, expanded ed. (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, Washington, in association with Steidl, 2009), 28. 9 Robert Frank, London/Wales, ed. Philip Brookman (Göttingen, Germany: Steidl Publishers, 2007). This publication was produced to coincide with the exhibition Robert Frank: London/Wales, held at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., May 10 to July 14, 2003. 10 Robert Frank, “Robert Frank,” in Photography within the Humanities, ed. Eugenia Parry Janis and Wendy MacNeil (Danbury, N.H.: Addison House Publishers, 1977), 56. 11 Robert Frank, quoted in Greenough, “Resisting Intelligence,” 30. 12 John Szarkowski, Mirrors and Windows: American Photography since 1960 (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1978), 19–20.

◆ 199 13 Ibid., 20. 14 Greenough, “Transforming Destiny into Awareness: The Americans,” in Looking In, 177. 15 Ibid., 178. 16 Ibid., 178–79. 17 Blake Stimson, The Pivot of the World: Photography and Its Nation (Cam- bridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006), 111. 18 Ibid., 111–12. 19 Ibid., 113. 20 Ibid., 114. 21 Ibid., 115. 22 W. T. Lhamon Jr., Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), 128. 23 Luc Sante, “Robert Frank and Jack Kerouac,” in Looking In, 205. 24 On the Road was written in April 1951 and published on September 5, 1957. Kerouac completed the first version of the introduction to The Americans in October 1957. The version eventually published in January 1960 was a revised and extended version. See Greenough, “Disordering the Senses,” in Looking In, 137–39. 25 Jack Kerouac, “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose,” in The Portable Jack Kerouac, ed. Ann Charters (New York: Penguin Books, 2007), 484. 26 Regina Weinreich, Kerouac’s Spontaneous Poetics: A Study of the Fiction (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1987), 4. 27 Jack Kerouac, introduction to Robert Frank, The Americans (Zurich, Swit- zerland: Scalo Publishers, in association with the National Gallery of Art, Washington, 2000), 7. 28 Ibid., 5. 29 Ibid. 30 Jack Kerouac, “On the Road to Florida,” in Robert Frank: New York to Nova Scotia, ed. Anne Wilkes Tucker (Göttingen, Germany: Steidl, 2005), 38. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid., 41. 36 Juan A. Suárez, Pop Modernism: Noise and the Reinvention of the Everyday (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 251.

200 ◆ NOTES TO INTRODUCTION 37 James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969), 13. 38 Suárez, Pop Modernism, 252. 39 Kerouac, introduction, 9. 40 Letter to Louis Zukofsky, July 5, 1928, in The Selected Letters of William Carlos Williams, ed. John C. Thirlwall (New York: New Directions, 1984), 102. 41 Robert Frank, “Robert Frank,” in Photography within the Humanities, 53. 42 Ibid. 43 Ibid., 58. 44 Ibid., 61. 45 Frank, The Lines of My Hand. 46 Raymond Bellour, Eye for I: Video Self-portraits (New York: Independent Curators Incorporated, 1990), 10. 47 Alexandre Astruc, “The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: La Caméra-stylo,” in The New Wave: Critical Landmarks, selected by Peter Graham (New York: Doubleday and Company, 1968), 18–19. 48 Michael Renov, The Subject of Documentary (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 72. 49 Ibid., 85. 50 Jonas Mekas, quoted in P. Adams Sitney, Eyes Upside Down: Visionary Filmmakers and the Heritage of Emerson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 90. 51 Robert Frank, “Robert Frank by Robert Frank,” Robert Frank File, Celeste Bartos International Film Study Center, Museum of Modern Art, New York. 52 Paul Arthur, A Line of Sight: American Avant-Garde Film Since 1965 (Min- neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 26. 53 This number includes This Film Is About . . . , the film that Frank made with students in a class on film taught by Frank at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 1973, as well as Fernando, the 2008 video dedicated to his friend, the photographer Fernando Garzoni. 54 Robert Frank, quoted in Ute Eskildsen, “In Conversation With Robert Frank,” in Robert Frank: Hold Still—Keep Going, ed. Ute Eskildsen (Zurich, Switzerland: Scalo, 2001), 108. 55 W. S. Di Piero, “Not a Beautiful Picture: On Robert Frank,” in Out of Eden: Essays on Modern Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 195.

NOTES TO INTRODUCTION ◆ 201 56 Samuel Beckett, quoted in Anthony Uhlmann, Beckett and Poststructur alism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 110. 57 Jean-Luc Godard, quoted in Raymond Bellour, “ ‘I Am an Image,’ ” Camera Obscura 3-4, nos. 2-3-1 8-9-10 (1982), 117. 58 D. N. Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Uni- versity Press, 2007), 43. Rodowick draws this principle from a close reading of the work of Stanley Cavell.

1. “TIME AND HOW TO NOTE IT DOWN” 1 Robert Frank, “Letter From New York,” in Robert Frank: New York to Nova Scotia, ed. Tucker, 55. 2 “The Independent Film Award,” in Film Culture: An Anthology, ed. and with an introduction by P. Adams Sitney (London: Secker and Warburg, 1971), 423–24. 3 “The First Statement of the New American Cinema Group,” in Film Cul ture, ed. Sitney, 80. 4 Ibid., 83. 5 Jonas Mekas quoted in P. Adams Sitney, preface to Film Culture, ed. Sit- ney, viii. 6 See, for example, Jonas Mekas, “The Experimental Film in America,” Film Culture no. 3 (May–June 1955). Reprinted in Film Culture, ed. Sitney, 21–26. 7 Jonas Mekas, “A Few Notes on Spontaneous Cinema,” in Cinema 16 Film Notes (1959/1960), n.p. See also Jonas Mekas, “New York Letter: Towards a Spontaneous Cinema,” Sight and Sound 28, nos. 3/4 (1959): 118–21. 8 Daniel Belgrad, The Culture of Spontaneity: Improvisation and the Arts in Postwar America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 3. 9 Harold Rosenberg, “The American Action Painters,” in The Tradition of the New (London: Paladin, 1970), 36. 10 Ibid., 37. 11 Ibid., 38. 12 Charles Olson, “Projective Verse,” in The New American Poetry, 1945–1960, ed. Donald Allen (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 388. 13 Ibid. 14 Arthur, A Line of Sight, 2. 15 Mekas, “A Few Notes on Spontaneous Cinema,” n.p. 16 Jonas Mekas, “Pull My Daisy and the Truth of Cinema,” in Movie Journal:

202 ◆ NOTES TO INTRODUCTION The Rise of a New American Cinema, 1959–1971 (New York: Collier Books, 1972), 5. 17 Ibid., 6. 18 Hans Richter, “The Film as an Original Art,” in Film Culture, ed. Sitney, 16. 19 Ibid., 17. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid., 19. 22 Ibid. 23 Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997), xlix. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid., l. 26 Ibid., xlix. 27 Ibid., l. 28 Ibid., 158–59. 29 Jonas Mekas, “Call for a Derangement of Cinematic Senses,” in Movie Journal, 1. 30 Jonas Mekas, “Notes on the New American Cinema,” in Film Culture, ed. Sitney, 91. 31 Ibid., 91–92. 32 As Miriam Bratu Hansen points out, “Kracauer recognizes and acknowledges the need for storytelling, for structures organizing time and space, action and subjectivity; he even gives a qualified approval to the convention of ‘happy,’ or rather ‘nontragic, provisional endings.” But—and this is the key point not only for Kracauer but also for Mekas—“some types of narrative are more apt than others to mobilize the medium’s purchase on material contingency, to maintain an awareness of the tensions involved in their own construction.” See Miriam Bratu Hansen, introduction to Kracauer, Theory of Film, xxxii. 33 Mekas, “Notes on the New American Cinema,” 95–96. 34 Alfred Leslie, quoted in Blaine Allan, “The Making (and Unmaking) of Pull My Daisy,” Film History 2, no. 3 (1988): 191. 35 Ibid., 195. 36 James Agee, “Movies in 1946,” in Film Writing and Selected Journalism (New York: Library of America, 2005), 275. 37 Jack Kerouac, quoted in The Portable Jack Kerouac, 450. 38 Kerouac, “On the Road to Florida,” 41.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 1 ◆ 203 39 Ibid., 40. 40 Kerouac, “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose,” in The Portable Jack Kerouac, 485. 41 Kracauer, Theory of Film, 299. 42 Ibid., 255–56. 43 Allen Ginsberg, “Photographic Poetics,” quoted in Sarah Greenough, Beat Memories: The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg (New York: National Gal- lery of Art and DelMonico Books, 2010), 17. 44 Allen Ginsberg, speaking in Fire in the East: A Portrait of Robert Frank, written, directed, and edited by Philip Brookman and Amy Brookman, produced by Anne Wilkes Tucker and Paul Yeager (Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and KUHT–Public Television, Houston, 1986). 45 Alfred Leslie, quoted in Allan, “The Making (and Unmaking) of Pull My Daisy,” 194. 46 Parker Tyler, Underground Film: A Critical History (New York: Grove Press, 1969), 40. 47 Jack Kerouac, “Belief and Technique for Modern Prose,” in The Portable Jack Kerouac, 483. 48 Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 15. 49 Astruc, “The Birth of a New Avant-Garde,” in The New Wave, 20. 50 Ibid. 51 Ibid., 18. 52 André Bazin, “Bazin on Marker,” Film Comment 39, no. 4 (2003): 44. 53 Sitney, Eyes Upside Down, 90. 54 Eileen Myles, “Reunion,” Parkett, no. 83 (2008): 48. 55 William Carlos Williams, quoted in Kerouac, “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose,” 484.

2. HE’S NOT THERE 1 Jonas Mekas, “Movie Journal,” in Robert Frank: New York to Nova Scotia, 45. 2 Ibid., 48. 3 Frank, quoted in “Highway 61 Revisited,” 36. 4 Stephen Mamber, Cinéma Vérité in America: Studies in Uncontrolled Documentary (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1974), 116. 5 “Third Independent Film Award,” in Film Culture, ed. Sitney, 425.

204 ◆ NOTES TO CHAPTER 1 6 Ibid. 7 Shirley Clarke, quoted in Melissa Anderson, “The Vagaries of Verities: On Shirley Clarke’s Portrait of Jason,” Film Comment 35, no. 6 (November/ December 1999): 56. 8 Penelope Gilliatt, “The Connection,” Sight and Sound 30, no. 3 (Summer 1961): 145. 9 Shirley Clarke, quoted in Anderson, “The Vagaries of Verities,” 58. 10 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 150. 11 Ibid., 154. 12 Frank, quoted in “Highway 61 Revisited,” 36. 13 Alain Robbe-Grillet, For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Grove Press, 1965), 32. 14 Ibid., 33. 15 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 133. 16 Ibid. 17 Noël Burch, “Chance and Its Functions,” in Theory of Film Practice, trans. Helen R. Lane with an introduction by Annette Michelson (London: Secker and Warburg, 1973), 117. 18 Ibid., 120. 19 András Bálint Kovács, Screening Modernism: European Art Cinema, 1950–1980 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 126. 20 Referring to the shooting of the motorcycle cop by the lead character, Kovács claims that the montage of emblematic images does not amount to constructing a realistic space in which what is made logical might in fact occur in reality. Instead, the film presents us with “a series of images the conceptual meaning of which is the killing.” Kovács, Screening Mod ernism, 133. 21 Kovács, Screening Modernism, 136. 22 Ibid., 137. 23 Robert Frank, quoted in Stuart Alexander, “Robert Frank at George East- man House 17 and 18 August 1967,” Katalog: A Journal of Photography and Video 9, no. 4 (Fall 1997): 37. 24 Ibid. 25 Daniel Kane, We Saw the Light: Conversations between the New American Cinema and Poetry (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2009), 143. 26 Hans Richter, quoted in Nora M. Alter, Chris Marker (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 17.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 2 ◆ 205 27 Adrian Martin, “Robert Kramer Films the Event,” Rouge 9 (June 2006), http://www.rouge.com.au/9/kramer_films_event.html. 28 Ross Gibson, “What Do I Know? Chris Marker and the Essayist Mode of Cinema,” Filmviews, no. 134 (Summer 1988): 27. Gibson uses this term to describe Marker’s approach in Sunless. 29 The lines from “Wichita Vortex Sutra” read by Ginsberg in the film differ slightly from those of the published poem, which read, “revolving my head to my heart like my mad mother.” 30 Di Piero, “Not a Beautiful Picture,” 180. 31 “As a still photographer,” he maintained, “you’re just an observer; you just walk around, and there’s no need to communicate. . . . Whereas with films it becomes more complicated—thinking in long durations, and keeping up a kind of sequence.” Frank, “Robert Frank,” in Photography within the Humanities, 53. 32 Philippe Grandrieux, “De la télévision au cinéma,” http://www.inattendus .com/2009/05/philippe-grandrieux-de-la-television-au-cinema. 33 Jonathan Rosenbaum, “C’est vrai! (One Hour),” in Frank Films: The Film and Video Work of Robert Frank, ed. Brigitta Burger-Utzer and Stefan Grissemann (Zurich: Scalo, 2003), 271. 34 Ibid. 35 Burch, “Chance and Its Functions,” 116. Published in English in 1973, Burch’s book was first published in 1969 by Éditions Gallimard in Paris. 36 Taylor Mead was one of the most important actors of the underground cinema movement, appearing in films directed by figures such as Andy Warhol, Ron Rice, Adolfas Mekas, and Gregory Markopoulos. He was also a published poet and painter. Bill Rice was a painter, actor, and scholar. Apart from his work in One Hour, he appeared in films by Jim Jarmusch, Scott and Beth B., Jacob Burckhardt, and others. He also appeared in a number of stage productions and collaborated in the writing of several seminal publications on the work of Gertrude Stein. 37 Robert Frank, One Hour (Göttingen: Steidl, 2007), n.p. 38 In an interview with Jim Jarmusch, Frank spoke about Orlovsky’s extra ordinary contribution to One Hour: “It’s interesting, he was right at the edge of the cliff, of going over. The next day he had to check in a hospital. It’s like he worked himself up to do this job just before that freedom would be taken from him.” This interview was published in the Japanese magazine Switch. The full transcript of the interview is available in the Robert Frank Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

206 ◆ NOTES TO CHAPTER 2 39 Jean Rouch, Ciné-Ethnography, ed. and trans. Steven Feld (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 185. 40 Ibid.

3. “A BETTER WAY TO LIVE” 1 During the same period, Frank worked as a cameraman on two productions—Conrad Rooks’s Chappaqua (1966) and Danny Seymour’s Home Is Where the Heart Is (1971)—and, along with students in his film class at the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, New York, made About Us (1972). 2 Emile de Antonio, quoted in Alan Rosenthal, “Emile de Antonio: An In- terview,” Film Quarterly 31, no. 1 (Fall 1978): 29. 3 Frank, “Robert Frank,” in Photography within the Humanities, 59. 4 Ibid. 5 Regarding the terms and conditions of the funding, Stuart Alexander adds: “Artist’s commission was $500.00 and facilities, etc., were available at cost but not to exceed $1000.00 per production.” See Stuart Alexan- der, Robert Frank: A Bibliography, Filmography, and Exhibition Chronol ogy, 1946–1985 (Tucson: Center For Creative Photography, University of Arizona in association with Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 1986), 61. 6 Frank, quoted in Johnson, “History—His Story,” 38. 7 Ibid. 8 Robert Frank, letter to Philip Brookman, in Robert Frank: New York to Nova Scotia, 64. 9 Sarah Greenough, “Fragments That Make a Whole: Meaning in Photo- graphic Sequences,” in Robert Frank: Moving Out, ed. Sarah Greenough and Philip Brookman, with contributions by Martin Gasser, W. S. Di Piero, and John Hanhardt (Zurich: Scalo, 1994), 117. 10 Robert Frank, letter to Philip Brookman, quoted in Philip Brookman, “The Silence of Recognition: Exhibiting Robert Frank’s Americans,” in Looking In, 325. 11 Robert Frank, quoted in Dennis Wheeler, “Robert Frank Interviewed,” Criteria 3, no. 2 (June 1977): 4. It is worth noting here that this splicing together of individual frames can be regarded as a cinematic act. 12 Amy Taubin, “Circling. Beginnings, Continuations, Renewals: Robert Frank’s Personal New American Cinema,” in Frank Films, 94. 13 Richard Leacock, quoted in Mamber, Cinéma Vérité in America, 14.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 3 ◆ 207 14 Taubin, “Circling. Beginnings, Continuations, Renewals,” 100. 15 Robert Frank, “J’aimerais faire un film . . . ,” in Robert Frank (Paris: Centre National de la Photographie/Collection Photo Poche, 1983), n.p. In 1991 Thames and Hudson published an English edition of this book. The translation of Frank’s remarks is taken from this edition. 16 Ibid. 17 Philippe Dubois, “Photography Mise-en-Film: Autobiographical (Hi)stories and Psychic Apparatuses,” in Fugitive Images: From Photography to Video, ed. Patrice Petro (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 162. 18 Frank, quoted in Wheeler, “Robert Frank Interviewed,” 7. 19 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. and with a foreword by Brian Massumi (London: Continuum, 2004), 343. 20 Ibid., 344. 21 Robert Frank, quoted in “Walker Evans with Robert Frank and Others,” Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, May 5, 1971, 19. A transcript of this talk is available in the Robert Frank Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. 22 Frank, quoted in “Weekend Discussions: Saturday, November 5th and Sunday, November 6th, 1988,” in Rochester Film and Photo Consortium Occasional Papers 2, 170. 23 Frank, quoted in Wheeler, “Robert Frank Interviewed,” 4. 24 David E. James, Allegories of Cinema: American Film in the Sixties (Prince ton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989), 241. 25 Garrett Stewart, Between Film and Screen: Modernism’s Photo Synthesis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 33. Philippe Dubois locates the film’s allegorical intentions more directly in relation to the photographic image: “Burning a photograph is only itself an extension of the photographic process: the photograph is a sensitive surface (like the soul) burned by the light that strikes it, and gnawed from within by the very things that allow it to exist: light and time.” See Dubois, “Photography Mise-en-Film,” 169. 26 In considering this connection, we must also acknowledge a number of differences between the two films. Unlike Frampton, who uses the voice- over to situate the images in the context of his own biography while distancing himself from this personal history by having his fellow filmmaker Michael Snow voice the narration, Frank is front and center in the per-

208 ◆ NOTES TO CHAPTER 3 colating resentments that distinguish his conversations with Pablo and Andrea. In other words, the implications of the materialist tendencies in Conversations in Vermont have to be drawn out of what appears to be an all-encompassing autobiographical agenda. Frank’s interest in issues of form seems to be incidental to his primary interest in the people and relationships before the camera. In this sense, the critical reception of his work has always labored under the terms established at the outset of his career in relation to the discussion of Pull My Daisy as a documentary on the beat subculture. 27 Frank, “Letter From New York,” in Robert Frank: New York to Nova Scotia, 55. 28 Dubois, “Photography Mise-en-Film,” 168. 29 Flannery O’Connor, Wise Blood, 2nd ed. (London: Faber and Faber, 1962), 165. 30 Frank refers to this passage in a 1992 interview with the filmmaker Jim Jarmusch that was published in the Japanese magazine Switch. A full transcript of this interview is available at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. He does so again in an interview with Robert Enright in “Frank Speaking: An Interview with Robert Frank,” Border Crossings 16, no. 4 (Fall 1997): 30. 31 Frank, quoted in Wheeler, “Robert Frank Interviewed,” 7. In other interviews, Frank’s reflections on the film center on the fate of his friend and collaborator on the shoot Danny Seymour: “We both made the film together, but he really sort of lived what the Stones imagined they were living. It was a drug scene, but he really did it in front of the camera, and I lived with him, so I made the film on him, part of it.” “Robert Frank,” in Photography within the Humanities, 64. Elsewhere, Frank elaborated about the toll the film took on Seymour: “Without him it was very hard to make the film. So I was disappointed at the end that he was so strung out. I mean he was really gone. And [the Rolling Stones] did promise in the beginning they would help him, send him to Switzerland or somewhere, and of course the tour was over and they were gone. And Danny was left like that.” Robert Frank, quoted in Jim Jarmusch, “Jim Jarmusch Interviews Robert Frank,” transcript available at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Frank’s remarks on the filming of Cocksucker Blues also reflect the fact that, a year after the film’s completion, Seymour disappeared during a boat journey traveling from South America back to the United States.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 3 ◆ 209 4. “THE FIRE OF PAIN” 1 Sarah Greenough, “Blowing down Bleecker Street: Destroying The Ameri cans,” in Looking In, 323. Since its first reissue by the Museum of Modern Art in New York and Aperture Publications, the book has been reprinted five times. The most recent reprinting, in 2008, coincided with Looking In: Robert Frank’s “The Americans,” a major exhibition at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., celebrating the book’s fiftieth anniversary. More than half a century after its publication, this book remains one of the most widely cited examples of twentieth-century photographic storytelling. 2 Di Piero, “Not a Beautiful Picture,” 195. 3 Samuel Beckett, “Letter To Axel Kaun,” July 9, 1937, in The Letters of Samuel Beckett, ed. Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck, vol. 1, 1929–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 518. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid., 518–19. 6 Robert Frank, quoted in “Robert Frank at George Eastman House, 17th and 18th August 1967,” ed. and with an introduction by Stuart Alexander, n.p. A transcript is available in the Robert Frank Collection, National Gal- lery of Art, Washington, D.C. 7 Frank, quoted in “Weekend Discussions: Saturday, November 5th and Sunday, November 6th, 1988,” in Rochester Film and Photo Consortium Occasional Papers 2, 163–64. 8 Frank’s treatment of the photographic print bears out a principle of modernist experimentation whereby the newer media attain reflexive self- awareness by drawing on the resources of media that have come before. “Thus, in a kind of circular flight,” Fredric Jameson surmises, “the various arts—better still, the media of the various arts—affirm their absolute quality only by borrowing representational features from the next.” Fred- ric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (London: Verso, 2002), 173. 9 Samuel Beckett, quoted in Uhlmann, Beckett and Poststructuralism, 105. 10 Frank, quoted in “Weekend Discussions: Saturday, November 5th and Sunday, November 6th, 1988,” 169. 11 Robert Frank, quoted in Wolfgang Beilenhoff, “A Film By Robert Frank,” in Robert Frank: Hold Still—Keep Going, 131. 12 Jonas Mekas, “The Diary Film: A Lecture on Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania,” in Avant-Garde Film: A Reader of Theory and Criticism, ed. P. Adams Sitney (New York: New York University Press, 1978), 193.

210 ◆ NOTES TO CHAPTER 4 13 Philippe Dubois, “Video Thinks What Cinema Creates: Notes on Jean-Luc Godard’s Work in Video and Television,” in Jean-Luc Godard: Son + Image, 1974–1991, ed. Raymond Bellour with Mary Lea Bandy (New York: Muse- um of Modern Art, 1992), 169. 14 Raymond Bellour, “The Film Stilled,” in Between-the-Images (Zurich: JRP/ Ringier and Les presses du réel, 2012), 133. 15 Serge Daney, quoted in Bellour, “The Film Stilled,” 133. 16 Robert Frank, quoted in Jack Sargeant, “An Interview with Robert Frank,” in Naked Lens: Beat Cinema (Berkeley, Calif.: Soft Skull Press, 2008), 51. 17 Frank, quoted in “Highway 61 Revisited,” 35. 18 Frank’s unease regarding the film’s dramatic underpinnings is evidenced by the way in which the central character in the two films that he directed immediately following Candy Mountain—Hunter and Last Supper—is considerably less central to the film. In Hunter this involves breaking the flow of the film’s fictional narrative by interspersing documentary footage and interviews. In Last Supper, as well as employing a similar juxtaposition of fiction and documentary, Frank complicates the presentation of character still further by creating a central character whose only partici pation in the film is in the recollections and viewpoints of the guests who have gathered at a book-signing party to celebrate his most recent publication. 19 “Journeys are no longer the same drive- and goal-oriented moral trajecto- ries they once were,” Thomas Elsaesser explains. “And although still serv- ing as an oblique metaphor of the archetypal American experience, they now foreground themselves and assume the blander status of a narrative device, sometimes a picaresque support for individual scenes, situations and set-pieces, at other times the ironically admitted pretext to keep the film moving.” See Thomas Elsaesser, “The Pathos of Failure: American Films in the 1970s: Notes on the Unmotivated Hero,” in The Last Great American Picture Show: New Hollywood Cinema in the 1970s, ed. Thomas Elsaesser, Alexander Horwath, and Noel King (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2004), 279. 20 Frank, quoted in Sargeant, Naked Lens, 51. 21 Greil Marcus, “On the Road Again,” Artforum International 33, no. 3 (No- vember 1994): 54. 22 Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer (New York: Zone, 1988), 66, 69. 23 Robert Frank, letter to Anne Willkes Tucker regarding the forthcoming

NOTES TO CHAPTER 4 ◆ 211 Houston catalogue, winter 1985, in Robert Frank: New York to Nova Sco tia, 72. 24 Kent Jones, “Presence,” in Frank Films, 134. 25 Francis Bacon, quoted in David Sylvester, Interviews with Francis Bacon, 1962–1979, new and enlarged ed. (London: Thames and Hudson, 1980), 17.

5. FRAGMENTS SHORED AGAINST MY RUINS 1 Frank, quoted in Moving Out, 218. 2 Giorgio Agamben, Profanations, trans. Jeff Fort (New York: Zone Books, 2007), 27. 3 Frank, quoted in Eskildsen, “In Conversation with Robert Frank,” 115. 4 Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium Eater and Other Writings, ed. and with an introduction by Grevel Lindop (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 103. 5 Frank, quoted in Wheeler, “Robert Frank Interviewed,” 6. 6 Hans Belting, An Anthropology of Images: Picture, Medium, Body, trans. Thomas Dunlap (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2011). 7 Ibid., 154. 8 Ibid., 165. 9 Stewart, Between Film and Screen, 10. 10 Theodor Adorno, “The Essay as Form,” in The Adorno Reader, ed. Brian O’Connor (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2000), 101. 11 Ibid., 104. 12 “The essayistic,” Timothy Corrigan specifies, “is most interesting not so much in how it privileges personal expression and subjectivity but rather in how it troubles and complicates that very notion of expressivity and its relation to experience.” Timothy Corrigan, The Essay Film: From Mon taigne, after Marker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 17. 13 Raymond Bellour, “(Not) Just Another Filmmaker,” in Jean-Luc Godard: Son + Image, 1974–1991, 220. 14 Bellour, Between-the-Images, 18. 15 Frank, quoted in “Weekend Discussions: Saturday, November 5th and Sunday, November 6th, 1988,” in Rochester Film and Photo Consortium Occasional Papers 2, 115. 16 Jacques Rancière, “The Pensive Image,” in The Emancipated Spectator, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2009), 129. 17 Ibid., 130.

212 ◆ NOTES TO CHAPTER 4 18 Vicente Todoli, foreword to Robert Frank: Storylines (Göttingen, Germany: Steidl, 2004), n.p. 19 Frank, quoted in Eskildsen, “In Conversation with Robert Frank,” 113. 20 Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Os- borne (London: Verso, 1998), 166. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid., 140. 23 Ibid., 157. 24 Max Pensky, Melancholy Dialectics: Walter Benjamin and the Play of Mourning (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), 104. 25 Frank, quoted in “Weekend Discussions: Saturday, November 5th and Sunday, November 6th, 1988,” 122. 26 Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habber- jam (New York: Zone Books, 1988), 58–59. 27 Jones, “Presence,” in Frank Films, 133–34. 28 Theodor Adorno, “The Actuality of Philosophy,” in The Adorno Reader, 37. 29 Ibid. 30 Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and the Frankfurt Institute (New York: Free Press, 1977), 86. Buck-Morss helpfully adds: “It was not imagination in the sense of subjective projection beyond the existing world either into the past or into the future; it remained ‘immanent,’ within the material phenomena, the factuality of which acted as a control to thought.”

CODA 1 Adorno, “The Essay as Form,” 99. 2 Frank, “Robert Frank,” in Photography within the Humanities, 61. 3 Chris Marker, Le dépays (Paris: Herscher Format-Photo, 1982). 4 Frank, quoted in Enright, “Frank Speaking,” 17. 5 Ibid., 21. 6 Frank, quoted in Eskildsen, “Conversation with Robert Frank,” 111–12. 7 Di Piero, “Not a Beautiful Picture,” 198. 8 Jean-Luc Nancy and Abbas Kiarostami, The Evidence of Film (Brussels: Yves Gevaert, 2001), 24. 9 Ibid., 16. 10 Ibid. 11 Kerouac, “On the Road to Florida,” 38.

NOTES TO CODA ◆ 213 12 Ibid., 40. 13 Ibid. 14 Leslie Baier, “Visions of Fascination and Despair: The Relationship between Walker Evans and Robert Frank,” Art Journal 41, no. 1 (Spring 1981): 61, 62. 15 Frank, quoted in “History—His Story,” 38. 16 Kerouac, “On the Road to Florida,” 41. 17 Robert Frank, quoted in Brian Wallis, “Robert Frank: American Visions,” Art in America 84, no. 3 (March 1996): 76. 18 Ibid. 19 Ezra Pound, “Vorticism,” in Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir (New York: New Directions, 1970), 89. 20 Ezra Pound, “Affirmations: IV. As for Imagism,” New Age 16, no. 13 (Janu- ary 1915): 350.

214 ◆ NOTES TO CODA INDEX

Page numbers in italics refer to Armour, Rachel, 2 figures. art of invention, 182 art sketching, 12–13 About Me: A Musical (film), 27, 91, Arthur, Paul, 25, 36–37 103, 108–11, 145 Astruc, Alexandre, 23, 55–56 About Us (film), 207n1 At Land (film), 87 abstract art, 39 Aurthur, Robert Alan, 32 abstract expressionism, 34, 35 action painting, 34, 35 B, Scott and Beth, 206n36 Acton, Arlo, 93–94 Babel, Isaac, 64 adaptations, 43 Bacon, Francis, 151 Adorno, Theodor, 161–62, 182 Baier, Leslie, 195 Agamben, Giorgio, 156 Ballet (Brodovitch), 5 Agee, James, 17–18, 44, 49 Ballet Mécanique (film), 39 allegorical method, 171–74, 208n25 Barthes, Roland, 55 Allen, Lewis, 33 Bazin, André, 57 “American Action Painters, The” Beat Generation (play), 25, 43 (Rosenberg), 35 Beck, Julian, 93–94 American Film Institute, 108 Beckett, Samuel, 28, 76, 104, 123, 125 American Way of Life, 34–35, 36 Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, 123 Americans, The (photobook), plate Belgrad, Daniel, 34–35 3; creation of, 7–11, 145; Frank’s Bellamy, Richard, 43 intention, 79–80, 103; images in Bellour, Raymond, 23, 136, 163 Me and My Brother, 81; influence Belting, Hans, 159–61 of, 122, 210n1; Kerouac’s introduc- Benjamin, Walter, 171–72, 177 tion to, 11–19, 47–49, 197, 200n24; Bergman, Ingmar, 64 treatment of images, 86, 92, 97, Bergson, Henri, 147 98 Billy (Bowery resident), 126 Amram, David, 48, 51 “Birth of a New Avant-Garde: La Angelika Film Center, 89 Caméra-Stylo, The,” 55–56 Anthology Film Archives, 88 Black White and Things (photo- Antonioni, Michelangelo, 64 book), 5–6

◆ 215 Bland, Edward, 34, 41 Chelsea Girls, The (film), 77 Bleecker Street (Lower Manhattan), cinema 16, 32 122, 196 Cinema 16 Film Notes, 33 Book, Julius, 139–40 Clarke, Shirley, 25, 27, 41, 67–71, Brakhage, Jane, 53 76–77, 91 Brakhage, Stan, 34, 41, 52–53, 87 Cocksucker Blues (film), 2, 26, 91, Brand, Stewart, 102 118–20, 125, 209n31 Brandt, Bill, 5, 9 Cocteau, Jean, 39 Brattleboro, Vermont (photograph), Coe, John, 63 plate 2, 28–29, 156, 191 commercial photography, 4 Breathless (film), 79 Connection, The (film), 25, 68, 71 Bresson, Robert, 64 Connection, The (play), 37, 68 Brian, Saint George, 2 Conversations in Vermont (film): Brodovitch, Alexey, 5, 6 background, 27; as documentary, Brookman, Amy, 204n44 94; as family album, 120; Frank Brookman, Philip, 97, 98, 204n44 as filmmaker in, 91, 102, 103, 105, Browne, Roscoe Lee, 63, 80–81 106; Frank’s farewell to photogra- Bruguière, Francis, 39 phy, 113, 116–17; Frank’s treatment Bryan, Mr., 194–95 of photographs, 27, 94–97, 99, Buck-Morss, Susan, 213n30 104–5, 157; Frank’s voice-over, 60, Burch, Noël, 77–78, 88 99–100; funding, 93–94; in Life Burckhardt, Jacob, 206n36 Dances On . . . , 125; selection of Burroughs, William, 26 photographs, 105–7; stills from, 95, 96, 105; structure, 93; use of camera reality, 42 music, 107–8 caméra-stylo, 23, 55–56 Cool World, The (film), 68–69 Camus, Albert, 56, 104 corporate liberalism, 34–35, 36 Candy Mountain (film), 26, 138–40 Corrigan, Timothy, 212n12 Cassady, Neal and Carolyn, 43 Corso, Gregory: Frank and, 11; in Pull Cassavetes, John, 25, 32, 41, 71 My Daisy, 25, 43, 46, 47, 48, 51, 58 Cavell, Stanley, 202n58 Creative Camera magazine, 31, 116 Central Islip State Hospital, 61 crisis structure in film, 66 Centre national de la photographie (Paris), 104 Daney, Serge, 137 C’est vrai! (One Hour) (video), Day of Paris (Kertész), 5 87–90, 138 de Antonio, Emile, 12, 91 Chaikin, Joseph, 26, 61, 62–63, 82–83 de Kooning, Willem, 6–7 Chappaqua (film), 207n1 De Maria, Walter, 93–94

216 ◆ INDEX De Quincey, Thomas, 158 Evergreen Review, 15 De Sica, Vittorio, 44 everydayness, 136, 148, 182 Deleuze, Gilles, 71, 76, 77, 109, 180 exact fantasy, 182 Delpire, Robert, 122 experimental film, 38–39, 87 Depardon, Raymond, 104–5 experimental literature, 76, 194 Deren, Maya, 87 Di Piero, W. S., 28, 86, 122–23, 191 falsifying narration, 76–77 Dilexi Foundation, 93–94 Faulkner, William, 56, 76 Dilexi Gallery, 93 Faurer, Louis, 154, 170–71 Direct Cinema, 26, 66–67, 102 Fernando (video), 201n53 discontinuity, 78–79, 80–81 “Few Notes on Spontaneous Cinema, Dr. John, 139 A” (Mekas), 34 documentary films, 24, 66–67, 94 film: authorial detachment, 91; as documentary reality, 37–38 conversational act, 103; crossing Dog Star Man (film), 87 of frontiers, 71; fiction versus Drew, Robert, 101–2 documentary, 67–71; learning to drug addicts, 68 communicate through, 190–91, Dubois, Philippe, 104–5, 116–17, 135, 206n31; literary values in, 38–39; 208n25 narration as system of judgment, Duchamp, Marcel, 39 76; photography in, 37–38; pho- Dunn, Jim, 68 tography versus, 20–22; physical reality in, 39–41; presentness in, Eggeling, Viking, 39 36–37; video versus, 23 8 mm technology, 53, 130 Film Culture magazine, 25–26, 32, Eisenstein, Sergei, 38 33, 38, 66–67 Elsaesser, Thomas, 211n19 filmstrip collages, 22 Emak-Bakia (film), 39 Fire in the East: A Portrait of Robert emotion as organizer of form, 197 Frank (film), 204n44 Engel, Morris, 34, 41, 44 “First Statement of the New Ameri- English at Home, The (Brandt), 1–3 can Cinema Group,” 33 Enright, Robert, 209n30 Fish, Nancy, 63, 80–81 Entr’acte (film), 39 Five Easy Pieces (film), 139 essay (verb), 82 Flaubert, Gustave, 76 essay film, 23–24, 81–83, 161–62, 186, Florida trip, 15–17, 47–49, 193–96 212n12 Fortune magazine, 7, 17 “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose” 400 Blows, The (film), 136–37 (Kerouac), 12–14, 19, 49 fragmentation as method, 83, 119, Evans, Walker, 6–7, 11, 17–18, 195 155, 162, 172, 181, 188

INDEX ◆ 217 Frampton, Hollis, 113, 114, 115, 208n26 laborations, 26; role of photo- Frank, Andrea (daughter): in The graphs in film, 104; words and Americans, 92; birth, 5, 95; photographs, 111–12 commemorated in The Present French New Wave, 27 (video), 142–44; in Conversations in Vermont, 27, 100, 102, 103, 107, Garzoni, Fernando, 201n53 120, 125; death in airplane crash, gaze, types of, 159–61 28, 29, 122–23, 130, 158–59 Gelber, Jack, 37, 68 Frank, Mary (née Lockspeiser, wife), George Eastman House, 124 5, 94, 96, 103, 106, 116, 120, 122, 158 Gibson, Ralph, 31 Frank, Pablo (son): in The Gibson, Ross, 82 Americans, 92; birth, 5, 95; in Gilliatt, Penelope, 68 Conversations in Vermont, 27, Ginsberg, Allen: in About Me: A 100–101, 102, 103–4, 105, 106, 107, Musical, 109; Howl, 8; influence 117, 120, 125; death from cancer, on Frank, 6–7, 11, 154, 204n44; 141–42; in Keep Busy, 158; letter Kaddish, 61; in Me and My Broth in True Story, 178–81; in Life er, 26, 62, 63, 82, 83–84; poetry Dances On . . . , 126; in Me and and photography, 52; in Pull My My Brother, 46; mental illness, Daisy, 25, 43, 46, 47, 48 28, 135–36 Godard, Jean-Luc, 23, 26, 30, 65, Frank, Robert: anger and drive, 166; 77–78, 79, 154, 163, 167 career retrospectives, 4, 138, 154, Grandrieux, Philippe, 86–87 168; conflict with Life maga- Great Depression, 17–18 zine, 6–7, 141; in Conversations Greenbaum, Marty, 126–27, 151–52, in Vermont, 96; dissatisfaction 170 with single-image approach, Greenough, Sarah, 6, 8–9, 97–98, 122 97, 195; donation of negatives, Gross, Teddy, 2 122; driving principle in work, Guattari, Félix, 109 79; family life in Switzerland, Guggenheim Fellowship, 7 4, 28; farewell to photography, 113, 116–17; journeys from home, Hague, Raoul, 154, 165–66 145, 211n19; marriages, 5 (see also haiku, 47 Frank, Mary; Leaf, June); move Halifax Infirmary (photograph), from photography to film, 19–22, plate 7, 124, 138, 145–46, 152, 156 24, 31, 92–93, 97–98; palimpsestic Halprin, Anna, 93–94 treatment of images, 157–58, 161; Hansen, Miriam Bratu, 203n32 parents’ graves in Switzerland, Harlem teenagers, 68–69 156, 164; range of work and col- Harper’s Bazaar, 5

218 ◆ INDEX Histoire(s) du cinéma (Godard), 167 jazz performance, 12–13 Holliday, Jason (née Aaron Payne), Jones, Kent, 148, 182 69–71, 76–77 journeys from home, 145, 211n19 Home Improvements (video): circumstances surrounding Kaddish (Ginsberg), 61, 82 production of, 121–24, 125; as Kane, Daniel, 81 diary, 132–33; Frank’s voice-over, Kaprow, Allan, 26 60; as part of trilogy, 29; as self- Keep Busy (film), 158–59 portrait, 23, 26; stills from, 133, Kerouac, Jack: awakening the eye, 137; the work, 131–36, 145, 151, 157, 17, 195–96; Beat Generation, 25, 171 43; on fame, 122, 171; Florida trip, Home Is Where the Heart Is (film), 15–17, 47–49, 193–96; Frank’s prac- 207n1 tice, 18; grave, 164–65; influence home movies, 52–55 on Frank, 2, 6–7, 26; introduction Hope Freaks, The, 109 to The Americans, 11–19, 47–49, Howl (Ginsberg), 8 197, 200n24; voice-over for Pull Hunger Show, 102–3 My Daisy, 25, 43–44, 45–46, 49, hunger strikers, 102–3, 117–18 51, 53–54, 57–60, 186 Hunter (film), 138, 211n18 Kertész, André, 5 hustler, 69–71 Kiarostami, Abbas, 191–92 kino-eye method, 1 images: investment in and under- Kline, Franz, 6–7 mining of, 24; reconfiguration of, Kovács, András Bálint, 78–79, 80, as writing, 24 205n20 improvisation in film, 41–42 KQED TV, 93–94 “In a Station of the Metro” (Pound), Kracauer, Siegfried, 39–42, 49–50, 196–97 203n32 Independent Film Awards, 33 involuted structure, 158 La Sept, 138 Israel, Laura, 140 Last Detail, The (film), 139 Italian Neorealists, 38, 41, 44, 69 Last Supper (film), 138, 211n18 Lawson, Mr., 124, 152 Jagger, Mick, 119 Leacock, Richard, 42, 66, 67, 70, 91, James, David E., 113 101–2 Jameson, Fredric, 210n8 Leaf, June (wife): in Frank’s work, 3, Jarmusch, Jim, 206n36, 206n38, 92, 122, 127, 147; illness, 132, 135; 209n30 influence on Frank, 154; as sculp- jazz musicians, 68 tor, 158, 159, 160, 169

INDEX ◆ 219 Lee, Carl, 69, 70, 71 Maas, Willard, 41 Léger, Fernand, 39 Mabou (Cape Breton Island, Nova Lennon, John, 56 Scotia), 121, 122, 196 Les années déclic (film), 104–5 Mabou (diptych), plate 5, 98–99, 112 Leslie, Alfred, 25, 43, 44, 52 Mabou, Nova Scotia, plate 6, 112, 117 Let Us Now Praise Famous Men Mabou Winter Footage, plate 1 (Agee/Evans), 17–18 Macartney-Filgate, Terence, 66 Letter from Siberia (film), 56–57 MacMillan, Bobby, 185–86, 189 Levitt, Helen, 41 MacNeil, Rita, 139 Lhamon Jr., W. T., 11 Malraux, André, 56 Life Dances On . . . (film), 26, 29, Mamber, Stephen, 66 60, 125–31, 145, 170–71; stills from, Man with a Movie Camera (film), 1 128, 129 Manhattan street life photographs, Life magazine, 4, 6–7, 15, 141 plates 4a and 4b, 97–98 Liferaft Earth (film), 26, 91, 102–3, Marcus, Greil, 144 117–18, 119 Marker, Chris, 23, 29, 56–57, 153–54, Lines of My Hand, The (Frank), 1–3, 162, 163, 188, 190, 206n28 21–22, 107, 160–61, 171 Markopoulos, Gregory, 206n36 literary values in filmmaking, 38–39 Married Woman, A, (film), 77 Little Fugitive; Lovers and Lollipops; Marshall, Mr., 181 Weddings and Babies (film trilo- Martin, Adrian, 82 gy), 44–45 Maysles, Albert and David, 66, 67, Living Theatre, 37 101–2 Lockspeiser, Mary. See Frank, Mary McClellanville, 195 London bankers, 6 Me and My Brother (film): back- London to New York (photograph), ground, 26–27, 61–63; disconti- plate 6, 112 nuity, 78–79, 80–81; documentary London/Wales (Frank), 6, 199n9 and fictional elements in, 65; as Look magazine, 4 essay film, 81–83; Frank as film- Looking In: Robert Frank’s “The maker in, 91, 103; Frank’s engage- Americans” (exhibition), 210n1 ment with Julius Orlovsky, 76–77, Lorre, Peter, 159, 161 78, 90; Frank’s intention, 64, 65, Lost Lost Lost (film), 24, 100 72; Frank’s treatment of photo- Loud Song, A, (Seymour), 128–29 graphs, 157; influences on, 66–67, Luce, Henry Robinson, 4 71, 72; relationship to Kaddish, 61, Lumière, August and Louis, 38, 40 82; sequences in, 65–66, 72–75, Lye, Len, 39 80–81, 169; stills from, 62, 63, 74, Lyon, Danny, 26, 31, 118 75; structural complexity, 77

220 ◆ INDEX Mead, Taylor, 88–89, 206n36 108–9; anthropological role of, Mekas, Adolfas, 206n36 109; in Conversations in Vermont, Mekas, Jonas: background, 32–33; 107–8 essay film, 24, 100, 203n32; filmic My Father’s Coat N.Y.C. (photo- and written diaries, 133–34; Me graph), 188 and My Brother, 63–64; on New Myles, Eileen, 59 American Cinema, 34; Pull My Daisy, 37–38, 42, 54; Shadows, Nagy, Kismet, 169 41–42 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 191–92 melancholic disposition, 177–78, 183, Napa State Hospital, 83 192–93 National Film Preservation Board, memorabilia, 28 26 memory and media, 153, 155–56, 180, National Gallery of Art (Washing- 183 ton, D.C.), 138, 154, 168, 210n1 Memory for the Children (collage Neel, Alice, 25, 43 photograph), 187–88 Nelson, Robert, 94 Men of Air, New York (photograph), Neorealists, 38, 41, 44, 69 100–101 Neuf journal, 174–75 Meyers, Sidney, 34, 41, 44 New American Cinema, 26, 33, 39, Miller, Warren, 68 41, 52, 56 modern art, 39, 40 New American Cinema Group, 33 More, Thomas, 117 New Novel, 76 Moriarty, Dean, 165 New Order, 138 Moses, Gunther, 121, 150–51, 157 New York, 97, 170–71 Motomura, Kazuhiko, 171 “New York Letter” (Frank), 116 motorial reaction, 178 Nield, Freddy, 2 Moving Pictures (video): corpus as Night and Fog (film), 56–57 mosaic, 167–68; as essay film, Night in London, A (Brandt), 5 161–62; Frank’s intention, 155–56, Nixon, Richard, 166 168–69; and incompleteness, 155, (nostalgia) (film), 113–17 162, 168; the listening eye, 161–63; NYC Bus, plates 4a and 4b as self-portrait, 23; stills from, 160, 164, 165; time’s deformations, O’Connor, Flannery, 117 164–67; the work, 138, 154–55, 157, O’Connor, Kevin, 87 158; as written, 155 OK, End Here (film), 64, 93 Müller, Jan, 2 Olson, Charles, 35–36 Museum of Modern Art, 122 On the Road (Kerouac), 12, 165, music: in About Me: A Musical, 200n24

INDEX ◆ 221 “On the Road to Florida” (Frank/ physical reality, 39–41 Kerouac), 15–17 Picabia, Francis, 39 One Hour (video), 87–90, 138 Pierrot le fou (film), 65 O’Neill, Shane, 2 Poe, Edgar Allan, 49–50, 181, 182–83 Ono, Yoko, 56 poetry and poets, 19, 46, 52 Orlovsky, Julius: disappearance Polaroid Land 196 camera, 112 from set, 62, 72, 83; in Me and My Polaroid photographs, 27–28, 124, Brother, 26, 61–63, 74, 75, 76–77, 138, 177, 187 84, 85; view of film, 83–85, 86, 186 Political Rally—Chicago (photo- Orlovsky, Peter: in About Me: A Mu graph), plate 6, 112 sical, 109; in Me and My Broth portable tape recorders, 102 er, 26, 61–63, 84; in One Hour, Portrait of Jason (film), 27, 68, 89–90, 206n38; in Pull My Daisy, 69–71, 76–77 25, 43, 48, 51 Pound, Ezra, 196–97 Present, The (video): erasing mem- Paddy from 23rd Street, 2 ory, 149–50; Frank’s method, 182; Paisà (film), 44–45 Frank’s voice-over, 60; as part Paper Route (video), 26, 185–87, 189, of trilogy, 125; the passages of 191–92, 193, 194, 196 thought, 147–48; as self-portrait, Paris Theatre, 32 23, 26, 29; stills from, 143, 144, 149, Paris trip, 5, 174 150; time is out of joint, 145–47; Parker, Denise, 43 the work, 140–44 Payne, Aaron. See Holliday, Jason Primary (film), 66–67, 101–2 Pennebaker, D. A., 66, 67, 70, 91, principle of personal expression, 33 101–2 principle of striving for presentness, Pensky, Max, 177–78 36–37 “People You Don’t See” (Frank), 6 “Projective Verse” (Olson), 35–36 Perrault, Pierre, 71 Proust, Marcel, 54, 76 Peru trip, 5, 154, 174–76 Pull My Daisy (film): as adaptation, Peterson, Sidney, 41 43; circumstances surrounding photobooks, 1–3, 5. See also The production of, 25–26, 31–32; Americans environmental life in, 50–51; from photography: in film, 37–38; film as eye to ear, 55–60; first public extension of, 39–41; film versus, screening, 32; as home movie, 20–22, 98–99; for magazines, 5; 53–55; Kerouac’s voice-over for, as object, 168–69; paper qualities, 25, 43–44, 45–46, 49, 51, 53–54, 124; poetry and, 52; writing and, 57–60, 186; as landmark cinema, 3–4, 14–17, 20–22, 47–49, 156 42–43, 67; sequences in, 44–45,

222 ◆ INDEX 51–52; as silent film, 43–44; as Romney, Hugh, 102 spontaneous cinema, 34, 37–38; Rooks, Conrad, 207n1 statement of intent, 44; stills Rosenbaum, Jonathan, 87 from, 47, 48, 50, 51, 58, 59 Rosenberg, Harold, 35 Rossellini, Roberto, 38, 44 Quiet One, The (film), 44–45 Rouch, Jean, 71, 90 Rovner, Michal, 87 radical discontinuity, 79 Royal typewriter, 181 Rainer, Yvonne, 93–94 Run (music video), 138 Rancière, Jacques, 167 Russian cinema, postrevolution, 38 “Raven, The” (Poe), 182–83 Ruttmann, Walter, 39 Ray, Man, 39 recording synchronous sound, 102 Saint-Exupéry, Antoine de, 5 Redbone, Leon, 139 San Francisco Renaissance Group, Redfield, William, 68 46–47 Renov, Michael, 23–24 Sanders, Denis and Terry, 34 Resnais, Alain, 56–57 Sante, Luc, 12 Reyner, Lynn, 108 San-Yu, 2 Rice, Bill, 88–89, 206n36 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 55, 56, 104 Rice, Ron, 41, 206n36 schizophrenia, 72–73 Richards, Keith, 119 Schlossberg, Edwin, 94 Richter, Hans, 38–39, 41, 81–82 Schuh, Gotthard, 2 Riley, Terry, 93–94 Schultz, Ben, 2 Rivers, Larry, 25, 43, 50 Serialism, 79, 80 road as structuring device, 10 Seymour, Danny, 2, 122, 125, 128–29, road movies, 139 130, 207n1, 209n31 Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 76, 77 Seyrig, Delphine, 43 Robert Frank: London/Wales (exhi- Shadows (film), 25, 32, 34, 37–38, bition), 6, 199n9 41–42, 67 Robert Frank: Moving Out (retro- Shoeshine (film), 44–45 spective), 138, 154, 168 Sick of Goodby’s (photograph), Robert Frank: Storylines (retrospec- 28–29 tive), 4, 168 silent cinema, 53–54 Rodowick, D. N., 30 Silk, Elmore, 139–40 Rogosin, Lionel, 34, 41 Sin of Jesus, The (film), 64 Rolling Stones, The, 26, 118–20, Sitney, P. Adams, 56 209n31 16 mm technology, 23, 53, 56 Rome, Open City (film), 44–45 Smith, Bessie, 94

INDEX ◆ 223 Smith, Harry, 26, 154, 164, 165, 166 time: contemporaneity of past with Smith, Patti, 26 present, 180; as medium and as Snow, Michael, 87, 208n26 force of ruination, 195; passage of, southern farmers during Great 21; temporal experience central Depression, 17–18 to cinema, 53–54, 188; temporal spontaneous cinema, 34–35 nature of perception, 49 Spontaneous Prose, 12–14, 19, 49, “Time and how to note it down” 57–60 (Williams), 60 Steichen, Edward, 6 time’s deformations, 164–67 Stein, Gertrude, 206n36 Todoli, Vicente, 168 Stewart, Garrett, 113, 161 tragedy in film, 40 stilled image, 136–38 transformation of outward thing to Stimson, Blake, 9–10 inward thing, 196–97 Story A Story B (collage photo- True Story (video); allegorical graph), 187–88 method, 171–74, 208n25; direct- structural film, 113 to-camera monologue, 169–70; Strummer, Joe, 139 Frank’s melancholic disposition, Suárez, Juan A., 17–18 177–78; interplay of media and Sulzer, Stanley, 2 memory, 153, 154–55; making Sunless (film), 29, 153–54, 162, 163, a mess, 181–83; Pablo’s letter, 206n28 178–81; paratactic narration in, Super 8 film, 21 170; as self-portrait, 23, 167–68; Szarkowski, John, 7–8, 122 stills from, 172–75, 179, 180; treatment of photographs, 157; the Tate Modern, 4, 168 tree in, 176–78 Taubin, Amy, 100 Truffaut, François, 136–37 Taylor, Mick, 119 Tucker, Anne Wilkes, 204n44 television project, 86–87 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her Texas state prison, 110 (film), 65, 77–78 Theory of Film: The Redemption Two-Lane Blacktop (film), 139 of Physical Reality (Kracauer), 39–42, 49–50 Ulysse (film), 105 35 mm Leica camera, 7, 31 Untitled (perforated photographs), This Film Is About . . . (film), 201n53 plate 8, 151 This Song for Jack (film), 26 U.S. 90, en route to Del Rio, Texas, Thompson, Bob, 2 plate 3 thought: expression of, 56; thinking U.S. tour with Rolling Stones, in fragments, 162 118–20

224 ◆ INDEX U.S. trip, 7–11, 145 Williams, William Carlos, 19, 60 utopia versus no place, 117 Window Water Baby Moving (film), 52–53 Varda, Agnès, 23, 104–5 Wise Blood (O’Connor), 117 Vertov, Dziga, 1 Wiseman, Frederick, 66 video experiments, 131–32 writing: diary versus autobiography, video stilled, 136–38 132–33; experimental literature, video versus film, 23 76, 194; experimentation be- Visions of Cody (Kerouac), 13–14 tween media, 124–25; filmic and Vogel, Amos, 32 written diaries, 133–34; interme- voice-over, 56–57, 100, 145, 186 dial writing, 21; literary values in filmmaking, 38–39; literature and Waits, Tom, 26 language, 163; photography and, Walden (film), 52–53, 56, 100, 134 3–4, 14–17, 20–22, 47–49, 156; as Walken, Christopher, 27, 63 reconfiguration of image, 24; two Warhol, Andy, 77, 93–94, 206n36 strands of thought, 55–56. See Wedlock House: An Intercourse also Spontaneous Prose (film), 52–53 Wurlitzer, Rudy, 26, 138 Weinrich, Regina, 13 Wellesley College 1977 symposium Yeager, Paul, 204n44 on photography, 19–21, 92 Yuiji, 149–50, 151 Welsh mining communities, 6 “Wichita Vortex Sutra” (Ginsberg), Zappa, Frank, 93–94 82, 206n29 Zukofsky, Louis, 19 Wiley, William T., 94 Zyrd, Werner, 5, 146

INDEX ◆ 225 George Kouvaros is professor of film studies in the School of the Arts and Media at the University of New South Wales. He is author of Where Does It Happen? John Cassavetes and Cinema at the Breaking Point and Famous Faces Yet Not Themselves: “The Misfits” and Icons of Postwar America, both from the University of Minnesota Press. PLATE 1. Mabou Winter Footage, 1977. Copyright Robert Frank. PLATE 2. Brattleboro, Vermont, 1979. Copyright Robert Frank. PLATE 3. U. S. 90, en route to Del Rio, Texas, 1955. Copyright Robert Frank, from The Americans. PLATE 4a. NYC Bus, 1958. Copyright Robert Frank. PLATE 4b. NYC Bus, 1958. Copyright Robert Frank. PLATE 5. Mabou, 1971. Copyright Robert Frank.

PLATE 6. Mabou, Nova Scotia, 1977. Copyright Robert Frank. PLATE 7. Halifax In�rmary, 1978. Copyright Robert Frank. PLATE 8. Untitled, 1989. Copyright Robert Frank.