Me and My Brother. 1965-68. USA. Directed by Robert Frank. Screenplay by Frank, Sam Shepard. With Julius Orlovsky, Peter Orlovsky, John Coe, Allen Ginsberg, Christopher Walken. 4K digital restoration of the original version by The Museum of Modern Art. Funding provided by The Celeste Bartos Fund for Film Preservation. 91 min.
A faux vérité involving Allen Ginsberg, Joseph Chaikin (founder of the off-Broadway Open Theater company), Peter Orlovsky, and his catatonic schizophrenic brother Julius, Me and My Brother is an important documentary record of bohemian artist life in 1960s New York; a tender portrait of friends; and a thoughtful interrogation of the artist’s own divided loyalties between work and family. It also reveals Frank’s fascination with the malleability of truth, in setting up conditions for improvisation within a scripted or premeditated framework, which would be developed even further in his notorious Cocksucker Blues (1972) and his end-of-the-road movie Candy Mountain (1987), a collaboration with the writer-director Rudy Wurlitzer.
preceded by
Summer Cannibals. 1996. USA. Directed by Robert Frank. With Patti Smith. DCP. World premiere of new digital remaster by The Museum of Modern Art. 4 min.
In this punkish, puckish music video for a song from Patti Smith’s 1996 album Gone Again, Frank borrows Catholic signifiers from past films like Sin of Jesus and Last Supper, including a kitsch rendering of Jesus and his apostles, a Caravaggesque closeup of Smith’s naked, dirty foot, and a discarded rosary. The producer of Summer Cannibals, Michael Schamberg, was a persuasive guy with consummate good taste, having also recruited Chris Marker, Kathryn Bigelow, Jonathan Demme, Robert Longo, and William Wegman to work on various music videos for New Order, R.E.M., Grace Jones, Talking Heads, and the B-52’s.