On November 22 Laura Israel and Alex Bingham, the creators of Robert Frank’s Scrapbook Footage, join with Dean Hurley, a sound designer best known for his collaborations with David Lynch, to discuss Frank’s creative process as well as their own. Their installation bridges the worlds of Frank’s artistic production: the gallery, the cinema, and the printed page. It serves as a vital link between the exhibition Life Dances On: Robert Frank in Dialogue, its accompanying catalogue, and our complete retrospective of Frank’s films and videos, many newly preserved by MoMA in celebration of the artist’s gift in 2015 of all his moving-image work. Moderated by MoMA curators Joshua Siegel, Lucy Gallun, and Kaitlin Booher, the conversation also features a premiere screening of Life Dances On (1980) in a new digital restoration.
Discovered over the past decade in film canisters and on videotapes tucked away in dusty storage places were Robert Frank’s inchoate observations of the world and his place in it, scraps of ideas and stirrings of art that only now have been brought to light. These fragments offer glimpses of Frank’s home life and work life—the two were often indistinguishable—drawn from unpublished material preserved in the archives of the June Leaf and Robert Frank Foundation. Like many artists, Frank collected his memories, thoughts, and feelings in notebooks and scrapbooks. This impressionistic collage of images and words gave shape to his imagination and gave rise to ideas for books, exhibitions, and movies.
Life Dances On. 1980. USA. Directed by Robert Frank. Cinematography by Danny Seymour. With Pablo Frank, Sandy Strawbridge, June Leaf, Marty Greenbaum, Finley Fryer. 4K digital restoration of the original version by The Museum of Modern Art. Funding provided by the Celeste Bartos Fund for Film Preservation. 30 min.
One of Robert Frank’s most heartbreaking autobiographical films, Life Dances On is, like so much of his still photography, a reckoning with death. In 1972, not long after they had worked on Cocksucker Blues, his friend Danny Seymour mysteriously disappeared while setting sail from Colombia. (Frank, who was like a second father to Seymour, shot two of his films, Home Is Where the Heart Is and That’s Alright, Mama). Two years later, in 1974, Frank’s daughter Andrea died in a plane crash in Guatemala. Watching the film today, the pathos—or “vicious hindsight,” as one passerby laments in It’s Real —deepens even further, knowing as we do that Frank’s son Pablo, seen here in such tender and fugitive images, would die by suicide in 1994.