Conversations in Vermont. 1969. USA. Directed by Robert Frank. With Robert Frank, Pablo Frank, Andrea Frank, Mary Frank. 4K digital restoration of the original version by The Museum of Modern Art. Funding provided by the Celeste Bartos Fund for Film Preservation. 26 min.
Robert Frank stages his own family intervention, questioning his responsibilities and shortcomings as both a divorced father and an itinerant artist through a series of searching encounters with his teenage children Andrea and Pablo. Leafing through old photos and contact sheets as well as film footage from his unrealized film Provincetown, Frank engages with Andrea and Pablo in perhaps the only way he knows how: through a camera. “Maybe this is a film about growing older,” he muses in voiceover. “Anyhow it’s about the past and the present. It’s some kind of a family album.” His voice trailing off, he resignedly observes, “I don’t know, it’s about…”.
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, his 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 in such tender and fugitive images, would die by suicide in 1994.
This Song for Jack. 1983. USA. Directed by Robert Frank. With Allen Ginsberg, David Amram, William Burroughs, Lawrence Ferlinghetti. 16mm. 30 min.
In 1982, Robert Frank was on hand at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, to film the Jack Kerouac Conference, a 25th-anniversary commemoration of On the Road in which poignantly aging Beats and fellow-traveling authors, activists, and composers (Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Michael McClure, Herbert Huncke, Anne Waldman, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Ken Kesey, Abbie Hoffman, David Amram) gathered on a rain-swept Chautauqua porch to recite poetry and raise a glass to their patron saint. Particularly memorable is Frank’s humorous encounter with a group of grizzled and well-lubricated onlookers.
Program approx. 86 min.