Rolling Stones Super 8 Footage. 1972. USA. Directed by Robert Frank. DCP. World premiere of new digital remaster by The Museum of Modern Art. Silent. 8 min.
Invited to shoot the cover for their 1972 album Exile on Main St., Robert Frank developed a relationship with the Rolling Stones that extended beyond Cocksucker Blues to include this Super 8 short, a jittery montage of the band slumming on Skid Row in downtown Los Angeles and gadding about in Mick Jagger’s rented Bel-Air mansion that Frank wryly contrasted with images of poor Black street buskers on the Bowery. Graphic designer John Van Hamersveld ended up using still images and film strips from the Super 8 footage to create collages for the album’s back cover and inner sleeves; the original material is on view in the exhibition Life Dances On.
Chappaqua. 1966. USA. Written and directed by Conrad Rooks. Cinematography by Robert Frank. With Jean Louis Barrault, William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Swami Satchidananda, Ornette Colman. 35mm. 82 min.
Robert Frank indulged the trust-fund fantasies of 32-year-old Avon cosmetics scion Conrad Hooks by shooting his drug-and-alcohol infused ego trip from the Indian ashrams to a drunk-tank sanatorium outside Paris. Psychedelic cinema has its partisans—your mind orbits to the trippy mandala films of Jordan Belson and Godfrey Reggio’s Qatsi trilogy (scored by Philip Glass, who also had a hand in Chappaqua)—and certainly Jean-Louis Barrault (Children of Paradise), Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Moodog, and Ravi Shankar give their all to advance the cause. Look for a special appearance by Swami Sathidanana, the yogi who used Rooks’s and artist Peter Max’s money to set up shop in upstate New York, flying by helicopter to deliver the opening address at the Woodstock music festival.