O.K. End Here. 1963. USA. Directed by Robert Frank. Screenplay by Gert Berliner. With Martin LaSalle, Sue Ungaro (Mingus), Sudie Bond, Anita Ellis, Joseph Bird. 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.
Robert Frank’s O.K. End Here, which premiered at the first-ever New York Film Festival, is a brutalist portrait of marital loneliness that borrows heavily from Ingmar Bergman, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Jean-Luc Godard. Sue Ungaro (soon Sue Mingus, after her marriage to the jazz musician Charlie Mingus) is the American woman who pines for a child of her own; Martin LaSalle, the French-Uruguayan actor who first appeared in Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket, is the photographer who seems anxious to step out for a pack of cigarettes and never look back.
Last Supper. 1992. Switzerland/USA. Directed by Robert Frank. With Zohra Lampert, Bill Youmans, Bill Rice, Taylor Mead, John Larkin, Odessa Taft. 16mm. 52 min.
Robert Frank’s droll stab at Beckettian comedy involves a book party for an author who never shows up. Shot in an abandoned lot in Harlem, the film straddles two worlds: a social climbing set from downtown Manhattan (actors whom Frank shoots in 16mm) and Blacks and Dominicans from the neighborhood (locals he observes in handheld video). But who, really, are the haves and who the have-nots? Zorah Lampert, a fine film and stage actress who worked with Elia Kazan, Sidney Lumet, and John Cassavetes, heads a cast that also includes Andy Warhol regular Taylor Mead and Richard Boes, an actor best known for his appearances in Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger than Paradise, Down by Law, and Night on Earth.