Provincetown. 1958. USA. Directed by Robert Frank. DCP. 12 min. Silent.
Robert Frank’s unfinished first film offers a sense of his freewheeling style, an important aspect of his turn from photography to cinema, and a glimpse of his circle of family and friends in 1958 as they cavort on the dunes of Cape Cod in a playful Maya Deren–like psychodrama.
Keep Busy. 1975. USA. Directed by Robert Frank, Rudy Wurlitzer. With June Leaf, Joanne Akalaitis, Richard Serra, Joan Jonas. 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.
Herman Melville meets Gertrude Stein in this sea shanty set in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, where JoAnne Akalaitis, Joan Jonas, Richard Serra, June Leaf, and other artist and musician friends make mischief and make meaning at the edge of the world. Robert Frank was fond of Keep Busy, observing, “It has a certain disaster and disorder and chaotic-ness and insanity. Everything is upside down.”
Home Improvements. 1985. USA. Directed by Robert Frank. With Robert Frank, June Leaf, Pablo Frank, Gunther Moses. DCP. World premiere of new digital remaster by The Museum of Modern Art. 29 min.
Shot for virtually nothing on a Sony Portapak during the winter of 1983–84, Robert Frank’s first video is also one of his most deceptively complex works, as the artist coped with his son Pablo’s mental illness, his wife June Leaf’s treatment for cancer, and the starkly different worlds of New York and Nova Scotia. “I think the winter taught me much more because I had to cope with nature,” he once observed. “It can be very cruel. You know it’s bigger than you, so you are happy to be able to burn wood, to keep warm and when the storm is over and the sun comes up, then you feel good. There’s no feeling good like that in New York; it just doesn’t exist.”
Program approx. 71 min.