I Remember. 1998. USA. Directed by Robert Frank. With Frank, June Leaf, Jerome Sother. DCP. World premiere of new digital remaster by The Museum of Modern Art. 7 min.
Dedicated from one great photographer to another, I Remember reenacts an afternoon spent with Alfred Steiglitz. Robert Frank plays Steiglitz, Frank is played by the artist Jerome Souther, and Frank’s artist wife June Leaf plays Steiglitz’s own artist wife Georgia O’Keeffe (the two women bear an uncanny resemblance). Together, the three share in simple domestic pleasures, the “hospitality, the wood stove in the kitchen, chicken for lunch, Steiglitz waiting for the sun to appear through the clouds.”
Sanyu. 2000. Switzerland/USA. Directed by Robert Frank. With Sanyu, Frank, Nikolai Boldaïen. 35mm courtesy June Leaf and Robert Frank Foundation, distributed by The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. 27 min.
Robert Frank remembers Sanyu, a painter whom he befriended when they exchanged studios and who died lonely and penniless in Paris in 1966 at the age of 71. Frank travels to Taiwan for an auction of Sanyu’s work without a clear idea of the film he will make but, he observes, “Usually by intuition a small idea will start rolling like a snowball on a Swiss mountain.” Art, commerce, and the true meaning of friendship are never far from his mind.
Fernando. 2008. USA. Directed by Robert Frank. DCP. World premiere of new digital remaster by The Museum of Modern Art. 12 min. Silent.
Robert Frank cared deeply about his friends and family, dedicating many of his photographs and films to them. This, the last video he completed in his lifetime, is a memento mori of his Swiss artist friend Fernando Garzoni: a watercolor, a glass of champagne, a handful of snapshots, a visit to a Jacques-Henri Lartigue show, a walk in the woods, a shy smile.
Harry Smith at the Breslin Hotel 1984. 2017. USA. Directed by Robert Frank. DCP. World premiere of new digital remaster by The Museum of Modern Art. 11 min.
Robert Frank’s unfinished video, completed in 2017, uniquely captures Harry Smith in his natural habitat: the Breslin Hotel apartment from which he was being evicted, and which teemed with the most extraordinary, and extraordinarily eclectic, collection of vinyl records, painted Russian eggs, nudie photos, string figures, tantric diagrams, reference books, his own paintings, and other precious esoterica.
Ginsberg/Corso Tapes. 1984. USA. Directed by Robert Frank. With Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso. DCP. World premiere of new digital remaster by The Museum of Modern Art. 19 min.
Longtime friends and frequent foils, Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso appeared onstage together countless times over the years, reading to audiences that sometimes numbered in the hundreds or thousands. On January 9, 1984, Robert Frank filmed Ginsberg reading his poem “White Shroud,” while Corso read a poem he had written the night before, some turgid verses on priapic preoccupations.
Program approx. 76 min.