Tunnel. 2008. USA. Directed by Robert Frank. DCP. World premiere of new digital remaster by The Museum of Modern Art. 4 min.
Commissioned for an event commemorating the ongoing construction of a 21-mile tunnel through the Swiss Alps, Robert Frank’s experimental short is as terse and unflinching as a Dziga Vertov newsreel, superimposing images of his wife, the artist June Leaf, at work and at play with the emotionless felling of a farm cow.
Fire in the East: A Portrait of Robert Frank. 1986. USA. Directed by Amy Brookman, Philip Brookman. DCP courtesy The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. 28 min.
Famously elusive and playful when the camera was turned on him, Robert Frank would in precious and vulnerable moments (and with a glint in his eye) reveal something surprising about his work and his way of moving through the world. Fire in the East is the first of several film portraits in this retrospective—portraits that were made across several decades—and features encounters with the poet Allen Ginsberg; the photographers Elliott Erwitt, Louis Faurer, and Duane Michals; the filmmakers Rudy Wurlitzer and Emile de Antonio; and Frank’s wife, the artist June Leaf, who touchingly observes of him that “he goes through life in this wonderful secret way, in the water, under the water. And things just come to him. So he’s like a fish, a beautiful fish in the dark, lighting up the water.’’
Robert Frank in Conversation with Clark Winter: 10 Films. 2024. USA/Canada. Directed by Clark Winter. DCP. 26 min.
An artist in his own right, Clark Winter captured the intimacy of his longtime friendships with Robert Frank and June Leaf in a series of videos shot over nearly 30 years in New York and Nova Scotia. These are a precious record of the married couple’s seemingly inseparable—yet resolutely independent—home and work lives. Today, Winter serves as one of only three board members of the June Leaf and Robert Frank Foundation.
June in the Studio. 2012. USA/Canada. Directed by Clark Winter. DCP. 8 min.
Rarely a day passed when June Leaf wasn’t working in her studio….
I’m Still Dancing. 2024. USA. Directed by Alice Attie. DCP. 10 min.
A cherished friend of Robert Frank and June Leaf, Alice Attie spent 15 years documenting Leaf as she worked on intricate metal sculptures and drawings in her studio. Attie now serves on the board of the June Leaf and Robert Frank Foundation.
Hunter. 1989. West Germany. Directed by Robert Frank. Screenplay by Stephan Balint. With Balint, Gunter Burchet. 16mm. In German, English and Turkish; English subtitles. 36 min.
Shot only months before the Berlin Wall came down, Hunter captures the tensions between old and new Germany, as Robert Frank observes the heavily industrialized Ruhr region through a provocative combination of fictional and nonfictional means. The Swiss-born emigré, who escaped this sort of life to come to America, contrasts the “volk” spirit of a woman who sells cheap Hitler and Elvis busts with the struggle of newly arrived Turkish immigrants. Based on a script by Istvan Balint (an actor in Raul Ruiz’s Golden Boat and Chantal Akerman’s American Stories), Hunter is, in Franks own words, “[about] a man whose destiny is not to find a destination…. A man who fears that he will never find what his imagination compels him to look for, a mystical traveler going by train and by car through…language and landscape.”
Program approx. 104 min.