Moving Pictures. 1994. USA. Directed by Robert Frank. DCP. World premiere of new digital remaster by The Museum of Modern Art. 17 min. Silent.
“Today memory creeps along the wall at Seven Bleecker. In the back of my eyes, longings and obsessions, Outside someone is yelling Robert! I love New York….” Robert Frank looks back on a lifetime of memory-gathering through photographs, home movies (his parents’ gravesite, June Leaf making art), portraits of artist friends (Raoul Hague, Allen Ginsberg), and portraits of those he admired (Jean-Luc Godard). The film resembles one of Gregory Corso’s “shuffle poems,” as Frank muses, “Together go words and images without sound. I have an obsession in my life for Fragments which reveal and hide truth.”
Flamingo. 1996. USA. Directed by Robert Frank. Narrated by Miranda Dali. DCP. World premiere of new digital remaster by The Museum of Modern Art. 5 min.
Robert Frank keeps busy by building a new foundation for his Cape Breton house…and for his art.
Paper Route. 2002. USA. Directed by Robert Frank. With Bobby MacMillan. DCP. World premiere of new digital remaster by The Museum of Modern Art. 23 min.
Neither snow nor rain nor gloom of daybreak stays Bobby MacMillan from the swift completion of his appointed rounds. On March 5, 2002, with Robert Frank riding shotgun, MacMillan delivered the Herald Tribune to some 158 customers in Mabou, Nova Scotia. This daily ritual of bringing the news of the world to an isolated community, with its cyclical rhythms of departure and return from the harbor to the coal mines, is a relic of a time when neighbors cared enough to know each other by their first names. Indeed, MacMillan’s habit of naming all the locals seems to have a Homeric quality to it, like the cataloging of the ships in the Iliad.
True Story. 2004. USA. Directed by Robert Frank. DCP. World premiere of new digital remaster by The Museum of Modern Art. 26 min.
“Tell the truth and shame the devil”: Robert Frank had turned 80 when he set out to make True Story, repurposing still photographs, home movies, and excerpts of completed films to reflect on memory and resilience. Moments of delight (a lobster claw and wiggling toes silhouetted against the sky) brush against moments of melancholy (the camera drifting across one of his son Pablo’s tortured collage letters written in microscript: “He wanted to say everything, he wanted to get rid of his loneliness…”); an inventory of enfeeblement (“swollen toes, nails falling out, gum disease, itching, irregular heartbeat”) gives way to an image of steadfastness (the crotch of a old tree stump propping up another tree).
Program approx. 71 min.