U B U W E B - Film & Video: Robert Frank

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Robert Frank (b. 1924)

Pull My Daisy
Directed by Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie
1959, 26 min

(From Wikipedia Entry: Pull My Daisy)

A short film that typifies the Beat Generation. Directed by Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie, Daisy was adapted by Jack Kerouac from the third act of a stage play he never finished entitled Beat Generation. Kerouac also provided improvised narration. It starred Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Larry Rivers, Peter Orlovsky, David Amram, Richard Bellamy, Alice Neel, Sally Gross and Pablo Frank, Robert Frank's then-infant son.

Based on an incident in the life of Neal Cassady and his wife Carolyn, Daisy tells the story of a railway brakeman whose painter wife invites a respectable bishop over for dinner. However, the brakeman's bohemian friends crash the party, with comic results.

The Beat philosophy emphasized spontaneity, and the film conveyed the quality of having been thrown together or even improvised. Pull My Daisy was accordingly praised for years as an improvisational masterpiece, until Leslie revealed in a November 28, 1968 article in the Village Voice that the film was actually carefully planned, rehearsed, and directed by him and Frank, who shot the film on a professionally lit studio set.

Pull My Daisy has been deemed "culturally significant" by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry.

Me and My Brother (1969)

Me and My Brother
by Ed Halter
Village Voice, November 7th, 2006

A heady intermingling of documentary and fiction, photographer Robert Frank's first feature (finished in 1969, then re-edited by Frank in 1997) focuses on poet Peter Orlovsky's schizophrenic brother Julius, portrayed at first in person via footage of the siblings in New York and touring the country with Allen Ginsberg, then entwined with re-enacted scenarios of actors playing the brothers and their acquaintances. Taking it a few notches more meta, the director also includes scenes of himself casting the actor who will play Julius‹only Frank is portrayed by a smooth-faced, young Christopher Walken. Peppered with smudgy urban boho romps and psycho-philosophical musings, the film fits squarely between Frank's Pull My Daisy and the painfully truthful revelations of his later video diaries. For despite its hypercubic narrative and high-modernist reflexivity, Me and My Brother offers a tangibly emotional experience as it struggles poignantly with the limits of understanding another person's mind.

Energy And How To Get It (1981)

Director: Robert Frank
Writer: Rudy Wurlitzer
With: William S. Burroughs
Dr. John
Allan Moyle
Runtime: 28 min Country: USA
Language: English
Color: Black and White

This quasi- documentary film explores the life and trials of Robert Golka, an obsessed and "outsider" inventor struggling to create an energy source from atomic fusion that would seem to play into the perpetual motion model. What begins as a portrait and document slips into questionable territory as scenes imply that the government has learned of his inventions and is trying to shut his operation down. Paranoia or a genuine threat? The closer Golka comes to his eureka, the more difficulties he has sustaining his operation. A smart, beautiful and funny film from renowned photographer Robert Frank, best known for his book The Americans and his involvement with Ginsberg, Kerouac and others of the Beat movement.

RESOURCES:

Robert Frank: Wikipedia Entry