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Robert Frank Collection now available for Prebook |
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The complete film works by American photographer and filmmaker Robert Frank is being release on June 1st. Prebook the titles now.
$US 125.00 SRP/ Edu
European List Prices:
€125.00/£82.99
CATALOG # MC-671
ISBN: 9783865213655
Short Films Collection
1959 - 2008 · 153 min
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Robert Frank: The Complete Film Works: Volume 1
Pull My Daisy, The Sin of Jesus, Me and My Brother
Robert Frank's significant contribution to photography in the
mid-twentieth century is unquestionable. His book, The Americans, is
arguably the most important American photography publication of the
post-World War II period, and his photography has spawned numerous
disciples, as well as a rich critical literature. However, at the very
moment Frank achieved the status of a "star" at the end of the 1950s,
he abandoned traditional still photography to become a filmmaker. He
eventually returned to photography in the 1970s, but Frank, as a
filmmaker, has remained a well-kept secret for almost four decades.
Robert Frank The Complete Film Works fills a long overdue gap by
presenting every one of Frank's more than 25 films and videos, some of
them classics of the New American Cinema of the 1950s and 60s.
Robert Frank The Complete Film Works Volume 1: Pull My Daisy is a
1959 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'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. Pull My Daisy was praised
for years as an improvisational masterpiece, until Leslie revealed in
1968 that the film was actually carefully planned, rehearsed, and
directed by him and Frank
The Sin of Jesus was based on the story of Isaac Babel, a woman on
a chicken farm who spends her days working at an egg-sorting machine.
"I'm the only woman here." She is pregnant, her husband spends his days
lying in bed, and his friends encourage him to go out on the town with
them. The woman talks to herself as she works, lost in the monotony of
human existence. She counts the passing days in the same way she counts
eggs. Even extraordinary events, such as the appearance of Jesus Christ
in the barn, go under the stream of this melancholy solipsism.
Me and My Brother seems to be a rather artless-film-within-a-film
being shown at a rundown movie theater. The story contains bizarre
twists and turns: skillfully weaving together opposites, playing
counterfeits against the authentic, pornography against poetry, acting
against being, Beat cynicism against hippie romanticism, monochrome
against colored. This was Frank's first feature-length film work and it
celebrates the return of the poetic essay as assemblage, the
affirmation of the underground as a wild cinematic analysis in the form
of a collage. There is a method to this film's madness: It is so rich
in text, quotes, music, and associations that keeping up with it
through the underbrush of psyche, film, and urbanity is barely possible. |
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$US 125.00 SRP/Edu
European List Prices:
€125.00/£82.99
CATALOG # MC-791
ISBN: 9783865215253
Short Films Collection
1963 - 2008 · 95 min
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Robert Frank: The Complete Film Works: Volume 2
Conversations in Vermont, Liferaft Earth, OK End Here
Here is volume two of Robert Frank's long-awaited Complete Film Works.
At the end of the 1950s, Frank abandoned traditional still photography
to become a filmmaker. He eventually returned to photography in the
1970s, but Frank, as a filmmaker, has remained a well-kept secret for
almost four decades. Volume two comprises Conversations in Vermont,
Liferaft Earth and OK End Here. Conversations in Vermont was produced
in 1969, and was Frank's first autobiographical film, addressing his
relationship with his two teenaged children, and partly told through
his narration over filmed images of his photographs, family photographs
and world famous images. Liferaft Earth opens with a newspaper report
from Hayward, California: "Sandwiched between a restaurant and
supermarket, 100 anti-population protesters spent their second starving
day in a plastic enclosure...The so-called Hunger Show, a week-long
starve-in aimed at dramatizing man's future in an overpopulated,
underfed world..." This film was made for Stewart Brand, the visionary
founder of the international ecological movement and publisher of the
bestselling Whole Earth Catalog (1968-85). OK End Here is Frank's 1963
short film about inertia in a modern relationship. The film alternates
between semi-documentary scenes and shots composed with rigid
formality, and suggests the influence of the French Nouvelle Vague and
Michelangelo Antonioni's films.
Robert Frank was born in Zurich, Switzerland, in 1924 and went to
the United States in 1947. He is best known for his seminal book The
Americans, first published in 1958, which gave rise to a distinct new
art form in the photo book, and his experimental film Pull My Daisy,
made in 1959.
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$US 125.00 SRP/Edu
European List Prices:
€125.00 / £82.99
CATALOG # MC-799
ISBN: 9783865215918
Short Films Collection
1971 - 2008 · 78 min
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Robert Frank: The Complete Film Works: Vol. 3
Keep Busy, About Me: A Musical, S-8 Stones Footage from Exile on Main Street
Robert Frank, born in Zurich in 1924, has made, in his 50-year career,
an unquestionably significant contribution to photography. His seminal
book The Americans is arguably the most important American photography
publication of the postwar period. His work continues to influence
photographers and has spawned a rich body of theoretical writing. Yet
at the very moment Frank became an art-world star at the end of the
1950s, he abandoned still photography to become a filmmaker. Though he
did return to photography in the 1970s, Frank the filmmaker has
remained a well-kept secret for almost four decades. A compilation
examining his missing years is long overdue. Robert Frank: The Complete
Film Works details each one of Frank's more than 25 films and
videos--many of them classics of 1950s and 60s New American Cinema.
Volume 3 of the set, this beautifully packaged publication, features
three DVDs--which include Keep Busy (1975), About Me: A Musical (1971)
and S-8 Stones Footage from Exile on Main Street (1972)--in a
film-roll-box slipcase.
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