Finders Keepers
When I met with Lee Anne Schmitt a few weekends ago to discuss her film California Company Town, she named Robert Frank’s video-essays as one of her primary filmmaking influences. My knowledge of Frank’s film work had been limited to his beat-related curios (Pull My Daisy, Me and My Brother) until I saw Home Improvements at MoMA last month. The other two films on the program gave me a greater jolt at the time (both 16mm collaborations with Rudy Wurlitzer, evoking the first line of “Howl”), but the deceptive calm of Home Improvements has been slower to fade. Now that I’ve been by the museum for a look at the exhibition on The Americans, I thought I’d put some words down.
The chemically-enhanced chiaroscuro of the gelatin-silver process is miles more seductive than the pixel smears of the early video camera Frank used for Home Improvements, but this technological downgrading does nothing to degrade the contemplative basis of Frank’s work: a deeply satisfying braid of art and the everyday, in which life shows up in the art and artistic discernment is cast back upon life. On first glance, Home Improvements appears a sketchbook, mere recording like so many YouTube confessionals to come. But the mundane snatches of life Frank deposits into the film [a visit to his wife in the hospital, images of Bleecker Street (or is it the smudged apartment window?), a playful wait for the garbage man by his rural Nova Scotia home, a visit to his son Pablo in a mental institution] are spliced together with an intrinsic, which is to say intimate, logic. The scenes become objects of contemplation, true reflections. Frank records televisions, roads, living space with droll banality (doubling down with the crude videography), but the freedom with which he cuts across distance and time—skipping between his lives in New York and Nova Scotia, for instance—seeds the associative glimmer of consciousness. There is no action, only commonplace; but one senses a roiling, migratory mind bringing these passages into focus. The shots are clearly talking to one another, even if only in a murmur. A single take following his visit to Pablo stands out as a clearing. It’s obviously been a difficult visit, even if Frank hasn’t said so. And so it is that he steals a postscript from the cloudy afternoon, catching a plane in the air (some people are flying away), reframing to a nearby highway (some are driving away) and then drawing back to the unseen anchor of the shot, the hospital he’s about to leave (some are just locked up). It’s rare to see a camera movement forging thought and emotion with such basic means.
What makes Frank’s work feel so eminently useful is this way he is able to chisel the long intelligence of a disquisition from the fleeting flotsam of unfurnished moments (no wonder Kerouac found so much). Home Improvements is not so elegantly dressed as the photographs, but this only makes Frank’s dramaturgy of the everyday seem all the much sturdier. Frank is cast as a Tocquevillean outsider in much of the literature on The Americans, but the fact that the pictures still speak is the result of his compositional sense rather than his Swiss background. To take one of the more expressly analytical plates of the book’s 83, New Orleans, 1955 inscribes American power differentials in a legible left-to-right fashion. There are multiple ways to read the photograph, but the basic facts are salient enough: the subjects are separated by gender, race and age, horizontally compartmentalized by frames within the frame, frames which together resemble nothing so much as a strip of film. The train is oddly transparent: we can see through it, and, along a top row of windows, we observe the obscure reflections of the world behind the camera. Each window is a separate photograph; taken together, they suggest the organization, the collage, the writing of the whole Americans project. The people are transparent too, in a way; idiosyncratic in their expressions and emblematic in their framing, they are what Bill Nichols might call social actors. If this blurring between being and representation can be said to be visible, it is surely in those three hands overhanging a window’s edge. In photographs and videos alike, Frank’s pictures exceed the frame—the only thing he seems to demand of his medium is that it travel well.
There’s more coverage of the Frank exhibition in this week’s Guardian. Links are up for my short piece on Phil Karlson in the same issue, as well as a week-old consideration of Windy & Carl and their marriage music.
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