
Directing
Nov 8, 1924
Zurich, Switzerland
Robert Frank
Directing
Biography
Robert Frank is one of the most acclaimed photographers of the 20th century. He is best known for his seminal book "The Americans", featuring photographs taken by the artist in the mid-1950s as he traveled across the U.S. on a Guggenheim fellowship. Robert Frank is also known as a filmmaker.
Feature Films (18)

A small film crew goes through several locations including Europe, New York and Mexico.
Second Century

Drawn from footage shot between 1949 and 1963, Jonas Mekas’s autobiographical diary film chronicles his early years in exile, capturing the struggle to build a new life in New York and his gradual discovery of a vibrant artistic community.
Lost, Lost, Lost

Home Improvements, Robert Frank’s first video project, is a simple and poignant diary of consequential events. It is about the relationship between Frank’s life as an artist and his personal life, and how the two are inevitably intertwined. It was made cheaply with a half-inch video porta-pak. Home Improvements takes place in New York and Nova Scotia and in the mental space between these two opposing worlds
Home Improvements

The life and work of Robert Frank—as a photographer and a filmmaker—are so intertwined that they're one in the same, and the vast amount of territory he's covered, from The Americans in 1958 up to the present, is intimately registered in his now-formidable body of artistic gestures. From the early '90s on, Frank has been making his films and videos with the brilliant editor Laura Israel, who has helped him to keep things homemade and preserve the illuminating spark of first contact between camera and people/places. Don't Blink is Israel's like-minded portrait of her friend and collaborator, a lively rummage sale of images and sounds and recollected passages and unfathomable losses and friendships that leaves us a fast and fleeting imprint of the life of the Swiss-born man who reinvented himself the American way, and is still standing on ground of his own making at the age of 90.
Don't Blink - Robert Frank

The film of Michael Engler from the year 1982 showing the different methods of operation of photgraphers Harry Callahan, Mark Cohen, Robert Frank, Ralph Gibson, Duane Michals, Joel Meyerowitz, Stephen Shore, Garry Winogrand and others
Contemporary Photography in America

"In the summer of 2019 Kara [Walker] and I took our second and final visit to see Robert Frank and June Leaf at their place in Mabou, Nova Scotia. This video is a record of some of the conversations between us. A blooming friendship between two mid-career artists and two late-career ones. I never meant to make this film but some time after Robert died I looked back and lined these moments up." — Ari Marcopoulos
June and Robert Kara and Me

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. — Museum of Modern Art
Robert Frank in Conversation with Clark Winter: 10 Films

Sanyu (1901-1964), an important Chinese artist, was a friend of Robert Frank's who died in anonymity in Paris. In this film portrait, Frank creates a requiem that includes dramatic and documentary scenes set in Paris, and a chronicle of his trip to Taipei to attend Sotheby's auction of the paintings Sanyu left him.
Sanyu

Dedicated from one great photographer to another, I Remember reenacts an afternoon spent with Alfred Steiglitz. Robert Frank plays Steiglitz, Frank is played by the artist Jerome Souther, and Frank’s artist wife June Leaf plays Steiglitz’s own artist wife Georgia O’Keeffe (the two women bear an uncanny resemblance). Together, the three share in simple domestic pleasures, the “hospitality, the wood stove in the kitchen, chicken for lunch, Steiglitz waiting for the sun to appear through the clouds.” — Museum of Modern Art
I Remember

Simple objects, photographs, and events prompt Frank to self-conscious rumination. From his homes in New York and Nova Scotia and on visits to friends, the artist contemplates his relationships, the anniversary of his daughter's death, his son's mental illness, and his work.
The Present
Television & Series (2)

The South Bank Show is a television arts magazine show produced by ITV between 1978 and 2010. A new series began on Sky Arts from 27 May 2012. Presented by Melvyn Bragg, the show aims to bring both high art and popular culture to a mass audience.



