While photographer Robert Frank is perhaps most notoriously known as the director of “Cocksucker Blues,” the debauchery-filled documentary about The Rolling Stones‘ 1972 tour in support of Exile On Main St., that’s only a mere moment in the artist’s expansive career. The upcoming documentary “Don’t Blink — Robert Frank” shines a light on the man and his hugely influential body of work.
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Directed by Laura Israel, the film takes viewers on a journey with the man who changed the way people looked at America, collaborated with some of the most important artistic and cultural voices ever, and forged an approach that makes his photographs unmistakeably his own. Here’s the official synopsis:
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 91.
“Don’t Blink — Robert Frank” features music by The Rolling Stones, Velvet Underground, Tom Waits, Patti Smith, Yo La Tengo, New Order, Bob Dylan, The White Stripes and more, and will open on July 13th via Grasshopper Film. Check out the exclusive trailer above scored by “What New York Used To Be” by The Kills.
