REVIEW: ‘Don’t Blink — Robert Frank’ profiles influential photographer from Beat Generation
Don’t Blink — Robert Frank is a thoughtful exposé on a man who has made many thoughtful exposés in his career. Frank is a unique photographer and videographer, someone who never plays by the rules, and his resulting body of work is interesting, informative and moving. As a documentary subject himself, he is endlessly entertaining, sometimes quite stubborn and perpetually creative.
Director Laura Israel and her team of filmmakers had unprecedented access to the auteur. They follow him around his apartment in New York City, travel with him in a car and even head to the photographer’s summer home in Nova Scotia. Along the way, the audience is able to view Frank’s evocative images throughout the years and scenes from his many documentaries.
Frank is perhaps most famous for making the Beat Generation short Pull My Daisies and C—sucker Blues, which followed the Rolling Stones on their Exile on Main Street tour, and it’s obvious that he likes to get close to the people he documents. He films scenes of everyday life, and the images he finds have a haunting, transfixing quality. When taking into account the full extent of his output, C—sucker Blues is actually a small part of his career-spanning modus operandi. Far more fascinating are his images of everyday Americans, struggling and living on the streets of the United States.
While filming Frank, Israel and her team get swept up into his life. When traveling with him, they encounter a host of friends and Frank’s significant other, artist June Leaf. These scenes with his confidantes weave a wonderful tapestry of emotions and conversations. They let the documentary focus on Frank as a real person, someone who stokes a fire in his apartment’s fireplace, someone who waves down a man dressed as Lady Liberty on the sidewalk, someone who marvels at the kindness and fortitude of a newspaper deliveryman on the outskirts of Nova Scotia. Frank goes about his life dipping into and out of encounters with interesting people; it’s what drives his own work and what drives Don’t Blink — Robert Frank.
Frank is now in his 90s, but there is still some of that stubbornness from his younger years. He doesn’t like authority or convention, and one archival interview shows him being quite impatient with the litany of questions he is asked about his work. Nowadays, he comes off wiser and happier, a person who spends endless hours shuffling through the many photographs, postcards and souvenirs of his life. Frank is a collector — and not a neat one! — and refuses to throw out anything with sentimental value. This means his apartment and studio are filled with tidbits here and there, and the photographer is prone to stopping his train of thought and heading down memory lane.
Also be on the lookout for the clever way Israel moves from black-and-white imagery to color. Her own documenting seamlessly connects to Frank’s career highlights.
Don’t Blink — Robert Frank, which is currently playing the Film Forum in New York City, is a thoroughly interesting portrait of a thoroughly interesting man. It’s one of the best films of 2016.
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
- Don’t Blink — Robert Frank
- 2016
- Directed by Laura Israel
- Featuring Robert Frank
- Running time: 82 minutes
- Rating:
