From: Joel S Bachar (email suppressed)
Date: Tue Apr 29 2008 - 12:34:24 PDT
Available Now from Microcinema: The Complete Film Works of Robert Frank
Volumes 1 - 3 featuring Pull My Daisy
STREET DATE: June 01, 2008
PREBOOK DATE: NOW
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Robert Frank Complete Film Works Volume 1
http://www.microcinemadvd.com/product/DVD/671/Robert_Frank_The_Complete_Film
_Works_Volume_1.html
$US 125.00 SRP/ Edu
CATALOG # MC-671
ISBN: 9783865213655
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Robert Frank Complete Film Works Volume 1
1959 - 2008 . 153 min
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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Robert Frank: Complete Film Works Volume 2
http://www.microcinemadvd.com/product/DVD/791/Robert_Frank_The_Complete_Film
_Works_Volume_2.html
$US 125.00 SRP/Edu
CATALOG # MC-791
ISBN: 9783865215253
Robert Frank: Complete Film Works Volume 2
1963 - 2008 . 95 min
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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Robert Frank: The Complete Film Works Volume 3
http://www.microcinemadvd.com/product/DVD/799/Robert_Frank_The_Complete_Film
_Works_Vol_3.html
$US 125.00 SRP/Edu
CATALOG # MC-799
ISBN: 9783865215918
Robert Frank: The Complete Film Works Volume 3
1971 - 2008 . 78 min
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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Joel S. Bachar
Microcinema Int'l/Microcinema DVD
1636 Bush Street, #2, San Francisco, CA 94109
(415) 447-9750
www.microcinema.com
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For info on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at <email suppressed>.