A Frank View of the ‘Mountain’

Being interviewed is a sort of reality therapy for photographer and avant-garde film maker Robert Frank. If you make a commercial film, you pay by being stuck in the spotlight.

As co-director (with Rudy Wurlitzer) of “Candy Mountain”--opening today (see Michael Wilmington’s review on page 27)--Frank has temporarily left the familiar world of underground film and come face to face with the foreign territory of the marketplace.

“The truth comes back. At the end you really know what you have done and how the system treats it,” said the 63-year-old artist, as he surveyed the Hollywood Hills from his seventh-floor window at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel.

Making his first--and what he says is his last--commercial film and submitting to interviews is “a very good lesson,” Frank said ruefully. But having agreed to “pose as an important person” to promote the film, he fulfilled his part of the bargain with considerable warmth and grace.

“Candy Mountain,” an on-the-road story about disconnected people, seems a natural for Frank. A Beat Generation artist associated with poet Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac (author of “On the Road”), Frank is best known for “The Americans,” a 1959 photo essay of stark, often unflattering images of working-class people taken during an odyssey throughout the United States.

The film follows the frustrating search of a young musician (Kevin O’Connor) for Elmore Silk (Harris Yulin), a legendary guitar maker, from the venal atmosphere of New York to a sparsely populated area of northern Canada. Julius, the musician, is motivated by the promise of money from some New York sharpies who plan to make a bundle selling Silk’s guitars.

Frank appears to be deeply ambivalent about the film, saying, “I don’t think it’s the greatest thing” and “It doesn’t go far enough,” while citing aspects that please him. For one thing, “Candy Mountain” gave Frank a welcome break from work that is intensely involved with personal experience, though there are autobiographical aspects to the film.

He likes the film’s ending because it puts Julius back on the road with no indication of his future. Frank also deems it important that “the old guy (Silk) is not a hero.”

The film raises questions about artistic integrity and commercial success. “It’s not possible not to sell out,” Frank said, “but it’s better to do it for more money than to change your work for more money.”

Frank said he makes his own money “not from films but from photographs I did a long time ago,” and he finds sharp differences in the two mediums.

“Film is very different from photography because you can arrange” the action in a film--and that’s its appeal, he said. His photographs, on the other hand, are likely to be caught on the fly. “They speak the truth of what I saw. They say how it feels for me to make a picture. If you have a message that’s strong enough, it will endure,” Frank said, conceding that “The Americans” has done exactly that.

But films remain a challenge that Frank feels he hasn’t fully mastered. “Films are interesting because they always turn out different than you think they will. When a film comes up finished, you are terrified,” he said, confessing that he can’t bear to take a second look at “Candy Mountain.”

Accustomed to a spontaneous approach to still photography and such underground films as “Pull My Daisy,” Frank found the experience of following a script for “Candy Mountain” disconcerting. “Too much money and too many rules” were involved for him to go off on a tangent. “We were on that track, that road, and we followed it.”

The road is Frank’s constant analogy for his life and work: “I had to find my own road,” he said of his youthful wanderlust. Making a film is like taking “a long trip,” and his artistic sensibility is “a low-road vision” focused on “people who are not winners, who struggle to come out on top and never make it.”

Being in transit is also Frank’s lifelong mode of operation. He left his native Switzerland for the United States, in 1947 at age 22, and landed a job as a fashion photographer for Harper’s Bazaar. But he was soon traveling again--to South America and Europe. With the help of a Guggenheim fellowship in 1955, Frank circled the United States by car, in “The Americans.” He always returns to New York but remains footloose, now dividing his time between what he calls the city of “terminal greed” and Nova Scotia.

Frank allows that his constant theme is largely a creation of youthful dreamers “who don’t know what they are doing,” but he insists that the notion of America as the promised land is not entirely passe.

“One of the great things about this country is that it is still open,” he said. “You can go on the road. You still have the promise that you can go out there and find something extraordinary. Europe is so small and closed, that idea doesn’t exist.”