Opening Lens to a Wider Experience

By DAVID EHRENSTEIN

March 1, 1996 12 AM PT

SPECIAL TO THE TIMES

“In making films, I continue to look around me, but I am no longer the solitary observer, turning away after the click of the shutter,” photographer Robert Frank once wrote in a monograph of his work. “Instead, I’m trying to recapture what I saw, what I heard and what I feel. What I know!”

Beginning tonight and continuing through April 10, Los Angeles audiences will have a rare opportunity to discover what Frank heard, felt and knew as the Museum of Contemporary Art presents “Robert Frank: Selected Film and Video 1959-1992,” an accompaniment to the photographic exhibition “Robert Frank: Moving On,” which is being presented at the Lannan Foundation Saturday-May 19. The 19-film retrospective vividly demonstrates that Frank’s moving images are every bit as important as his still ones.

“I don’t see how I can review any film after ‘Pull My Daisy’ without using it as a signpost,” Jonas Mekas wrote of Frank’s maiden effort back in 1959. And that critic wasn’t alone in his reaction.

Co-directed with Alfred Leslie, written by Jack Kerouac and starring the “On the Road” author, his “Beat generation” buddies (Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, Gregory Corso) and a pre-”Last Year at Marienbad” Delphine Seyrig, this brief black-and-white improvisation about a confrontation between a street-corner minister and a group of bohemians jump-started the entire American independent film movement that Mekas came to champion. Though taken as a pure slice-of-beatnik-life by many critics, “Pull My Daisy” was in fact a delicate mixture of reality and fiction. And so are Frank’s 18 other films--all of different shapes, lengths and subject matter.

“Life Dances On,” an autobiographical essay about the death of his daughter Andrea, combines footage Frank shot of her over the years with images culled from still photographs and collages. Yet for all its heartfelt emotion, Frank never lets you forget the film is a work of artifice. In the same way, “Me and My Brother” supplements “documentary” material about the anti-nuclear “family” of poet Peter Orlovsky, his mentally impaired brother, Julius, and Peter’s lover, Allen Ginsberg, with sequences in which actors from Joseph Chaikin’s “Open Theater” play at being this unconventional trio.

While “Brother” is Frank’s most important film, his most notorious is “CS Blues.” A study of the Rolling Stones’ 1972 tour, this grimly impressionistic effort concentrates more on backstage antics (drug-taking, groupie-groping, and Bianca-humiliation) than onstage performing. Proving too much for rock ‘n’ roll’s bad boys, the Stones have blocked the film from ever being distributed. They should have known better. Robert Frank doesn’t know how to lie.

* All screenings will be held in the Museum of Contemporary Art’s Ahmanson Auditorium at 250 S. Grand Ave. except for the March 27, 29, and April 10 screenings, which will be held at the Directors Guild of America, 7920 Sunset Blvd. Information: (213) 626-6222.

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Schedule of Screenings

Screenings of “Robert Frank: Selected Film and Video 1959-1992,” accompanying the photographic exhibition “Robert Frank: Moving On” at the Lannan Foundation Saturday through May 19 will be held in the Museum of Contemporary Art’s Ahmanson Auditorium at 250 S. Grand Ave. except for the March 27, March 29 and April 10 screenings, which will be held at the Directors Guild of America, 7920 Sunset Blvd. Information: (213) 626-6222.

Today, 7:30 p.m.:

“CS Blues” (1972)

Saturday, 7:30 p.m.:

“CS Blues” (1972)

Wednesday, 7:30 p.m.:

“About Me: A Musical” (1971), “This Film Is About” (1973), “Life-Raft Earth” (1967)

March 9, 2 p.m.

“Pull My Daisy” (1959), “Conversations in Vermont” (1969), “This Song for Jack” (1983)

March 16, 7:30 p.m.

“Fire in the East: A Portrait of Robert Frank” (1986), “Home Improvements” (1985)

March 20, 7:30 p.m.

“C’est Vrai” (1990)