In 1959, Robert Frank’s The Americans was published in New York City. The magazines that reviewed the book were appalled and the art of photography was open in a new way. Traveling on a Guggenheim Fellowship between 1955 and 1956, Frank drove America in a used Ford, cutting a jagged ring around the lower 48, and taking 27,000 exposures from which he chose 83 prints to tell the story of what he’d found on his journey. Having immigrated to the US from his native Switzerland after World War II, Frank used his position as an outsider to objectively look at all strata of American society in those heady years of materialism, chrome, and suburbs that dominated our imagination in the middle of the last century. He very consciously sought out the parts of America that Americans were not fond of looking at – gays, blacks, bikers, folks – and showed those parts to the world.
Generations of artists and appreciators have been moved by the courage of Frank’s gaze – it has been said “There is photography before The Americans and there is photography after The Americans”. Now, during the 50th Anniversary of the American printing of the book, French documentarian, journalist, and photography editor, Philippe Séclier, gives us An American Journey: Revisiting Robert Frank’s The Americans, which opens tomorrow night (Sept. 30th) for a weeklong engagement at Film Forum along with the classic short, In the Streets.
Philippe Séclier endeavors to follow in Frank’s footsteps and give us some insight into the mythic journey that produced perhaps the first great book of photography and a pioneering socio-political story. In the interest of recreating Frank’s setup, Séclier traveled light – directing, shooting, and driving – recording on DV CAM, using only natural light and no tripod, just as Frank did.
Neither the photography or story-telling of An American Journey are as compelling as Frank’s work in The Americans, but the journey remains highly interesting. Séclier’s film – coming in at 58 minutes – holds up as a coherent work interweaving road footage and stops with people who were in Frank’s photos, people who knew him, and people who have worked with his work. And while Séclier’s DV CAM experiment may not be as aesthetically pleasing as the work Frank did with his 35 mm Leica camera and handful of lenses – mostly wides – he does manage to give us a rather painterly picture of the project of The Americans, stressing the loneliness of the work, and the feeling of being an outsider in America.
An American Journey opens up with fragments of night-driving in winter – glimpses of taillights and medians – and Séclier’s voice telling us that he is at the end of a journey about a book by a Swiss émigré to the US. Early on, the voice of French photographer Raymond Depardon talks about the amount of energy required to stay on task, photographing a year on the road in a strange country, and he talks of the loneliness of this task while the video shows us a neon HOTEL sign against the empty night sky.
The loneliness that Frank experienced and the sense of alienation he felt over that year are recounted in letters he wrote from the road to friends like Walker Evans, the famous Depression Era photographer of the human condition and the mentor who helped Frank get his fellowship. We get the story of how Frank was arrested and held for over a day in an Arkansas jail because he looked foreign, had a foreign whiskey in his glovebox and a letter from a man named Guggenheim – we understand how jarring that must have been for a talented artist, just starting to feel at home in his adopted country. When Séclier takes us to that same jailhouse in McGehee, AR and talks with the affable Jim White, current chief of police, who tells us he “could see something like that happening,” we are reminded of the similarities between McCarthy’s America and our current Threat Level: Orange America.
The scenes with people who experienced Frank’s America, past and present, are interesting mile markers in this documentary. We get to spend time with James Crowenshild who was captured by Frank’s camera as a child at a 4th of July celebration in Jay, NY. We visit with the manager of the Finlen Hotel in Butte, MT where Frank took one of his most famous photographs of the human-less Butte downtown out his window. We meet several friends and colleagues who introduce us to their own piece of America as they tell us of the talented man that they knew. We spend time with the curators, notably Sarah Greenough of the National Gallery of Art in D.C., as she talks about the contact sheets that Frank made before choosing his final prints and the stories those unused shots tell us. We meet artist Jno Cook, whose traced line drawings in The Robert Frank Coloring Book offer a strikingly simplified look at Frank’s black and white prints, and whose love of the source material makes for a wonderful dispatch from a fern-filled porch in the Chicago area.
These interview scenes are wonderful if somewhat disjointed and they give us a glimpse of what is happy and real in America, even on the fringes, but much of the b-roll is nighttime, dingy winter, or rainfall through the windshield. Overall, the sense we get is that Séclier does not connect with the America he is videoing. It’s not that he despises is, but in a way, it’s as though he hasn’t fully seen it. This feature of An American Journey is fascinating in that we get to take a look at the loneliness of Robert Frank’s adventure through the eyes of an outsider in Séclier, who clearly identifies with this aspect of the photographer’s experience. This loneliness is something that resonates for anyone who’s traveled around this nation, and really does get at one of the source emotions that went into the 83 print work, The Americans.
Jack Kerouac, that maven of the lonely American road, wrote in his introduction for the first, and all subsequent, US editions of the book, “Robert Frank, Swiss, unobtrusive, nice, with that little camera that he raises and snaps with one hand he sucked a sad poem right out of America onto film, taking rank among the tragic poets of the world.” The sadness in The Americans is unmistakable. More recently, critics have also written of Frank’s anger at his experiences on the road between 1955 and 1956. Still, when one looks at the actual prints that made the final cut of the book, you see a terrific humanity in each and every shot. Sometimes it’s tragedy, sometimes magic, sometimes magical tragedy, sometimes you laugh out loud, and sometimes you smile at the grace of the mundane. Of this feature of Frank’s photographs, Kerouac wrote, “As American a picture – the faces don’t editorialize or criticize or say anything but ‘This is the way we are in real life and if you don’t like it I don’t know anything about it ‘cause I’m living my own life in my way and may God bless us all, mebbe’ … ‘if we deserve it’ …”
Before he came to the United States, Frank had trained as a photographer’s apprentice in Zurich, learning realism in the European school. It is this realism that he honed to a beautiful kind of perfection when he made The Americans – that we can see when we look at the pictures. Happily, Séclier has us looking at the pictures a lot. In the end, the most wonderful feature of An American Journey is that it lets us look at Frank’s photographs and that it gives us a rather personal visual account of the loneliness and alienation that accompanied the man who took those photographs. For anyone who’s ever driven the American road with a palmcorder in hand, the film will strike a chord.
In addition, you get to take a look at Harlem, 1945 in Helen Levitt, Janice Loeb, and James Agee’s 14 minute classic In the Streets. Both films are wonderful food for thought and gaze. And with your appetite whetted, visit the Met to see the Gallery of Art-curated Looking In: Robert Frank’s The Americans through January 3, 2010, were you can see the 83 prints that make up The Americans, the contact sheets that the prints came from, as well as Frank’s photographic work in Europe’s great cities and South America before he settled in New York City – where he still resides at 84 when he’s not in Nova Scotia.
Images from the Met.
