Now in his 70s, Robert Frank still is primarily known as one of the great American photographers–a matchless chronicler of the American underground–even though, since 1959, he has regarded himself as primarily a filmmaker. Not a filmmaker in the Spielberg sense: Only once in his life, with “Candy Mountain” in 1987, has Frank had a budget over $1 million. Instead, he has been an anti-Establishment experimentalist, stubbornly pursuing his own rebellious course.
How poetic that rebellion could be is demonstrated in the Frank retrospective starting Friday at the Film Center of the School of the Art Institute, Columbus Drive and Jackson Boulevard. It includes 15 shorts and one feature, made over three decades.
The opening night program (6 p.m. Friday) includes Frank’s remarkable filmmaking debut, “Pull My Daisy” (1959), plus “The Sin of Jesus” (1961) and “This Song for Jack” (1983). The first and third of these films provide a rich, touching tribute to Frank’s collaborator and friend, novelist and American legend Jack Kerouac. Kerouac, who wrote and spoke the narration for “Pull My Daisy,” was long dead by the time of “This Song for Jack,” a cinema verite record of a gathering of his old friends and lovers, colleagues and admirers at a “Jack Kerouac Conference” at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colo.
Seeing, at that gathering, poets Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky and Gregory Corso, novelist William Burroughs and composer David Amram, musing on their phenomenal friend, gains poignance after watching the group, almost 25 years before, in “Pull My Daisy.” Co-directed with Alfred Leslie, this resonant, wacky ’50s document is based on the third act of Kerouac’s play “The Beat Generation.”
Actually you don’t see the skeletal Burroughs in “Daisy.” But there is a spooky Burroughs double: painter Larry Rivers as the dour railroad brakeman Milo. But the others are all there: shy Ginsberg and Orlovsky, grinning Corso and jazzman Amram, virtually playing themselves in a daffy, plotless romp about beatniks confronting a visiting bishop in a lower Manhattan loft. And, if “Pull My Daisy” is a priceless chronicle of hipster madness, Kerouac’s narration–an almost free-form ramble, in which he speaks for all the characters and comments on the action as if he were interpreting a TV show–is a magnificent literary goof.
“The Sin of Jesus” and 1963’s “OK End Here” (6 p.m. Tuesday with 1969’s “Liferaft Earth” and 1975’s “Keep Busy”) both skillfully copy art film styles of the time. “Sin of Jesus,” based on Isaac Babel’s story of a woman and an angel (with Telly Savalas in a supporting part), pastiches Ingmar Bergman. “OK End Here” pastiches Michelangelo Antonioni and the French New Wave (star Martin Lasalle played Robert Bresson’s “Pickpocket”). Rural and urban ennui are caught powerfully. The visuals are incredibly strong, the acting sometimes weak. But all these shorts show one of the great “eyes” of American cinema.
Call 312-443-3737.
– One of the best-known filmmakers of Chicago’s underground, Tom Palazzolo, will introduce two new works at Chicago Filmmakers, 1542 W. Division St. They are “I Married a Munchkin” (1994) and 1995’s “Bleach Yr Old Sox: Comiskey Park Revisited” (8 p.m. Saturday)–about the 11th annual Wizard of Oz Festival and the ballpark’s death throes, respectively.
At 8 p.m. Friday, Filmmakers offers an unusual program called “Y Chromosomes?” four short movies about male indoctrination: Jean Vigo’s 1933 boarding school revolt classic “Zero de Conduite,” Jay Rosenblatt’s 1994 “The Smell of Burning Ants,” Selby Eddy`’s 1993 “We’re Spies” and the local premiere of Jean Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet’s 1982 short, “En Rachachant,” based on writing by Marguerite Duras. Call 312-384-5533.
– Another special Chicago program, at the Film Center, involves an evening with local bluesman Eddie Burks, who will play a set and talk with the audience after a screening of the 1994 documentary short “Blues Highway” (6 p.m. Thursday). In it, Burks and other emigrants from the Depression-era South recall the times when Chicago was a mecca.
Two beautifully photographed Moroccan films with feminist themes premiere on the Film Center’s “Movies From the Maghreb” series: 1989’s “A Door to the Sky” (8 p.m. Friday), written and directed by Farida Benlyazid and 1993’s”Looking for My Wife’s Husband,” (8 p.m. Saturday), directed by Mohamed Abderrahman Tazi. There’s something scintillating about the light and colors of these two films. “Looking for My Wife’s Husband,” especially–a bright, irreverent satire of Islamic marriage customs–is a real discovery.
