Robert Frank, the Swiss-born photographer and filmmaker, was six years shy of a hundred when he died, in 2019. He left Europe for the U.S. in 1947, and in 1959, his groundbreaking book of photographs, The Americans, was published. Funded by a Guggenheim Fellowship, Frank had traveled the country catching images that were the visual counterparts of Beat poetry, then at its cultural apex. That same year, he made his first film, Pull My Daisy, co-directed with Alfred Leslie and featuring the writings of Jack Kerouac. Frank’s fixation on la vie de bohème evolved, and in 1972 he chronicled the Rolling Stones’ decadent Exile on Main St. tour. The film has never been commercially released, not least because the title is obscene.
One Frank film that is getting a revival this fall is Candy Mountain, his glorious 1987 road movie co-directed with and written by Rudy Wurlitzer. In a restored 2K print from Film Movement Plus, it opens this month in major cities, including screenings at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on October 25, and will be digitally available on December 13.
