Movie Night: Don’t Blink – Robert Frank

The life and work of Robert Frank—as a photographer and a filmmaker—are so intertwined that they’re one in the same.

The vast amount of territory he’s covered, from The Americans to landmark films like Pull My Daisy (with the Beats) and Cocksucker Blues (with the Rolling Stones) is intimately registered in his now formidable body of artistic gestures. From the early ’90s on, Frank has been making his films and videos with the brilliant editor Laura Israel, who has helped him to keep things homemade and preserve the illuminating spark of first contact between camera and people/places. Don’t Blink is Israel’s like-minded portrait of her friend and collaborator, a lively rummage sale of images and sounds and recollected passages and unfathomable losses and friendships that leaves us a fast and fleeting imprint of the life of the Swiss-born man who reinvented himself the American way, and is still standing on ground of his own making at the age of 90. (2015, 82 min, digital)