Don’t Blink: Robert Frank (Laura Israel, 2015)
In Alice Tully Hall, I got my first introduction to Robert Frank – photographer and documentarian, most noted for 1958’s The Americans, a photo book documenting subjects all over the US. Utterly unfamiliar with Frank’s work, I came into Laura Israel’s documentary Don’t Blink: Robert Frank not knowing what I would find.
I was met with a strange, spiky, kaleidoscopic portrait of a strange, spiky, kaleidoscopic artist. Israel, Frank’s longtime friend and editor, intersperses one-on-one interviews with images of his films and photographs. With glimpses of Robert Frank’s decades-spanning work juxtaposed achronologically with modern interviews and Beat-era music, the film creates a wall of time, presenting its black-and-white images as equally and overwhelmingly immediate. And as the film collects more and more fragments of Frank’s oeuvre, this wall of time and space becomes increasingly collaged; the more the audience learns about Frank’s textural, scrappy, abrupt style, the more Israel’s style gains purpose as an homage, a way to represent an artist in the best way that artist knows to represent himself.
But this jumbled collage of words, sounds, and images struggles to find resonance with spectators who don’t have the prescience to recognize its purpose from the outset. With no preconception of Robert Frank’s work, the comradeship between the styles of the film and its subject were oftentimes lost on me, leaving me locked out, a bystander to a conversation I did not have the knowledge to understand, let alone participate in. The film’s narrative focus didn’t help orient me, either; Israel, prepared by over ten years of friendship with the man, paints Frank’s portrait with a fine detail brush, choosing to fill in shading and minutiae rather than the broad strokes of an outline.
Don’t Blink: Robert Frank (Laura Israel, 2015)
By focusing on the intimate details of Robert Frank’s life, Israel almost by definition distances a potential audience that has no context in which to enjoy them. But it’s true that such a choice has two edges: what might be confusing, frustrating, or unengaging for me appears to the more informed viewer as innovatively personal glimpses into the personality of the man behind the artwork. Certainly, the film is more concerned with exploring Frank’s personal life and interiority than it is with framing the artistic work that sprang from it. The film’s central interviews, often curmudgeonly and playful, discuss everything from Frank’s early life in Switzerland to his relationship with his deceased children. Israel’s intense, quiet familiarity with the man she has worked alongside for over a decade imbues these discussions and their portrayal on-screen with compassionate honesty.
This compassion that Israel extends toward her subject does not extend toward her audience. Most immediately, the film conveys the opposite of intimacy, translating to uninformed spectators as an unfeeling sensory overload that shutters us along at arm’s length instead of inviting us into an interaction with the screen. It wasn’t until after my screening of the film had ended, the lights bringing the red back into the theater seats, that I realized Robert Frank was in the audience, sitting two rows back from me as Laura Israel pointed him out from the stage. As I and the rest of the audience turned to look, I felt no more connected to the artist sitting twenty feet away from me as I had before the movie began, in spite of all the film’s close-range explorations of his work and life. The image of Frank presented in Don’t Blink is one viewed through the magnifying glass of Laura Israel’s filmmaking, and its collaged immediacy and imperative intimacy can only deepen what an audience already knows. Though compassionately detailed, it’s a hard sell to anyone looking for the bigger picture.
Author Biography
Christian Leus is a sophomore English-Film Studies major at Hendrix College and a native of Altheimer, Arkansas. An aspiring film critic, Christian spends her time writing about spectatorial experience and annoying her friends with her opinions.
Mentor Biography
Kristi McKim is an Associate Professor of English and Chair of Film Studies at Hendrix College, where she was awarded the Charles S. and Lucile Esmon Shivley Odyssey Professorship, honored as the 2014-15 United Methodist Exemplary Professor, and nominated for the CASE U.S. Professors of the Year Award. Her publications include the books Love in the Time of Cinema (2011) and Cinema as Weather: Stylistic Screens and Atmospheric Change (2013), in addition to pieces in Camera Obscura, Studies in French Cinema, Senses of Cinema, Film International, The Cine-Files, and Film-Philosophy.
Department Overview
Hendrix College offers a major in English with an emphasis in Film Studies and a minor in Film Studies. This growing program within an intimate and rigorous liberal arts college environment includes a variety of courses in the history and theory of film and media, alongside co-curricular experiences (such as this trip to the New York Film Festival) generously made possible through the Hendrix-Odyssey Program. Extracurricular film-related groups include Hendrix Film Society and Hendrix Filmmakers.
Film Details
Don’t Blink: Robert Frank (2015)
Canada/USA/France
Director Laura Israel
Runtime 82 minutes
Follow this link to read the introduction to this set of reviews: https://www.filmmattersmagazine.com/2016/05/21/2015-new-york-film-festival-introduction/
