Robert Frank Film Series

Cinema program
Every Wednesday at 7 pm.
Auditori del MACBA

A decision: I put my Leica in a cupboard. Enough of lying in wait, pursuing, sometimes catching the essence of the black and white, the knowledge of where God is. I make films. Now I speak to the people in my viewfinder.
Robert Frank
The retrospective exhibition Robert Frank: Storylines, co-produced with the Tate Modern, is complemented by this unusual cycle of Robert Frank’s films, practically unknown here in Spain, which makes clear the importance of these works in his artistic career. Robert Frank is known for his significant and unquestionable contribution to photography in the mid-twentieth century. However, towards the end of the ‘50s, just when he had achieved the status of ‘star’, he temporarily gave up photography and became a filmmaker. This selection of films, in which many different formats are used ranging from direct or pseudo-documentary cinema to road-movies or a personal diary, allows closer examination of film’s critical influence on the narrative and sequential aspects of his photography. For his films were not an isolated chapter in his career, just the opposite. In the films he develops and radicalises the interests he had begun to explore with his photographic work. These include his reflections on the act of creating itself, the contamination between time and space that photography and cinema allow, the dichotomy between reality and fiction, or the analysis of the relationship between memory, language and images.