Me and My Brother, Frank’s first feature length film, places documentary footage of poets Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, and Peter’s brother Julius within a fictional framework. Constantly delineating real and imaginary situations and moving back and forth between color and black and white, the film describes the inner and outer worlds of Julius, a catatonic, who silently observes the world around him. The film was re-edited in 1997 to mark the passing of Allen Ginsberg and also features the late Joseph Chaikin, founder of the revolutionary Off-Broadway company, Open Theater.
Robert Frank (b. 1924, Zurich) is one of the most well-known and acclaimed photographers in the world. Yet he was also a filmmaker, a fact that comparatively few remember or are even aware of. From 1959 onwards, he put his work as a photographer on hold to focus on cinema, going on to complete more than 25 films over a 50-year career until his death in September 2019. Many of these are regarded as seminal works within the international independent and documentary scene.
Photo credit: Dodo Jin Ming