Seeing With Robert Frank's Eyes

Fifty years ago today, "The Americans" was published in Paris. Robert Frank's book of 83 black-and-white images, extracted from more than 28,000 individual shots taken on road trips between 1955 and 1957, did not reflect the apple-pie vistas of Eisenhower suburbia. The Swiss photographer took a novel, jaundiced view of the country, catching lonely, vagabond faces with unusual angles, jukeboxes alight in half-empty bars, lost highways, and short-order melancholy.

After the underground success of "The Americans" in the late '50s, Mr. Frank began to concentrate on art films and videos, such as 1959's beatnik reverie "Pull My Daisy." He captured a society in flux, one making a jarring transition from contentment to discontentment, and he did so from uncommon perspectives. One oft-cited review deemed his work a "meaningless blur." But as Jack Kerouac (who served as narrator on "Pull My Daisy") wrote in his introduction to the Grove Press edition of "The Americans," published in 1959, "Robert Frank. Swiss, unobtrusive, nice, with that little camera that he raises and snaps with one hand he sucked a sad poem right out of America onto film, taking rank among the great tragic poets of the world."

That vision will be honored tonight when Mr. Frank, 83, appears at a one-day retrospective of his films, hosted by the Film Society of Lincoln Center. The occasion is the latest edition of "The Americans," published by the German house Steidl, in a version overseen by the photographer. Though the pictures do not appear markedly different from the 2000 Scalo edition of the book (they are a little bit darker), they generally correct unauthorized croppings in other previous editions.

What is most compelling about "The Americans" today is how what was once disturbing and revelatory gradually became iconic and even romantic: Looking back from the 21st century, these scenes are what come to mind when we think about what "America" is. This is not so much in a contemporary sense, as a lot of what fills Mr. Frank's lens — the jukeboxes, the black-and-white televisions, the convertibles with their tail fins — looks like relics of an imaginary age. But maybe because of that, and because of so much chest-thumping campaign rhetoric about one candidate's patriotism or another's beer-and-a-shot authenticity, it's an extremely useful book to look at right now. These photographs have never stopped resonating.

As much as Mr. Frank's still images have colonized our national subconscious, his films remain mostly obscure. Tonight's screenings precede a full retrospective scheduled for November at the Anthology Film Archives (and an exhibition that opens in January at the National Gallery of Art). They also highlight Steidl's ongoing series of Mr. Frank's films on DVD, packaged in miniature replicas of film-roll canisters and available online for a whopping $140. With any luck, these collector editions will precede a more affordable boxed set of some sort — lest they become as hard to get as one of the guitars made by Elmore Silk in Mr. Frank's 1988 "Candy Mountain" (his only film that might be found on VHS in a mom-and-pop video rental outlet).

In the meantime, one can catch three programs of Mr. Frank today, with an evening session devoted to a new documentary about the artist, and a discussion of his work. Among the rarities are "The Sin of Jesus" (1961), an austere, black-and-white, 37-minute short about a lonely woman (Julie Bovasso) and her unexpected encounter with an unmerciful Christ (Roberts Blossom) on a desolate farm. It's hard to say what comes as more of a surprise: the sight of trombone-wielding extras parading around in white robes and angel wings, or a cameo by Telly Savalas.

The full-length "Me and My Brother" (1968) was Mr. Frank's first feature, and uncommonly prescient in its satirical musings about mass media. As the film begins, a legend flashes on the screen: "In this film all events and people are real. Whatever is unreal is purely my imagination." Immediately, the camera lands on a staged movie shoot, with actors portraying the film's principals — the brothers Peter and Julius Orlovsky — auditioning for the roles. (Pay close attention to the director's surrogate: That's Christopher Walken, making his screen debut). Moments later, we're in a screening room as a small audience watches the clip and denounces it.

One woman declares, "The best actor in the world couldn't replace Julius." Mr. Frank goes on to prove this right, as he follows Peter Orlovsky and his lover, Allen Ginsberg, on a rambunctious reading tour, and traces the relationship between Peter and Julius, who has been released to his sibling's care after spending much of his adult life institutionalized. It's a raw and poignant portrait, in which the camera peels away the varnish from every wall.