The Photo Film Club #009 – Don’t Blink – Robert Frank
DON'T BLINK - ROBERT FRANK
Wednesday 24th May
7pm (doors 6.30pm)
THE PHOTO FILM CLUB hosts a photography based film or documentary roughly every 4-6 weeks in the wonderful Theatr Colwyn cinema.
Watch a photography based film, meet some old friends, make some new friends, become inspired!
Our 9th Photo Film Club event was on WEDNESDAY 24th MAY at 7pm (doors 6.30pm) showing the film DON'T BLINK - ROBERT FRANK (cert TBC).
Ohh... and one last thing, it is not really a club, we just liked the name… It's not exclusive, you don’t have to join and everyone is welcome!
Photo Film Club #009
DON'T BLINK - ROBERT FRANK
- dir Laura Israel Cert(TBC)
WEDNESDAY 24th MAY 2023 at 7pm (doors 6.30pm)
Robert Frank revolutionized photography and independent film. He documented the Beats, Welsh coal miners, Peruvian Indians, The Stones, London bankers, and the Americans. This is the bumpy ride, revealed with unblinking honesty by the reclusive artist himself.
Photo of Robert Frank by Lisa Rinzler, copyright Assemblage Films LLC
Even Robert Frank’s friends will tell you that he was difficult. One of the most influential figures in the worlds of photography and independent filmmaking, Frank was never easily approachable. For over six decades he held steadfast to a singular vision and earned widespread acclaim without forsaking his outsider status.
Photo Eye Collage by Robert Frank, copyright Robert Frank
Don't Blink follows Frank from his early family life in Switzerland to his reluctance to embrace celebrity status in New York to his eventual quest for solitude in a remote corner of Nova Scotia, Canada. A series of personal tragedies pushed Frank to painfully explore complex feelings about family and friends, memory and loss, acceptance of change, and loneliness. Don't Blink offers audiences revelatory insight into the intricacies of his photos, films and personal history while artfully revealing Robert Frank’s complex life story.
Photo in Robert Frank’s studio by Lisa Rinzler, copyright Assemblage Films LLC
The life and work of Robert Frank—as a photographer and a filmmaker—are so intertwined that they’re one in the same, and the vast amount of territory he’s covered, from The Americans in 1958 up to his death 2019, is intimately registered in his now formidable body of artistic gestures. From the early ’90s on, Frank had 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 mix 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.
- New York Film Festival Description
Photo of Robert Frank by Sid Kaplan from contact sheet, copyright Sid Kaplan
We gratefully acknowledge Ffilm Cymru Wales support for our regular Photo Film Club screenings.
