Focus on America Who the Slayer and Who the Victim?

AT THE TURN of the century, Harvard had as its President a man named Eliot whose face, I am told, was on one side quite fair and distinguished and beautiful. The other side of his face was darkened by a terrible birthmark. This was told me by a retired professor who attended Harvard at that time, a misplaced Yankee scholar who because of health exiled himself to my semi-tropical hometown in a house located halfway down the road which leads to the swamp where the lads and lasses went on Saturday nights to park, celebrate, or race our cars at ungodly speeds through the licking fingers of the Spaish moss. This professor told me that the dark side of Eliot's face was terrible to behold but that he was a splendid man, "a very moral man, Timmy." Eliot very much resembled the doctor in The Grand Hotel whose face seemed split down the middle-dark on one side, fair on the other-by just such a discoloration. In the movie, the doctor is present full face to the camera when the hotel thief is deciding whether or not to steal the wallet of the accountant, and at the close of the movie as well, when he pronounces with heavy irony (with the dark side of his face turned completely away from the camera so that the audience only sees his clear side in profile) that "People come and people go, but nothing ever happens at the Grand Hotel." Yes, splendid Eliot had some words of advice for the students when he returned to a "distinguished Sanders gathering" for his nineteenth birthday in 1924.

"Avoid... introspection, reflections on yourself, or as it is common to speak of now, self-expression. The less you think of yourselves in this world, the better, and the sooner you get the passion for serving others, at home and abroad, at home particularly, the better."

The special edition of the CRIMSON which carried the story of that 1924 tribute to Eliot had a large reproduction of a full-face portrait of the former President on the cover. Looking at the picture closely, it gives no clue that Eliot did not have an immaculate complexion. I have heard that he looked men straight in the eye, but did not like to be photographed.

ROBERT FRANK, who came to Harvard two weeks ago to show his films and talk to students in the Visual Studies Department, seemed profoundly uncomfortable when asked to introduce his works. As the Carpenter Center seems out of place in the midst of its red-brick, ivied, neo-classic or neo-gothic architectural neighbors (prompting the famous remark of Classics Professor John Huston Finley: "It looks like two pianos copulating!"), Frank felt out of place being even remotely in the vicinity of a school. "Colleges are giant hatcheries," said Frank. "Now that I have come here, today, this is the first time I really felt I understood what the word underground means. The bigness of education frightens me. I understand why radicals go underground. You know that song of Dylan's when he gets his degree at Princeton, Day of the Locust? I like that very much. That is the feeling."

The instructor who introduces Frank does not explain a thing, he says, "Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Robert Frank."

Frank, hands in pockets of charcoal corduroy pants, an old dark sweater and shirt, dark work-shoes of worn leather, short, dark-complexioned with an eight o'clock shadow, thinning but bushy black hair, with some wrinkles on his forehead after 43 years of facing the desperate moments head on, eyes sad, calm, laughing-he sidles up to the front and leans like a cowboy against the lectern. He crosses his feet.

Frank tells the audience he has decided not to cut his films and splice three of them together. "We will all be seeing them for the first time tonight, and I think I will like it." The three films will be Pull My Daisy, Me and My Brother, and a film commissioned by the American Film Institute about music, which ended up being a self-portrait. Frank shrugs, smiles and the lights dim.

The past. In 1959, Robert Frank published a book of photographs called The Americans, and Jack Kerouac wrote the introduction. Frank said he wanted to have Kerouac write the introduction because "he loved America very much and he was very desperate." Frank's photographs, taken 1955-57 on a Guggenheim fellowship, showed the American people at their most desperate.

Frank walked and drove crisscrossing the whole country, much like Kerouac on the road (except his family accompanied him to many places). "Swiss, unobtrusive, nice... with that little camera he raises and snaps with one hand be sucked a sad ???m right out of America onto film. taking rank among the tragic poets of the world..." as Kerouac himself put it. When he was working he was always alone, rarely seen, the quiet click of his shutter nearly always passing unheard, he might as well been a wraith.

Frank found angels behind cafe counters and operating elevators, jukeboxes our glowing gods of night, and coffins in cars under tarpaulins... "Car shrouded in fancy expensive designed tarpolian (I knew a truckdriver pronounced it "tarpolian") to keep soots of no-soot Malibu from falling on a new simonize job as owner who is a two-dollar-an-hour carpenter snoozes in house with wife and TV, all under palm trees for nothing, in the cemeterial California night.... In Idaho three crosses where the cars crashed," wrote Kerouac, but you must read the rest of his introduction. The pictures are pure existential moments, complex images, not pretty, but reflecting something in each case which shouts with mysterious intensity, in another language altogether, "There are no words!" In one of his pictures, a woman in an Elko, Nevada, casino reaches for the dice so intently her arm becomes, with slight blur, a serpent's tongue. Frank understood best the absolute respect the still image must have for reality, and the duty the photographer has to confront people in the reality of their daily lives.

After The Americans came out in 1959, Frank essentially quit taking photographs to make movies. That is, he continued taking some pictures into the mid-60s, but never again was the still camera to be his priority. "There should always be a struggle to come up with something new," said Frank. "You cannot repeat the old formulas. Perhaps I might take up still photography again, but only if I had something new to say. Eugene Smith, after all he went through, now takes pictures from his loft in New York City. They're really terrible pictures, you know. A shadow of his past. But he's fighting. He was almost killed in World War II, he fights alcoholism, and he pushes on even at the risk of falling flat on his face. There is struggle there. Walker Evans hasn't taken photographs for years. He realizes that if the pictures he takes now were to be so insignificant that they were merely an echo of the past, he should keep them to himself. If I were to begin taking photographs again, I would think more. The photographs in The Americans were almost pure feeling."

Now FRANK takes movies and his photographs are very much a part of his past. He thinks more, his movies are jagged, intricate, inchoate - full of rage and some humor and if they have anything in common I would say it is continual self-reference. Or self-probing. Before he just took the pictures. "I was solitary, alone, I would look at people and then walk away." said Frank. "I was young then. Didn't think much. Now I think about the end.

"New York City is at the end of the land, and I like being near the ocean. At the edge. I have sympathy for the outlaw, the deviant. I am attracted by something extreme. I like to see real crazy people. That's why I live in New York. It is kind of a boil. You can really see the sickness there. As an artist, who must deal with these things, I am a little proud to have existed through all this. I'm a little bit crazy myself.

"If you want to be an artist, you risk falling on your face. I live near the Bowery. Between the artist and the bum, there is little difference."

Frank describes his film Me and My Brother thus: The world of which I am a part includes Julius Orlovskv. Julius is a catatonic, a silent man; he is released from a state institution in the care of his brother Peter. Sounds and images pass him and no reaction comes from him. In the course of the film he becomes like all the other people in front of my camera - an actor. At times most of us are silently acting because it would be too painful not to act and too cruel to talk of the truth which exists.... To complete this circle Joseph Chaikin, the Actor, plays Julius and becomes me at the same time." In Me and My Brother Frank uses film, which is a process of lies, to describe the reality he insists on living with.

In the first main sequence Julius enters a room in which the cameras are filming Peter making it with another homosexual for a skinflick. As Julius (Chaikin) watches, we see him recoil. The grating voice of the man behind the camera tries to sell him: Come around again, it's not so bad, Love can't be bad, ch Julius? The man behind the camera promises to show Julius the film. You'll be in the movies, Julius, big... up on the screen. The movie is a prostituting medium and Julius r?i?cts it; he refuses to become an actor.

In the next sequence Frank tries to keep the audience from taking the movie simply, therefore irresponsibly. He shows people watching Me and My Brother in a theater. Several turn away from the movie and leave in disgust, saying "This is a boring movie. The whole Orlovsky family bores me." Then another member of the audience turns round to the camera and says "Gee. I like this. This is really a wonderful movie!" Neither is this a way to see the movie, for Me and My Brother is obviously not simply good or bad.

Peter treats Julius cruelly ("Yer a god damn creep, that's what you are!") throughout the film. People in the Carpenter Center audience who were familiar with the catatonic conditions were shocked. Catatonics know what is going on around them, they are driven deeper into their condition by the reaction of those around them. They are speechless, often, and retreat into a totally noncommunicative state eventually, depending on their environment. And as we see the film progress, there are many instances in which the camera itself is a very threatening presence to the real Julius Orlovsky (the one with the beard). And if indeed most of the disturbing scenes were shot using the actor Chaikin, Julius must have been extremely susceptible to the idea that the film was being make about him, that someone was probing into his soul, using his sickness. The questioning Frank gathering material for his film. Even if the original contact was innocent on Frank's part, if he just happened to film the poetry reading with Julius in the background, Frank is guilty of contributing to Julius' condition. We suspect.

Perhaps this tension, the guilt of the audience is a conscious part of the film. I am not sure about my guilt in watching Orlovsky and being entertained by him. But he has become a part of my world as well, and Frank has succeeded in breaking through the normal disassociation of emotions in this film.

In response to questions the following morning, Frank said that perhaps Julius was affected by the making of the film, but he didn't feel it played a major role in his decline. A photographer must believe very strongly in himself, for it is never easy to use a real person in a moving photograph unless one is insensitive and totally egotistic. Frank never spoke of this internal bleeding, but it is there. His whole life illustrates that some men must intrude on others as well as ourselves. And Frank is ruthless in his belief.

In the last movie interspliced on the program was the movie about himself. In the beginning, Frank is seen talking to the director of the American Film Institute, the sponsors, explaining why he abandoned the music. "Fuck the music! This is going to be a film about me." And the film deals with his struggles as an artist, Frank has an actress play himself. Certain scenes are tinted red to reflect his internal struggle. The dialogue teeters on eloquence, but oftimes fails. Although the direct explication of his problems seems honest enough, the film seems to put a cloud between us and Frank's core. But there is a searing segment when Frank films some convicts in prison for life, singing spirituals. It is noble, powerful... so obviously real and honest that it literally leaps out at the audience. Sad, refreshing, powerful, memorable... then the movie cuts to the silly actress high on something, satirically singing the same songs. It is shocking. This hard cut is the one moment of this self-analysis that works. And it is inextricably bound up in the revulsion we feel for the cheap manipulation of movies. It is inextricably bound in the guilt of the audience.

Frank feels that he is now ready to make the movie of his life.