Interview

With "The Americans" Robert Frank solidified his position among photography legends, as evidenced by the success the Met's current exhibition of those 83 poignant, era-defining snapshots. Though decidedly less exposed, the Swiss-born artist's film ventures were just as evocative, and caught their subjects off-guard in a way that idolizes and destroys them at the same time. In fact, viewers of Cocksucker Blues might not realize Frank was the man who shot the seminal Rolling Stones documentary, which was banned by the band for pulling the curtain back on their drug use and hard partying lifestyle. Frank also is near the source of the meta genre that Charlie Kaufman has come to embrace, with his first feature length film Me and My Brother. Co-written by playwright Sam Shepard and debuted at the 1968 Venice Film Festival to raves, the film revisits two of the Beat subjects from Frank's 28-minute short, Pull My Daisy, on a cross-country campus book tour with Peter Orlovsky, Allen Ginsberg, and Orlovsky's catatonic brother, Julius, whom they signed out of a New York psychiatric ward in the mid-sixties. Read the full story on Art in America. (PHOTO: ROBERT FRANK'S ME AND MY BROTHER)