Robert Frank: The Complete Film Works: Volume 2 “Conversations in Vermont, Liferaft Earth, OK End Here”

Here is volume two of Robert Frank’s long-awaited Complete Film Works. At the end of the 1950s, Frank abandoned traditional still photography to become a filmmaker. He eventually returned to photography in the 1970s, but Frank, as a filmmaker, has remained a well-kept secret for almost four decades. Volume two comprises Conversations in Vermont, Liferaft Earth and OK End Here. Conversations in Vermont was produced in 1969, and was Frank’s first autobiographical film, addressing his relationship with his two teenaged children, and partly told through his narration over filmed images of his photographs, family photographs and world famous images. Liferaft Earth opens with a newspaper report from Hayward, California: “Sandwiched between a restaurant and supermarket, 100 anti-population protesters spent their second starving day in a plastic enclosure…The so-called Hunger Show, a week-long starve-in aimed at dramatizing man’s future in an overpopulated, underfed world….” This film was made for Stewart Brand, the visionary founder of the international ecological movement and publisher of the bestselling Whole Earth Catalog (1968-85). OK End Here is Frank’s 1963 short film about inertia in a modern relationship. The film alternates between semi-documentary scenes and shots composed with rigid formality, and suggests the influence of the French Nouvelle Vague and Michelangelo Antonioni’s films.