Leaving Home, Coming Home – A Portrait of Robert Frank

Leaving Home, Coming Home is the first full-length documentary about the life and work of the legendary film maker and photographer Robert Frank (1924, Zürich). The film was shot in New York, where the young photographer arrived in 1947 and where – less than ten years later – he was to become renowned with his revolutionary book of photographs called The Americans, and in Nova Scotia where Frank now lives. Robert Frank talks at length about the photographs and his journeys through America and to places like Paris, London and Wales. There are scenes from his film début Pull My Daisy, the classic beat film, with Jack Kerouac in top form on the soundtrack (during a retrospective of Robert Frank at the Rotterdam Film Festival in 1983, the copy of this film was stolen from the projection cabin; if anyone still has it, it’s never too late to return it!). There is also plenty of material from other Frank classics such as Me And My Brother and the infamous Rolling Stones-documentary Cocksucker Blues, interwoven with interviews with Frank in various places, some of which he hasn’t visited for forty years. At the same time, the film offers a beautiful picture of Frank’s relationship with his second wife, the artist June Leaf, with whom he leads a fairly quiet life in Mabou, Nova Scotia. Frank also talks extensively about the loss of both their children and how that affected his art.Fox’ portrait is a complex, moving and sometimes funny document by one of the most uncompromising and influential of today’s artists. (GT)