Leaving Home, Coming Home: A Portrait of Robert Frank.(FOX, Gerald, 2005)
Shown on ITV’s the South Bank show in 2005 this documentary refers to the world greatest living photographer and I have to say after 5 minutes I did not like Robert Frank, he came across as rude and as a petulant child; however, my view changed as the documentary progressed.
Probably best know for this booked “The American” is a Swiss immigrant to the USA and the Americans is a project that he undertook shortly after arriving in the USA. Therefore, this is a man looking through the camera at a subject with very fresh eyes.
Wildly condemned at the time for being un-American the book is very far from that it his way of showing his love for this new country
The documentary’s conversations touch on his childhood in Switzerland during the war, the son of stateless German Jewish immigrant living in the daily fear that Nazi Germany would invade Neutral Switzerland.
These roots I feel have affected his work where is clearly sort his meaning in the pictures portraying the emotion of an immigrant in a country which was very different to the progressive USA of today – at the time these was stark divisions on racial grounds for example.
Frank with his work takes note of people and place and their relationship. The is one quote in the film which I will take away is that “Robert is a man with chopsticks….waits and waits… then picks the lasting moment from chaos”. This quote describes precisely how the Americans is put together.
All in all, this is a fascinating documentary, into the mind of a great documentary photographer who is usually very reticent to talk and his work let alone his family troubles with his son who suffered from mental illness and died at tragically young age.
I was embarrassed by the end of the film not have disliked him initially.
Bibliography
FOX, Gerald. 2005. Leaving Home, Coming Home: A Portrait of Robert Frank (2005). [online]. [Accessed 19 Aug 2015]. Available from World Wide Web: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bt97Jomj5nw&feature=youtu.be>