Robert Frank: One Hour

by Robert Frank (Photographer)

C'est vrai! (One Hour) is a single-take of Robert Frank and actor Kevin O'Connor walking and riding in the back of a minivan through lower Manhattan. Shot between 3:45 and 4:45 p.m. on July 26, 1990, it appears to document a journey, but this little and little-known book, first issued by Hanuman in 1992, reveals it to have had a script (by Frank and his assistant, Michal Rovner) and enough actors (27) and crew to fill two pages of credits. Frank also acknowledges that a conversation heard in a diner is written by Mika Moses, but that Peter Orlovsky's crucial plot-turning lines, intercepted by Frank roughly halfway through the hour, in front of the Angelika Cinema on Houston Street, are "total improvisation." C'est Vrai is published as a part of a long-term program to re-issue all of Frank's works; the film will also be issued as a DVD within Robert The Complete Film Works.

88 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 1992

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.

Robert Frank (November 9, 1924 – September 9, 2019) was a Swiss American photographer and documentary filmmaker. His most notable work, the 1958 book titled The Americans, earned Frank comparisons to a modern-day de Tocqueville for his fresh and nuanced outsider's view of American society. Critic Sean O'Hagan, writing in The Guardian in 2014, said The Americans "changed the nature of photography, what it could say and how it could say it. [ ... ] it remains perhaps the most influential photography book of the 20th century." Frank later expanded into film and video and experimented with manipulating photographs and photomontage.

Reviews

[Mills College Library]

P Hanuman