Films

Fire in the East: A Portrait of Robert Frank

Part of First Saturday Festivals
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Two people look out of side-by-side windows in a brick building in this horizontal black and white photograph. The woman on our left has a double chin and a broad chest. She wears a polka-dotted dress and dark shawl or vest, and she leans forward with one hand on the sill. Her face is partially shadowed by a white window blind. An American flag hanging near this window billows across the right two-thirds of the picture, entirely hiding the second person’s head. That person wears a coat buttoned up to a rounded collar. They hold one hand near their chin and the other by their waist. The flag has eight columns of stars. The work is signed and dated in the white margin below: “1955 HOBOKEN” to the left and “Robert Frank” to the right.
Robert Frank, Parade—Hoboken, New Jersey, 1955, printed 1977, gelatin silver print, Robert Frank Collection, Robert B. Menschel Fund, in Honor of the 50th Anniversary of the National Gallery of Art, 1991.82.5

Join filmmaker Philip Brookman and writer Nicholas Dawidoff for a post-screening discussion.

Throughout his career, iconic American photographer and filmmaker Robert Frank traveled across the country and documented the United States in all its complexity. Produced by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and KUHT-Houston Public Television, Fire in the East: A Portrait of Robert Frank surveys four decades of Frank’s art and life including interviews with friends and colleagues, such as Emile DeAntonio, Allen Ginsburg, June Leaf, Jonas Mekas, Duane Michaels, John Szarkowski, and Anne Wilkes Tucker. (Philip Brookman and Amy Brookman, 1986, digital, 28 minutes) 

The screening is followed by a conversation between the filmmaker, Philip Brookman, also consulting curator at the National Gallery, and writer Nicholas Dawidoff (The Other Side of Prospect: A Story of Violence, Injustice, and the American City), who is currently writing a biography of Frank. 

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