Saturday, February 8, 2016, 7 pm – “Don’t Blink” by Robert Frank
Friday, February 9, 2016, 6 pm – “Life-Raft Earth” by Robert Frank
This screening is free! Use the “Get Tickets” button to reserve your spot.
Presented by filmmaker Laura Israel
The MFAH has served as the repository and distributor of films by legendary photographer Robert Frank (born 1924) for more than three decades. This relationship has led to the preservation of essential works in the artist’s filmography, as well as hundreds of screenings and retrospectives around the world.
About the Presenter
Laura Israel started editing award-winning commercials and music videos while a film student at New York University. She formed the editorial company Assemblage and worked on projects involving David Byrne, Ziggy Marley, New Order, Lou Reed, Keith Richards, Patti Smith, and Sonic Youth, among others. Windfall, her directorial debut, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and won top prize at Doc NYC. A New York Times Critic’s Pick, the paper called it “urgent, informative, and artfully assembled,” and Israel was named in Filmmaker Magazine’s 2011 “25 New Faces of Independent Film.” Don’t Blink – Robert Frank premiered in the main slate of the 2015 New York Film Festival. Included as one of Artforum’s top 10 films of 2015 as well as one of Film Comment’s top 10 unreleased films, Don’t Blink also screened at the 2016 Berlin International Film Festival.
The Museum hosts one of the first public screenings of the new feature-length documentary Robert Frank – Don’t Blink prior to its national release. Several years ago, Robert Frank consented to a request from Laura Israel, his trusted longtime editor and collaborator, to serve as the subject of a new film. Culling from many years of conversations while working and watching his films together, Israel brilliantly creates a portrait described by the New York Film Festival as “a lively rummage sale of images, sounds, and recollected passages, unfathomable losses, and friendships that leaves audiences a fast and fleeting imprint of the life of the Swiss-born man who reinvented himself the American way, and is still standing on ground of his own making at the age of 90.”
This screening is free! Use the “Get Tickets” button to reserve your spot.
Whole Earth Catalog editor Stewart Brand and his friend Hugh Romney (aka Wavy Gravy) asked photographer Robert Frank to document “The Hunger Show,” a weeklong fast staged by the Portola Institute in California. This “happening” was designed to make the problem of world hunger and malnutrition a personal matter for participants and observers. Life-Raft Earth records the October 1969 event, which took place in a parking lot in Hayward, California. A fascinating time capsule, this short film is shown in a newly restored 16mm print created with funding from the National Film Preservation Foundation. Laura Israel, Frank’s longtime editor, introduces the screening.