Don’t Blink – Robert Frank

Energetic, crazy portrait of one of the most amazing photographers and avant-garde film directors in history, Robert Frank, who came to the United States from Switzerland in 1944. He found himself in an ideal time and quickly became America’s chronicler—his camera would encounter beatniks, hippies, counter-culture artists, and various big city misfits. However, Frank also photographed Welsh miners, Peruvian Indians, London Bankers and American rednecks with equal passion. Always on the road, he captured the world before globalization, beautiful and seducing in its diversity. His realistic and poetic photographs, which showed loneliness and America as if it was painted by Edward Hopper, have stirred a lot of controversy. They were criticized for their stark realism, bad composition, lack of logic and harmony, and blur. And yet, these features helped him create a new style, the so-called indecisive moment photography, named in opposition to Henri Cartier-Bresson’s theory of decisive moment. The documentary, richly illustrated by Frank’s photographs as well as music and poetry of artists he cooperated with (such as Velvet Underground, Bob Dylan, Jack Kerouac, Living Theater), is also a lecture on his ideas about art, philosophy and the meaning of being with people.