In the mid-1950s, a photographer named Robert Frank, lately emigrated from Switzerland, drove around the United States to see and to join his new country. He shot pictures. The results, or his choices among them, were published in a book of eighty-three photos called The Americans, which was an immediate and lasting success. The book was not only a unique way for a newcomer to learn about his new home: in some ways it showed a social candor that was as yet unusual in photography. In his introduction to the book, Jack Kerouac wrote: "Robert Frank, Swiss, unobtrusive, nice, with that little camera that he raises and snaps with one hand he sucked a sad poem right out of America onto film." We can still look over Frank’s shoulder and see that poem in the making.
Fifty years later, another European, the French photographer and director Philippe Séclier, retraced Frank’s footsteps--tire treads, really. In a film called An American Journey, Séclier travels to see this country today from the same vantage points as Frank: South Carolina, Montana, Louisiana, and so enticingly on. Séclier includes interviews with some experts, mostly modern curators of photography, who support his view of Frank’s pioneering in photography as social inquiry. It is hardly a surprise that almost all the people who were in the original shots are no longer around, but all the towns and cities have greatly changed, too. Séclier gives us the essence of Frank’s vision as understood by his own.
These days we are all so awash in photography that Séclier can add little to our knowledge of the way America looks. Essentially what he brings us is not news but difference--why and how the mining town of Butte is not the same, why Frank’s sidewise view of a segregated New Orleans trolley is now a historical document. We find ourselves wondering what a comparable Séclier--equipped with what camera technology?--will see on a similar trip fifty years from now.
His work underscores an element that implicitly and sometimes visibly overwhelmed Frank: the size of this country. Frank, like many Europeans, was struck by the fact that in America, after you have traveled a long way, there is still a long way to go. Séclier found, almost naïvely, that to reach the Frank sites he had to move and move and move. His closing credit is "Directing and driving by Philippe Séclier." Most of the shots of auto travel in his film are slightly blurred, as if to signify that he was voyaging through a kind of outer space on earth. Thus, like Frank, he ultimately situates the places that he visits in vastness. It is part of the American Geist. He makes us remember the opening of John Ford’s version of The Grapes of Wrath, when Henry Fonda walks away from us into a wide landscape down a narrow road; and the very last line of the Dos Passos trilogy U.S.A.: "A hundred miles down the road"; and Kerouac’s own On the Road; and Frank’s highway shots of U.S. 30 in Nebraska and U.S. 285 in New Mexico. And look at Séclier’s title. He is revisiting Frank’s particulars in a continental cosmos.
Subsequently Frank had a substantial film-making career, most notably with Pull My Daisy, a sort of ballad of Beatniks written and narrated by Kerouac. But he never abandoned still photography. It is as if he refused to concede that cinema was an automatic improvement on it. Film always swaggers a bit over stills, perhaps because it glories in the delusion that it can really defeat mortality. The still photograph more quietly knows that it at least preserves one infinitely deep moment.
Back when the Underground was in the foreground of film discussion, Andy Warhol made a picture called The Chelsea Girls. It was shot in the celebrated Hotel Chelsea in New York, but it had much less to do with its setting than with Warhol’s attempts to reshape film form. Nonetheless, he felt a need to mention the place in his title.
Now, however, comes a concentration on the place--Chelsea on the Rocks, a documentary meant as memorial. The hotel has had a century-old reputation as a rather free-and-easy, convivial roost for all kinds of artists: it has now changed ownership, and this film was made as tribute to a landmark that may be changing. The director is Abel Ferrara, who made such numbers as Bad Lieutenant and King of New York, and is not especially known for sentiment. But he was drawn to this subject and has handled it with all the appropriate mist and chuckle.
