An American Journey: In Robert Frank's Footsteps

An American Journey: In Robert Frank's Footsteps is a film made by French-American filmmaker Philippe Séclier in 2009. The 60-minute documentary traces Swiss-American photographer Robert Frank's hallmark The Americans photography book, published in 1958. The Americans chronicles Frank's travels through America while on a Guggenheim Fellowship, from the East Coast down to Florida, through the South and across the country, eventually ending up in California. 

Frank's The Americans was groundbreaking work in modern photography. Over fifty years later, Séclier retraced Frank's steps, visiting some of the most significant sites that Frank photographed. In "An American Journey," Séclier travels over 15,000 miles, and the documentary transitions between cinematography captured by Séclier and photography captured by Frank. 

Throughout the film, Séclier converses with a wide range of people including other photographers and cinematographers, but most interestingly, a few people who were in the scenes of Frank's photographs, and the manager of a hotel where he took a landscape photo. Séclier was able to humanize Frank's work through his strategic tracking down of the subjects of some of Frank's most famous photos. However, this was truly the only exciting part of the slow-moving one hour documentary. 

While I appreciated the grassroots-esque vibe of the documentary, the quality was lacking. In fact, it almost felt like the documentary was filmed on a home movie recorder. Although this parallels Frank's style of photography in his exclusive usage of 35mm film, for a documentary filmed in 2009, it seemed haphazardly made, as if it were in need of another round of edits and higher quality film. Along the lines of what else was missing from the documentary, the viewer seldom interacted with Séclier. I believe an introduction of the filmmaker would have forged a better relationship between not only the viewer and the documentary but also Séclier and the the subjects that he interacted with in the documentary. This would have reinforced how Frank took a look at America through more of an outsider's view as he was exiled from Europe, which would have played nicely with Séclier's French origins as well.

Although the documentary was groundbreaking in the sense that it unveiled those who were crystallized in one of the most significant photography books of all time, this documentary lends the viewer to believe that some works of art should only be interpreted and explained by the artist themself. And this is one of those cases. If you find yourself looking into documentaries about Robert Frank, I would recommend a different one: Don't Blink: Robert Frank. Here, the viewer gets to interact with Frank, getting an inside look at the genius himself.