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Robert
Frank became known when he settled down in Bleeker Street,
N.Y.City and filmed what has become a cult movie of the
Beat Generation, Pull My Daisy (1959) (with
buddies Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs)
plus a number of outrageous features with or about Mick
Jagger (Cocksucker Blues, the US 1972 tour
of the Stones) and Tom Waits (Candy Mountain,
1987).
After learning of Sanyu's death and the dissemination
of his paintings in Taiwan, he decided to honor the man's
memory. Shot in Paris during several visits in May and
June of 1999, Frank re-created, or perhaps re-invented,
Sanyu's life with French and Chinese professional actors.
Robert Frank loved Sanyu but, once more, he is talking
about himself as an artist. As he puts it "I am filming
the outside in order to look inside."
 French
actress Delphine Seyrig, who was supposedly Alain Resnais'
discovery in Hiroshima Mon Amour at the
time of the French New Wave, actually appears for the
first time in Robert Frank's Beat Generation film
Pull My Daisy. She was then living in New York
and married to a New York painter, a friend of Jack Kerouac.
Seyrig plays the humorous part of a faithful housewife
setting the table and doing kitchen chores! She is honored
in Locarno with Swiss-born Jacqueline Veuve's homage,
Delphine Seyrig, Portrait of a Comet.
Claire Clouzot
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Swiss-born
Robert Frank returns to his home country at the Locarno Film Festival!
The 76-year old legendary photographer and video artist studied
in Zurich, his birthplace before immigrating to the USA. In 1958,
he published the legendary photography book, "The Americans", a
mapping of 60s America, contributing radical innovations to the
prevailing photographic conventions of the time. His films often
mix his public and private life as in Conversations in Vermont
(1969) and Life Dances On (1980). His half-hour 35mm
film Sanyu, presented in Locarno in the Filmmakers
of the Present section, is about a close friend who died 40 years
ago in Paris, the Chinese painter Sanyu. 