French Filmmaker retraces a famous jourmey

It was a foreigner who best captured the soul of America in the ’50s. Swiss-born photographer Robert Frank traversed the United States alone from 1955 to 1956 on a Guggenheim Fellowship, taking over 28,000 photographs that he later culled down to a succinct 83 to form his most famous work, the seminal 1959 photography book “The Americans.”

Fifty years after the publication of “The Americans,” French journalist and filmmaker Philippe Séclier began a two-and-a-half-year-long project to retrace Frank’s cross-country trip. After traversing over 50,000 miles, shooting more than 70 hours of footage, and speaking with curators and Frank’s acquaintances, Séclier pieced his experiences together to create his first film, the hour-long documentary “An American Journey.” The film opens this week at Film Forum alongside a new exhibition of Frank’s work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Through his Leica lens, Frank unflinchingly stared down America, and America—reticent, ebullient, lonely, hopeful—stared right back. With respectful detachment, Frank captured it all, shocking critics accustomed to well lit, classically composed pictures with the informal muddiness of his images and the attention he paid to the more-than-ordinary—the diner counters and mailboxes and old couples in their cars with nowhere to go.

“When I decided to make this film I just wanted to understand, to explain,” Séclier said. “It’s not a lesson on how you live here. It’s just to compare two periods and to explain how this book is very important to American culture, and ... the modern period.”

Séclier explored that resonance by revisiting the sites of some of Frank’s best known photographs. Working with a handheld digital camera and natural lighting to mimic Frank’s practice of using no tripod or flash, Séclier hunted down the exact hotel windows, crooked elms, and roadside statues that appear in the book.

He even happened across some of the exact same people, 50 years older and living only a stone’s throw away from where Frank first found them. Describing his meeting with the boy in Frank’s shot of a Fourth of July celebration in Jay, New York, Séclier said, “It was like a shock, because at this time, you are filming a man holding [his image as] the small boy in the book. It’s very emotional, because the book is alive.”

For Séclier, it is the book as an object—“The thing of the book, not one picture in particular,” he clarified—that is a masterpiece of American art, a work we continue to revisit because we still recognize ourselves within it.

According to Séclier, Frank saw America as it is seen today. “The book is very modern,” he explained. Though it was made in the ’50s, the same issues “about racism, about religion, about the classes rich and poor” persist today.

He continued, “I would say the book is very well known now because we can see in these black and white pictures that there is the same America, the same wave of culture.”
Kerouac writes in the introduction to “The Americans” of “the humor, the sadness, the EVERYTHING-ness and American-ness of these pictures.” Séclier, traveling through our present with an eye towards the past, helps us to rediscover American culture.

“An American Journey” plays alongside Helen Levitt’s classic short “In the Street” through Oct. 6 at Film Forum, on Houston Street just west of Sixth Avenue.