Photographs and Film 1959–1980
With the mammoth project of The Americans behind him, Frank turned quickly to filmmaking. He took his first film footage in the summer of 1958, filming Mary and several friends in Provincetown, MA. He went on to make such films as The Sin of Jesus (1960), Pull My Daisy (1961), Me and My Brother (begun 1965, opened 1969), Home Improvements (made 1983, first shown 1985), and his only feature-length film, Candy Mountain (begun 1986, released 1988). Frank continued to travel on photographic assignments to places such as Italy and Nairobi (1961) as well as Yugoslavia, Romania, and Hungary (1963).
Although Frank declared From the Bus his “last personal project in still photography,” he continued making photographs and collages in tandem with his film career. Often, he combined the two practices. In 1959, Frank cut, mounted, and marked on film stills from Pull My Daisy, in a manner reminiscent of his early groupings of Swiss contact prints. Later, he printed multiple film stills and strips on a single page, emphasizing his persistent interest in recurrent visual motifs and the repetition of form but signaling his rejection of the single still photographic image.