USA,
1968, 91 min
Shown in 1998
CREDITS
- dir
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Robert Frank
- prod
-
Helen Silverstein
- scr
-
Robert Frank, Sam Shepard, Allen Ginsberg
- cam
-
Robert Frank
- editor
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Robert Frank, Helen Silverstein, Bob Easton
- cast
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Julius Orlovsky, Joseph Chaikin, John Coe, Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, Virginia Kiser, Nancy Fish, Christopher Walken
- source
-
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 1001 Bissonet, P.O. Box 6826, Houston,TX 77265. FAX: 713-639-7399
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COMMENTS
Robert Frank appeared in person to receive the Persistence of Vision Award.
OTHER
Robert Frank’s late 1960s masterpiece is his most ambitious and complex film. It incorporates black-and-white and color film, montage, split screen, nonsynchronous sound, voiceover, fractured chronology and other cinematic devices to tell both fictional and documentary stories. An exploration of Julius Orlovsky, the catatonic brother of poet Peter Orlovsky, Me and My Brother is ostensibly about mental illness and society’s reaction to it. Yet it also explores the complex relationship between cinema and truth, raising questions about voyeurism, the parallels between acting and social behavior and the creation of illusion to echo reality. Julius, after spending years in a New York mental hospital, emerges catatonic and must rely on his brother Peter, who lives with poet Allen Ginsberg. We see him at work, at home, walking blankly through the city and staring uncomprehendingly at simple objects. Frank begins to question his own role as documentary filmmaker, doubting his ability to make sense of his subject. When Julius wanders off in the middle of filming, Frank hires an actor (Joseph Chaikin) to play the character and begins a fictional version of his psychological portrait. Then, as suddenly as he vanished, Julius turns up at an institution. In an astounding final scene, he breaks his long silence as he and Frank confront each other through the lens. Frank recently re-edited Me and My Brother in preparation for the striking of this new print.
—Paul Roth
FACTOID #173
Though he starred in an Opening Night film (1967’s How I Won the War), lent his image and songs to 1968’s Festival entry Yellow Submarine and was scheduled to appear at the 1971 Festival with wife Yoko for an evening of their short films, John Lennon never attended the SFIFF.
