Cocksucker Blues is a documentary film about The Rolling Stones' 1972 North American Tour. The film provides an intimate and raw look into the excesses and hedonism of the rock and roll lifestyle, capturing the band's performances, backstage drama, and the counterculture of the era. It also explores themes of sexuality, drug use, and the chaotic nature of being on tour.

A mediocre musician goes on the road in search of the world's greatest guitar maker

In an empty lot in Harlem, an elite group of New Yorkers prepares for a book-signing party given in honor of a writer who never shows up. Local residents, dealing with the practicality of life, look on as the guests obsess about identity, status, and success.

An egg-sorting woman shrugs off even the appearance of Christ. From Isaak Babel story.

Invited to shoot the cover for their 1972 album Exile on Main St., Robert Frank developed a relationship with the Rolling Stones that extended beyond Cocksucker Blues to include this Super 8 short, a jittery montage of the band slumming on Skid Row in downtown Los Angeles and gadding about in Mick Jagger’s rented Bel-Air mansion that Frank wryly contrasted with images of poor Black street buskers on the Bowery. Graphic designer John Van Hamersveld ended up using still images and film strips from the Super 8 footage to create collages for the album’s back cover and inner sleeves; the original material is on view in the exhibition Life Dances On. — Museum of Modern Art

Commissioned for an event commemorating the ongoing construction of a 21-mile tunnel through the Swiss Alps, Robert Frank’s experimental short is as terse and unflinching as a Dziga Vertov newsreel, superimposing images of his wife, the artist June Leaf, at work and at play with the emotionless felling of a farm cow. — Museum of Modern Art

This rarely screened film was used to raise funds for the making of Energy and How to Get It. High-energy physicist Robert Golka was granted a lease on an airplane hangar once used to build B-29 bombers to further his experiments on ball lightning and free energy distribution. By the time Robert Frank and his crew arrived, Golka, his frisky older love interest Agnes Moon, and his dogs Nitro and Proton were facing eviction. — Museum of Modern Art

One of the longest handheld tracking shots in film history, It’s Real documents an hour in the street life of downtown Manhattan. Not only is it a unique record of a particular time and place—July 26, 1990, from 3:45 to 4:45 p.m. in the Lower East Side near Robert Frank’s studio (we note in a Daily News headline that after some 20 years the Zodiac killer still hasn’t been identified)—it’s also an experiment in fragmentary language, gesture, and life caught unawares. Snippets of dialogue captured in passing at phone booths and crosswalks, in alleyways, subways, and diners—chance encounters, only presumably, with people going about their day—have something of the aleatory cut-up technique of the Dadaists in the 1920s and William Burroughs and Byron Gysin in the 1950s, an effort to divine new and deeper meanings in ordinary life. — Museum of Modern Art

Home Improvements is a thought-provoking documentary that follows the life of a struggling artist who embarks on a journey of self-discovery. Through a series of introspective moments and encounters with various individuals, the film explores the themes of identity, creativity, and the meaning of home. As the artist reflects on their life and art, they seek to find a sense of belonging and purpose in a world that seems fragmented and disconnected.

Filmed in Wendover, Nevada, in early 1981, Energy and How to Get It combines documentary and fictional ideas. What began as a documentary film about Robert Golka, an engineer who was experimenting with ball lightening and the development of fusion as an energy force, was turned into a spoof on the documentary form, inserting fictional characters into the story such as the Energy Czar (William Burroughs), and a Hollywood agent (filmmaker Robert Downey). (mfah.org)

In this punkish, puckish music video for a song from Patti Smith’s 1996 album Gone Again, Frank borrows Catholic signifiers from past films like Sin of Jesus and Last Supper, including a kitsch rendering of Jesus and his apostles, a Caravaggesque closeup of Smith’s naked, dirty foot, and a discarded rosary. The producer of Summer Cannibals, Michael Schamberg, was a persuasive guy with consummate good taste, having also recruited Chris Marker, Kathryn Bigelow, Jonathan Demme, Robert Longo, and William Wegman to work on various music videos for New Order, R.E.M., Grace Jones, Talking Heads, and the B-52’s. — Museum of Modern Art

Julius Orlovsky, after spending years in a New York mental hospital, emerges catatonic and must rely on his brother Peter, who lives with poet Allen Ginsberg. When Julius wanders off in the middle of filming, Frank hires and 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 in an institution where he and Peter must face their relationship.

The 94-year-old Robert Frank’s unique recordings of his fellow artists Harry Smith and Allen Ginsberg, which he had salvaged from his own archive for Harry Smith at the Breslin Hotel.

O.K. End Here is Frank’s 1963 short film about inertia in a modern relationship. The film alternates between semidocumentary scenes and shots composed with rigid formality, and appears to have been directly influenced by the French Nouvelle Vague and Michelangelo Antonioni’s films.

A poet invites a group of friends to his apartment for a party, leading to spontaneous conversations and jazz performances.

The protagonists’ astounding verbal gymnastics and often incomprehensible interactions tend to descend into nonsense, and with the syncopated rhythm of its action and dialogue, this film is reminiscent of the playful and parodying elements of the Beat fantasy Pull My Daisy. The interweaving of documentary and fiction with the syncopated rhythm of its action and dialogue presents an absurd buzz of activity reminiscent of Beckett’s abstract comic grotesque.

In the words of Robert Frank, Hunter is about “. . . a man whose destiny is not to find a destination. . . . A man who fears that he will never find what his imagination compels him to look for, a mystical traveler going by train and by car through . . . language and landscape.” The film was shot entirely on location in Germany’s industrial Ruhr region in September/October 1989.

Longtime friends and frequent foils, Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso appeared onstage together countless times over the years, reading to audiences that sometimes numbered in the hundreds or thousands. On January 9, 1984, Robert Frank filmed Ginsberg reading his poem “White Shroud,” while Corso read a poem he had written the night before, some turgid verses on priapic preoccupations. — Museum of Modern Art

Sanyu (1901-1964), an important Chinese artist, was a friend of Robert Frank's who died in anonymity in Paris. In this film portrait, Frank creates a requiem that includes dramatic and documentary scenes set in Paris, and a chronicle of his trip to Taipei to attend Sotheby's auction of the paintings Sanyu left him.

In 1982, Robert Frank was on hand at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, to film the Jack Kerouac Conference, a 25th-anniversary commemoration of On the Road in which poignantly aging Beats and fellow-traveling authors, activists, and composers (Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Michael McClure, Herbert Huncke, Anne Waldman, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Ken Kesey, Abbie Hoffman, David Amram) gathered on a rain-swept Chautauqua porch to recite poetry and raise a glass to their patron saint. Particularly memorable is Frank’s humorous encounter with a group of grizzled and well-lubricated onlookers. — Museum of Modern Art