Frank Film

This Oscar-winning animation is a giant headache and could easily be used by evil, repressive governments to torture and brainwash their people and is one of the best examples of a truly awful film that somehow won this award. While I can definitely appreciate the effort it took making this film (cutting out thousands and thousands of magazine pictures to make collages), the problem is that it is so cacophonous. You see, the sound track consists of two alternate scripts being read CONSTANTLY throughout the film. Both narrators are the same person. One constantly repeats words starting with the F-sound while the other talks ad nauseum about his very dull life--during which time these collages appear and disappear rapidly. The film has no commercial appeal whatsoever and is great for people who like artsy and pretentious film--otherwise beware, as it's totally painful and annoying.

An almost kaleidoscopic review of images from the last fifty years bombard the screen accompanied by a dual narration. One stream is more continual but is gradually beaten into the background by the other which calls out in a keyword/phrase style. I didn't love this. The presentation of the photography does work well enough for a while, but I felt it quickly became quite repetitious and the manipulation of not just the imagery but of the focus too started to grate a bit. When the random sound track resorted to the calling out of people's names or expressions that begin with the letter "f", I sort of gave up. It's original and quirky, certainly, but I found it increasingly quite annoying to watch. Be careful if you're averse to flickering.

This short, which most deservedly won the Academy Award and I believe has been included in the Library of Congress's Film Preservation listings as well, defies description with mere words. It must be seen to be appreciated. At first I found the two separate soundtracks jarring, because the same person recorded them both. But gradually, I began to flow with the two distinct, yet equally interesting, narratives. The visual images correspond to one or the other narrative at different points. Compelling to watch.

This clearly was a labor intensive project, as any form of stop-motion animation has to be. Think about how long it took to shoot just 60 seconds worth of film and realize this is nine minutes long! Well worth tracking down, I saw this on Sundance Channel last night. Most highly recommended, but if your idea of animation begins and ends with Bugs Bunny or Speed Racer, you may not care for this at all.

When it comes to experimental film-making, I am the worst possible critic. Where others see great beauty and vision, I see pretension and uselessness. As such, I was pleasantly surprised to find that the animated short, 'Frank Film (1973),' directed by Frank and Caroline Mouris, is a genuinely wonderful autobiographical piece of film-making. Over a five-year period, the directors collected a vast volume of magazine clippings, and these are used to animate the stunning visuals in the film. There are two soundtracks: in the first, Frank Mouris continually lists a number of words beginning with "f," as well as anything else that seems to come to his mind. In the second, he delivers a personal synopsis of his own life, touching on everything from school-life as a child to his career-choices in college. These two soundtracks play simultaneously, sometimes cutting over each other and occasionally seeming to merge into a single entity.

The animation works like an endless stream of the subconscious. As Frank's meandering autobiography turns its attention towards a particular topic, the visuals unleash a gush of related images. For example, as he discusses his endless love for food, we witness a collage of culinary images, each merging into the other, the memory of ten thousand past meals. This is what I like about 'Frank Film;' just like the best of cinema, this is a film that successfully connects with the way that the human memory works, a stream of long-forgotten recollections brought forth by a simple subliminal trigger. Oddly for an experimental film, 'Frank Film' was awarded an Oscar for Best Animated Short Subject at the 1974 Academy Awards, and, in 1996, was inducted into the Library of Congress' National Film Registry, alongside such iconic pictures as 'Broken Blossoms (1919) and 'The Graduate (1967).'

Frank Mouris's Academy Award-winning "Frank Film" consists of magazine articles forming a collage to two different sets of narration: one chronicling the narrator's life, the other a series of words beginning with F. It strikes me as an experimental movie. It's not anything special, but I appreciate how they laid everything out. I haven't seen either of the other shorts nominated for Best Animated Short that year (I guess that it depends on whether or not they're available online), but this one is still worth seeing. I understand that Mouris only made a few movies after this one. It's probably hard to make a career out of independent animated shorts.

Anyway, an interesting short. Available on YouTube.