Jacques Prèvert--European portraits no number 1961

This is Robert Frank’s film of Jacques Prèvert, one of the European portraits, made with a camera. It’s so cool to see a whole film strip laid out like this! You get a sense of the before, during, and after of a shot. Almost like a painting, he’s trying different angles, playing with light, maybe even letting the accidental shots stay in the frame. I’m thinking about what Frank was going for in these portraits. Was he trying to capture something about the poet’s essence, or was he just riffing, seeing what would emerge? I love that you see Prèvert in different situations—sitting at a table, lying down, maybe even in a hospital bed. It reminds me that people aren’t just one thing. Frank isn’t interested in a perfect image, so you just get everything all at once: the beautiful, the messy, the mundane. It’s like he’s saying, “Here’s a glimpse of a life, take it or leave it.”