We’re honored to present the online premiere of Robert Frank’s Rolling Stones Super 8 Footage. To celebrate his centennial, MoMA has organized the film retrospective “The Complete Robert Frank,” which accompanies the photography exhibition “Life Dances On: Robert Frank in Dialogue” and video installation “Robert Frank’s Scrapbook Footage.” Pace Gallery will also commemorate the artist with the exhibit “Hope Makes Visions.”

After receiving an invitation to shoot the album cover for The Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street, Frank developed a close relationship with the band. In addition to shooting the famous fly-on-the-wall documentary Cocksucker Blues, he also assembled a silent Super-8 snapshot of the band gadding about Los Angeles — an appropriately rapid-fire barrage of images and words that matches the stylistic excesses of the Stones’ sound. 

“Today you can go out and buy your capsule, your cartridge of Super-8 film for three dollars and fifty cents, put it in your camera, and shoot your stuff. You bring it to the drugstore and it comes back in three days, and you look at it…. Pick up the camera and have the confidence to say something you feel strongly about.” ROBERT FRANK

Approaching the film like a mosaic, Frank mixes and matches images of L.A. boulevards, poetic intertitles, and footage of Mick Jagger lounging about his garden to create a spasmodic portrait that reflects the anything-goes vibe of the band and their milieu. Halfway through the 8-minute film, he seizes on a window cleaner at a traffic stop whose movement amid passing cars resembles a sort of improvised dance; Frank’s observations suggest the language of rock n’ roll was alive on every street corner.

Robert Frank was born in Zurich, Switzerland, in 1924. In 1947, he immigrated to the United States and worked for several magazines, including Harper’s Bazaar, LIFE, Vogue, and more. His landmark photo-book, The Americans, was published in 1959. That same year, he directed the classic Beat film Pully My Daisy with Alfred Leslie. Throughout the rest of his life, he continued to produce radical work on all sorts of cameras  — still, moving, video, and film.

Text written by Nicolas Pedrero-Setzer. Special thanks to The June Leaf and Robert Frank Foundation, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and MoMA Film.