Frank Film
Tags: autobiographical

Plot synopsis:
Jon lives in a small coastal town, but aspires to be a songwriter. While walking along the beach, Jon witnesses a man trying to drown himself. The man is revived, but taken to hospital. Jon talks to Don, who explains the man was a keyboardist in an experimental band called the Soronprfbs, managed by him. Jon mentions that he plays keyboards and is invited to play with him in town that night. Jon goes along and meets the rest of the band, all of whom are reluctant about Jon, except for Frank, the band leader who wears a paper-mâché mask over his head. The concert goes well, until Clara breaks her theremin and storms offstage.
Frank invites Jon to become a full-time member of the band. He accompanies them to Ireland, where they plan to record their first album in a remote cabin for the next year. Clara displays contempt to Jon and they end up sleeping together, but she threatens to kill him if he mentions it. Don becomes depressed and explains to Jon that he wants to be a songwriter, but is terrible. He plays a song for Jon, who compliments it. The next morning, Jon finds what appears to be Frank's corpse hanging from a tree. He calls the rest of the band down and they remove the mask, only to find it was Don wearing one of Frank's masks. Don is cremated and Jon reveals he has been posting the band's recording sessions online. The Soronprfbs have gained a small following and have been invited to South by Southwest.
Upon arrival in Texas, Jon, Frank and Clara scatter Don's ashes, but realise Frank accidentally replaced them with powdered food. Drummer Nana and bassist Baraque reveal their strong hatred for Jon and return to England the night before the concert. On the day of the concert, Clara and Frank disappear. Jon finds them in an alley, but Clara stabs Jon in the leg, but runs away. She is later arrested by the police. At the concert, only Jon and Frank remain of the band. As they go onstage, Frank refuses to sing, forcing Jon to sing one of his songs. Frank dislikes it and suffers a nervous breakdown. The next day, Jon attempts to reason with Frank, which ends in them arguing and Jon trying to remove Frank's head. Frank runs out of the motel room and is hit by a car. Jon gives chase, but realises Frank has escaped.
Sometime later, Jon has attempted to track down Frank, but all his attempts have failed. He finally succeeds in tracking Frank to his hometown of Bluff, Kansas, where he is living with his parents. They explain that Frank has suffered with severe mental health issues all his life and began wearing the mask as a teenager. Jon finally sees Frank without a mask, only to learn he has a large scar on his head and is balding. Jon takes Frank to a bar, where Clara, Nana and Baraque are playing. Frank approaches the band and when he begins to speak, they realise who he is. He begins singing and joins them onstage, while Jon watches. As Frank sings, Jon leaves the bar to return to England.

Review: Words escape me..
I have a fetish for films made entirely of cutout images.
There's an NFB film called "This is a Recorded Message" made right around the same time that also uses a similar cutout technique.
Both films use advertisements to create their point.
However, where "Message" is scathing critique of advertising, "Frank Film" uses advertising images to construct a moving autobiographical portrait of the film maker, Frank Mouris.
I was amazed at the way Mouris was able to find all these thousands of images and then stick them all together with two overlapping soundtracks that perfectly match up.
It works beautifully, without at all being confusing or hard to follow.
I wish there was more I could say about the film, but words escape me.
Of course, I should mention some specific moment from the film that had an effect on me, but in this case the whole film is that one moment.
It never gives you time to reflect on what you've seen until its over.
When Mouris' voice mentions television, hundreds of T.V sets fill the screen, forming complicated patterns.
Similar things happen throughout the film: specific words trigger an array of objects, forming intricate designs.
It's stunning..
Save those magazines....
Frank Film is a wonderfully done film.
The film is a scrap book on film, but much much more.
Frank Mouris uses a collage effect that will leave you breathless.
It is hard to amagine the time and effort it took to make this short film.
The film basically is an autobiography of Frank's short life.
What adds to the brilliance of the film is the two different soundtracks.
The film will keep you jumping back and forth between the two.
Frank Film is definitely one of the best examples of a short film and it deservingly gave Frank Mouris an Oscar for this grad school project.
If you can get your hands on a copy, it is worth taking the short time to watch..
Simply incredible piece of film!.
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..
Frank Film is perhaps a bit too pretentious for my tastes.
So I just got finished watching this animated short by Frank and Caroline Mouris that won the Academy Award for the year it was made and was put into the Library of Congress' National Film Registry during the '90s.
In it, Frank is speaking in two soundtracks: one telling his life story and the other listing words that start with "F" or something with a similar sound.
This happens as constantly flashing images of something relating to whatever subject is at hand is mentioned.
It's initially fascinating to watch and hear but after a while I wondered when the whole damn thing would end!
Still, it's worth a look if you're curious about this sort of thing..
An absolutely mesmerising mosaic of images and sounds.
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).'.
Frankly...far from fabulous..
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..
life as narration.
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..
Accessible experimentalism.
"Frank Film" is a 9-minute animated short film that won Frank Mouris, the man who made it and also the one we hear in here, his first and only Academy Award.
He was surprisingly unprolific in the over 4 decades since his biggest career achievement, at least in terms of film.
So yeah, I cannot agree with the Academy here.
Neither the animation nor the comments are awards-worthy in anyway and this film is evidence of how weak the (animated) short film genre was in the 1970s compared to previous decades if films like this could receive major awards attention.
I did not enjoy the watch.
It is not as bad as many other experimental films, but the two voices we hear at the same time become annoying pretty quickly, so that I would have given this one an even lower rating if it had gone on for a couple more minutes.
Not good.
Not recommended.