One Hour

Robert Frank's film One Hour is a single-take of Frank and actor Kevin O'Connor either walking or riding in the back of a mini-van through a few blocks of Manhattan's Lower East side. Shot between 3:45 and 4:45 pm on 26 July, 1990 the film presents the curious experience of eavesdropping involuntarily on strangers. It appears to be a document of a journey but is also a kind of stream of consciousness retracing the same patterns and spaces. This book is a reprint of a little-known Frank publication first issued by Hanuman Books in 1992, a tiny book, comprising mainly a transcription of the dialogue heard but also two pages of credits: half a dozen production or crew workers and 27 actors. Unravelling the apparent documentary nature of the film, there is also an acknowledgement that the film has a script (by Frank and his assistant, Michal Rovner), that a conversation heard in a diner is written by Mika Moses, and that Peter Orlovsky's lines (intercepted by Frank roughly halfway through the hour, in front of the Angelika Cinema on Houston Street) are "total improvisation".