Me and My Brother

As he said himself, initially Frank’s plan was to make a film about a poem by Allen Ginsberg. Nevertheless, during the shoot the focus shifted to Ginsberg’s partner, the Beat poet Peter Orlovsky, and his brother Julius. The catatonic Julius had just been released from a mental hospital, where he had received electroshock treatment for schizophrenia. The experimental, unsettling form of the film seems to be a reflection of how Julius experiences the world: detached from reality. “In this film all events and people are real,” says the text that appears at the beginning. “Whatever is unreal is purely my imagination.” The viewer has been warned. There is footage of a performance by Peter Orlovsky with Ginsberg, including Julius onstage, and of the two brothers in the apartment they share. But a psychiatrist who interviews Julius is played by the actor John Coe, who politely introduces himself and says that he is playing the role of the psychiatrist. When Julius disappears at one point, the actor Joseph Chaiken takes over his role. This creates a film-within-a-film in which Frank himself is played by a young Christopher Walken. More than 45 years later, Me and My Brother (partly black-and-white, partly in color) is still fascinating. (International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam)