The Sin of Jesus1961

"In SIN OF JESUS, Robert Frank continues to his documentation of the soul of modern man. Formally, the film is an attempt to merge the best of the old with the best of new cinema. It can be much criticized on these grounds. Despite its formal faults, the presence of the director is unmistakable. 'If your aim is high, it should be you that comes through the most' says Robert Frank. The self-expression of an artist, however, is a universal act, it expresses a universal content. The lonely woman's desperate and recriminatory cry in the dark, doomed and desolate fields of New Jersey expresses the despair of our own existance. This pessimism, this desolation, doom, or despair revealed in THE SIN OF JESUS is the inner landscape of the twentieth century man, a place that is cold, cruel, heartless, stupid, lonely, desolate-this landscape emerges from Robert Frank's film with a crying, terrifying nakedness. Robert Frank is here as much a documentarist as Robert Flaherty was in NANOOK. There are movies which are tested by the audience. THE SIN OF JESUS is one of those few movies which test the audience." –Jonas Mekas, Village Voice