Actors following horseback rider--Filming "Landammann Stauffacher" 1941

This small photograph by Robert Frank captures actors following a horseback rider during the filming of "Landammann Stauffacher." It's like a fleeting sketch from life. I imagine Frank, camera in hand, observing the scene unfold, deciding where to stand to capture the composition. There's a raw, immediate quality to the image, a documentary style reminiscent of other photographers also interested in what the movies were doing like Lisette Model or Helen Levitt. You can sense Frank’s desire to freeze a moment in time. I wonder what he was thinking, what conversations he might have had with the actors or the director? Did he see himself as a director too? The figures and the landscape are rendered in shades of gray, but that very constraint forces us to consider the many other shapes that are in play. Frank is asking us to consider the ways the world is seen as it becomes a story on the silver screen.