NEW YORK, NY.- Robert Frank never recovered from the success of “The Americans.” On its publication in the United States in 1959, the book was initially excoriated as un-American, particularly in the photography magazines, for its sour, disillusioned take on life in this country. The rich looked bored, the poor desperate, the city fathers fatuous, and the flags threadbare or soiled. What’s more, specialists in photography faulted his technique for muddiness, grain and blur.

But in a slow burn, Frank’s willful violation of the conventional rules of photography was understood to serve the purpose of personal expression, and his dissection of national alienation and social divides was deemed prophetic. The smoke blew away, and “The Americans” stood clearly as a towering monument, one of the most important and influential books in the history of photography.

Frank hated that. In the early ’60s, he renounced still photography in favor of filmmaking. When he went back in the ’70s to making photographs — “in the time left over between films or film projects,” as he put it — he eschewed the street photography that had established his reputation. Instead, he mostly made studio or landscape pictures, which he liked to splice together into montages or embellish with scratched and stenciled words.

It’s this late work — if such a rubric can be applied to the six decades of movie, video and photo production that preceded his death at 94 in 2019 — that is the focus of “Life Dances On: Robert Frank in Dialogue,” opening Sunday at the Museum of Modern Art. Curated by Lucy Gallun, the exhibition marks the centenary of Frank’s birth and is his first solo show at MoMA. Although there are some omissions (his return to documentary photography in Beirut in 1991, for example), it presents as eloquent a case as can be made for this later art, often left in the shade by what came before.

Frank felt trapped by the expectations and pigeonholing that the lionization of “The Americans” induced, and he recoiled in horror at the prospect of repeating himself. Beyond that, he gave various explanations over the years for why he abandoned the 35 mm camera that he brandished like a sorcerer’s wand. He explained that he had lost faith in the capacity of a single photograph to convey the truth. And his search had turned inward. “The truth is the way to reveal something about your life, your thoughts, where you stand,” he said. He believed film was a better way to do that.

Film (joined by video in the ’80s) allowed Frank to record his feelings directly. In addition to clips from his movies and videos, the museum is showing “Robert Frank’s Scrapbook Footage,” an assemblage of previously unseen diaristic moving images, stitched together by Frank’s longtime editor, Laura Israel, and art director Alex Bingham — most ambitiously, in a five-screen installation that jumps between shots taken in the house in Mabou, Nova Scotia, and the apartment on Bleecker Street in the East Village in New York that Frank shared with his wife, artist June Leaf, as well as visits he made to his parents in Switzerland (where he was born) and to Russia. Topping it off, MoMA, which received Frank’s entire film and video archive as a gift from the artist, will present a complete motion-picture retrospective, from Nov. 20 to Dec. 11.

The aim is to reposition Frank’s reputation by showcasing the art that occupied most of his life. The trouble is: His genius as a photographer did not carry over to filmmaking. That was evident from the outset. His first completed movie, “Pull My Daisy,” a collaboration with artist Alfred Leslie, incorporated improvisation by the actors within the framework of a rehearsed script. With a voice-over by Jack Kerouac and appearances by Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, Gregory Corso and Larry Rivers, the film resonates as a historical document of the Beat movement. As a movie, though, its madcap bohemianism is a clunky, leaden bore. First screened publicly in 1959 on a double bill with John Cassavetes’ similarly improvised “Shadows,” it wilts, woefully dated, when viewed today alongside that other milestone of independent American cinema.

Frank’s dissatisfaction with the limitations of a single photograph was long-standing. But before it drew him to filmmaking, it provoked his greatest achievements in photography. As a German-speaking Jew listening anxiously to Adolf Hitler’s antisemitic tirades on the radio, he had mastered camera technique working in Switzerland during World War II before immigrating to the United States in 1947 and settling in New York.

His youthful photography often compressed a narrative into a single image. In a well-known picture, he portrayed a friend, photographer Louis Stettner, holding a tulip behind his back and walking toward a young woman, as an old man approaches. That theme of the arc of life recurred. The abbreviated selection of Frank’s early photos in this exhibition includes his classic shot of a little girl running past a parked hearse on a London street, with an older bystander visible through the hearse’s open rear window.

By 1955, when he was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship that funded the cross-country trip of “The Americans,” Frank had grown disenchanted, he later said, with his “early lyrical images because it wasn’t enough anymore.” Until then, he “had always tried to come up with a picture that really said it all, that was a masterpiece.” His ambition had shifted. Although it can be argued that some of the images in “The Americans” do say it all, what is perhaps the greatest achievement of the book (almost completely overlooked when it first came out) is its organization: composed of four sections, painstakingly sequenced. “There had to be more pictures that would sustain an idea or a vision or something,” he said. “I couldn’t just depend on that one singular photograph anymore.”

Viewed that way, “The Americans” is a slowed-down version of the early flip books that predate cinema. Frank sought to convey his internal experience of America, not simply record what he was seeing, an approach that later documentary photographers would emulate. In a syncopated rhythm, he presented posturing politicians and then African American mourners; a covered car outside a Southern California house and then onlookers by a body under a tarp at the site of a car crash in Arizona; a wealthy couple at a charity ball followed by a hard-bitten man in a cut-rate cafeteria. In one picture that sums up his mission, he photographed an empty South Carolina barbershop through a screen and a glass door. His reflection can be glimpsed faintly at right, but that merely marks him as an outsider. Frank’s forlorn mood is his poignant subject.

After “The Americans” was completed, Frank embarked on a series of pictures from the window of a Fifth Avenue bus, a last effort to introduce movement into his still photography before he shifted gears and committed himself to filmmaking.

An invitation by Japanese publishers to produce a retrospective photo book, “The Lines of My Hand,” in 1972, reawakened his interest in still photographs. But the world had changed, and so had he. He said that photographs were so ubiquitous, “you see photography everywhere, it’s like bricks, you know.”

He developed different strategies to make his pictures stand out. One approach was printing multiple negatives on the same sheet or taping prints together and rephotographing them. Some of these assemblages, such as ones of East Village artists or deceased friends, are artless hodgepodges, but a montage he made in the late ’60s of a Chinatown beauty contest captures the frenzied snapping of press photographers more effectively than one image could. A photograph of his bulletin board in New York, with pinned pictures of the home he was about to move to in Nova Scotia, was another way to make one picture out of many.

In Mabou, where he lacked a darkroom, Frank used cheap throwaway Lure cameras and later a Polaroid 195, which created both positive and negative images. He often scratched words onto the negatives or the prints. While his earlier pictures, sometimes off-kilter or dark and grainy, transgressed the rules of “good photography,” now Frank celebrated artlessness in the pursuit of honesty. “I don’t believe in it anymore — beauty, aesthetics,” he said.

He wanted to express the facts of his life, the day-to-day routines amid harsh nature in Mabou, and the tragic intrusions, particularly the premature deaths of the two children from his first marriage, to Mary Lockspeiser Frank: Andrea in a plane crash in Guatemala, in 1974, and Pablo, by suicide after a long struggle with schizophrenia, in 1994. (“Conversations in Vermont,” from 1969, one of his most effective films, addresses directly his self-perceived failings as a parent.) A collage in a nine-box grid he made the year after Andrea’s death combines five snapshots (one of Andrea by the house in Mabou, the others of the Nova Scotia landscape) with four empty white frames. He added thin lines of pale yellow and blue, like a winter sunrise, and an inscription that reads, in part, “I think of Andrea every day.” Even without knowing the backstory, you’d be moved.

But what might you make of another work, also forged in anguish, “The Suffering, the Silence of Pablo” (1995)? It depicts a box that lies on a wooden chair and is covered with a cloth on which rest two wooden fish. The title of the photograph has been scratched on the image. Presumably, Pablo’s ashes reside in that box and the fish are mementos he cherished. But the father’s pain is lost on the viewer. And Frank’s biographers would be the ones most interested in a collage of faded Lure prints of a rural mailbox that he pasted onto business correspondence (including a lawyer’s letter blocking the release of his movie on the Rolling Stones, which — looking at something other than himself — happens to be one of his best, and will be shown this fall).

Frank took countless pictures of the utility pole and clothesline outside his window in Mabou. In many, he hangs picture frames from the line, through which you see the landscape. It is a reminder of the square edges that define a photograph. But how much more effective it was to catch on the fly a Londoner through the window of a hearse.

Although he argued that he scrawled words on his pictures to make them “more honest and direct about why I go out there and do it,” Frank’s pungent sensibility comes through far more powerfully in “The Americans.” In a striking self-portrait taken in his Bleecker Street home, a vertical strip of film hangs from the ceiling, and four lozenges of light illuminate the grayness. You can see the reflection of the photographer, but you can’t tell anything about him. Try as he might, he remains in the shadows.

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‘Life Dances On: Robert Frank in Dialogue’

Opens Sunday and runs through Jan. 11; Museum of Modern Art, 11 W. 53rd St., Manhattan, 212-708-9400; moma.org.

‘Robert Frank’s Scrapbook Footage’

Opens Sunday and runs through March, also at Museum of Modern Art.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.