An American Journey, a 60-minute documentary by Philippe Seclier, is ostensibly about the director's journey across America, following the path of a similar journey photographer Robert Frank took when putting together his seminal photo collection The Americans. However, it plays far more like those informational films that play in museums, side by side with exhibits. You know the ones: You stop at them regardless of what part is playing, so you can rest your feet for 10 minutes before moving on to the next room.

This isn't necessarily an indictment of the film. There's certainly some illuminating information on the photographer from scholars, collectors, and his most constant publisher. But Seclier starts out assuming we're all up to speed on Robert Frank's life and career, and the impact of The Americans in particular. Because of that, the doc seems like an inside baseball look at the work, playing (I would guess) far better to photography scholars than the casual viewer.

At the risk of also alienating our audience, to wit: Robert Frank was a Swiss photog who moved to America in 1958. Tired of the stilted, composed look of magazine photography, and with a Guggenheim Grant under his arm, Frank headed out across America with no flash and no tripod, instead capturing his gritty, unfiltered pictures in the moment. 83 of the thousands of pictures Frank shot were collected in a book called The Americans, which changed the way people looked at photography, composition, and the idea of pictures as art. Fifty years later, photography editor Phillipe Seclier attempted to follow Frank's journey across the USA, revisiting his locations, and some of his former subjects.

The biggest problem with this film is that Seclier brings a photographic eye to film. There are some lovely images captured by Seclier's camera (which, in honor of Frank, was a no-frills digital video camera, without lights and only ambient sound), but Seclier forgets that between those images, there are 23 other frames (or possibly 29, depending on how the doc was shot). There's no real connection between the scenes, or flow to the narrative.

In addition, it's unclear what the point of view is. Why is Seclier taking this journey? What is he hoping to achieve? Information on film isn't enough without context. One can't help but think this is endemic of having a French filmmaker traveling the U.S., following a Swiss photographer who was also traveling the U.S. There are too many remote filters there to form any sort of insight or opinion. Or perhaps Seclier holds Frank in too high a regard, and is unwilling to delve further than the surface. That's far less bold than Frank himself, whose pictures were considered by some an attack on America, by others a celebration of the American spirit.

The last minute or two of the documentary does start to get somewhere, though, and I can't help but wish this was more of the focus. We see first a German publisher gearing up for the fiftieth anniversary edition of The Americans; and then a museum in China getting ready for its own retrospective. The doc ends with the starkly incongruous footage of a Chinese woman, dressed in a cowboy hat, looking at pictures of the Swiss photographer's view of America. One wishes the rest of the film had more of this insight.