Pollock

source: terracombr

Ed Harris tornou real seu sonho ao dirigir, produzir e estrelar um filme sobre um dos maiores pintores do pós-guerra americano, Jackson Pollock. Nesta biografia filmada, baseada no livro Jackson Pollock: An American Saga, o ator traz à tela a personalidade e arte de um artista obcecado pelo verdadeiro sentido e sentimento de sua obra.

Precursor do expressionismo abstrato americano, Pollock estudou em Nova York entre os anos 1929 e 31, com o também pintor Thomas Hart Benton. Apesar disso, sua grande influência artística foi de A. P. Ryder, da arte muralista mexicana, especialmente de Siqueiros, e principalmente do surrealismo de Pablo Picasso, o qual Pollock tinha verdadeira veneração.

Tal influência é revelada logo no ínicio do filme, em que o pintor americano, num de seus devaneios alcoólatras, revela: “Dane-se Picasso! O desgraçado era completo.”

A figura trágica que vemos no retrato de Pollock por Harris traz um artista ousado, inflexível e agressivo. Tais características marcaram este pintor que transcendeu e violou os limites da arte através de sua personalidade auto-destrutiva, misturando estrutura à espontaneidade, disciplina à liberdade, que culminou numa forma única de expressão em sua época. Para Pollock, a Arte Moderna nada mais era que “os anseios contemporâneos do tempo em que vivemos”.

O filme conta a história de Pollock a partir dos anos 40, quando a também pintora Lee Krasner (Marcia Gay Harden) visita seu estúdio pela primeira vez. Na verdade, o estúdio ficava num apartamento decadente em que o pintor morava junto ao irmão e sua esposa grávida.

Foi nesta mesma década que artistas começaram a livrar-se do peso das figuras e dos controles estéticos, convertendo-se em abstracionistas. Mas, enquanto os grandes mestres modernistas europeus expunham regularmente em museus de Arte Moderna e de Pintura Não-Objetiva (como o Museu Guggenheim), artistas americanos eram considerados meros seguidores provincianos.

Com o início da Segunda Guerra a situação começou a mudar. Vários artistas europeus renomados foram forçados a fugir da dominação nazista em países onde o Cubismo, Expressionismo e o Surrealismo foram oficialmente banidos por serem considerados movimentos de arte degenerados.

Nesta época, um grande número de exilados europeus com Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, Fernand Léger, Joan Miró e Mondrian mudaram-se para Nova York, onde suas idéias estimularam a vanguarda americana.

A herdeira e patrona desta arte foi Peggy Guggenheim, sobrinha de Solomon Guggenheim, que estabeleceu um ligação crucial entre os movimentos americanos e europeus. No filme, Pegg é interpretada pela mulher do diretor, Amy Madigan. Exilada em Nova York, abriu a galeria Art of This Century, que rapidamente tornou-se a sensação da cidade. Neste período adquiriu grandes obras de vanguarda apoiando significativamente os artistas.

Além de exibir trabalhos abstratos e surrealistas, que trazia da Europa, Peggy Guggenheim começou a procurar representantes americanos de tais movimentos. Foi mesclando trabalhos de grandes nomes a desconhecidos, que ela ajudou a legitimar diversos artistas, que logo formariam o núcleo nova-iorquino.

É através do marchand bonachão Howard Putzel (But Cort) que Peggy conhece o trabalho de Pollock. A galerista apaixona-se pelo trabalho do artista e investe em sua carreira. É na galeria Art of This Century que ele realiza sua primeira mostra individual e insere-se no mercado de arte, mas não agrada à crítica.

Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko, Willem DeKooning (Val Klimer), Clyfford Still e William Baziotes (interpretado pelo artist Kenny Scharf) foram apenas alguns dos artistas que reaizaram suas primeiras exposições individuais na galeria Art of This Century.

Apesar de todos os fatos biográficos, o grande mérito do filme é o enfoque no relacionamento do artista com a pintora Lee, que torna-se sua mulher. Apaixonada pelo homem e sua arte, Lee é quem dá suporte psicológico e emocional ao pintor, que tinha um sério problema com o álcool. Em 1945 mudam-se para uma pequena fazenda em Long Island, e é aí que a criação de Pollock torna-se extremamente frutífera.

Seu experimentalismo ocasionou o desenvolvimento completo de seu trabalho. Ele energeticamente desenhava com grandes pincéis em enormes telas. Às vezes, aplicava a tinta diretamente dos tubos e, algumas vezes, usava tinta metálica para proprocionar um efeito de brilho em seus quadros.

Seu vigoros ataque às telas e sua devoção ao verdadeiro ato de pintar tornaram Pollock um símbolo da nova revolta artística. É pintando uma de suas telas no chão que ele encontra sua maior característica: fluxos de tinta, sem a marca do pincel, com líquidos soltos, definidos por pingos, respingos e grandes gotas abundantes.

A partir daí, sua técnica aperfeiçoa-se, seus trabalhos ficam cada vez mais elaborados e catárticos, o que o consagra entre a crítica. Seu sucesso chega ao ápice em 49, quando expõe trinta quadros em uma mostra individual e vende quase todos, restando apenas cinco.
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source: theguardian

He delivers a Pollock who experiences tremendous, agonising self doubt and despair – even when he’s out buying cornflakes.

It’s surprising that no one has attempted to make a film of Pollock’s life before now. He was, after all, the American painter whose search for unmediated self-expression ended up changing the course of modern art and wrestling the crown from the Europeans. And beyond his penchant for flinging, dripping or pouring paint on gigantic canvases, his life was full of the psycho-theatrics that actors adore – anger, alcoholism, twisted love, abuse and violent death.

Pollock died aged just 44 in a car crash on Long Island in 1956 with a mistress half his age.

For Harris to play Pollock required total immersion of the kind method actors love. First he read every biography (Jackson Pollock: An American Saga by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith provided the core of the script). He went to galleries and stared at the paintings. He switched to the unfiltered Camel cigarettes favoured by the artist. And he even gained weight to portray him in his final, dissolute years.

He visited the Pollock-Krasner House in East Hampton, NY, slept in the artist’s bed and flirted with mental disintegration in the studio-barn.

‘Pollock said several times that he couldn’t separate himself from his art,’ says Harris. ‘Not knowing much about modern art when I began to read about him, it was much more his persona – his struggles as a human being – that was interesting to me.’

To better understand what it is to be a painter, Harris learnt how to paint. In 1994 he built a studio at his home in Malibu and began to mimic Pollock’s drip technique, laying a sheet of canvas on the floor and walking around all four sides as he tossed and flung liquid pigment from a stick. Harris managed to capture Pollock’s athletic, agitated battle with the canvas by watching Hans Namuth’s 1950 film of the painter in action. It was that film, which includes a sequence shot from beneath a plate of glass as the painter sets to his dribbling, which cemented Pollock’s legend.

‘Pollock tried to put the act of painting on canvas. That was his revelation. I began early on, at the tail end of the Eighties and through the Nineties,’ Harris recalls. ‘I painted on wood. I did relatively abstract stuff. I tried to create things that had harmonics and rhythms. I didn’t always succeed, but it was about the effort. I got an inkling of what it was about to look down at that board.’

The fascination with Pollock had begun after his father sent him the Naifeh-White book in 1986. Harris was drinking at the time, and he believes it was meant as a warning. ‘I certainly have been, uh, an abuser at times, to the degree where I’ve been aware I have a problem. That’s all stuff I’m not unfamiliar with.’

The photo on the book cover immediately struck the actor: ‘The initial thing was that I resembled him.’ That surface resemblance soon gave way to a deeper affiliation, and Harris decided it would not be enough to simply play Pollock. He would have to direct the film too. ‘It wasn’t intended to be my picture, but I was so intimate with the material that I didn’t want to hand it over,’ he says. Co-star Jeffrey Tambor, who plays art critic Clement Greenberg, says: ‘It was a lifetime’s achievement. I think he became Pollock.’

Harris hired screenwriters to come up with a script, and after the usual difficulties finding financing he managed to get Interview magazine owner Peter Brant and newsprint tycoon Joe Allen to come up with the cash. Then he secured permission from Pollock’s estate to film at the artist’s house.

The film accurately captures Pollock’s New York in the Forties and Fifties, a world dominated by Peggy Guggenheim (played by Harris’s real-life wife Amy Madigan), who became Pollock’s benefactor and dealmaker. Other players include Guggenheim’s art scout Howard Putzel (played by the old Harold and Maude star Bud Cort) and Lee Krasner (played by Marcia Gay Harnden, also nominated for an Oscar), who, though aware of his unpredictable nature and sexual infidelities, suppressed her own painting career to foster his.

The film starts in 1941 when Pollock and Krasner meet in New York. Pollock is a struggling artist and already a deeply troubled man with a serious drinking problem. ‘I get overwhelmed thinking about how much pain Jackson was in,’ Harris says. ‘This is a guy who needed a mother. Lee didn’t give him love or warmth. She nurtured him as a professional artist, but she didn’t nurture him as a man.

‘He was the most frail character I’ve ever played. His dad basically left home when he was 10. His mother, while they were close, was more frightening than nurturing. He was a young man at odds with the world. He was the youngest of five, and the family moved around from dirt farm to dirt farm. He never fitted in. And all the brothers left, one by one, and all of them were painters. He was looking for something. You look at his early paintings and drawings and you see him searching for something to fulfil his purpose. He pursues it intently. He fights through the influence of others. And finally he arrives at something truly original, and he did all this despite having the emotional maturity of a 12-year-old.’

Harris has shot the film very simply: ‘I tried to do a subtle job. I was not interested in exploring innovative techniques. Whenever I was in doubt I simply trusted simplicity. Most of the ideas I had that I thought were “cool”, you don’t see them in the movie. They just didn’t work. Everything had to appear non-forced, realistic.’

Of course, there’s a parable of fame in playing the artist-hero as a death-haunted loser that anyone who has spent a career in Hollywood would surely recognise. Pollock exhibited a desperate need for recognition but when he achieved it he found it did little to diminish his anxieties, and if anything exaggerated them.

‘Pollock was desperate for approval,’ Harris says. ‘But when he got to where he wanted to get, it wasn’t what he thought it would be.’
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source: filmtvit

Un uomo tormentato, combattuto dai dubbi, impegnato in un solitario braccio di ferro tra la necessità di esprimere se stesso e il desiderio di escludere il mondo intero dalla sua opera. Così era Jackson Pollock, il grande pittore americano che, a poco a poco, sprofondò in una spirale senza ritorno che distrusse il suo matrimonio con Lee Krasner, la sua carriera e, in una notte d’estate del 1956, la sua vita.

Commento
In questa rispettosa e sincera dichiarazione d’amore per Pollock il tono e la struttura sono calibrati, corretti e Harris espone una genialità cagliata in macchie, linee torte e meravigliosi sgocciolamenti. Oscar alla Harden come miglior attrice non protagonista.
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source: kinode

Der Maler Jackson Pollock (Ed Harris) gilt als einer der einflussreichsten Künstler des 20. Jahrhunderts. Unverstanden von Kollegen und Kritikern schafft er erst nach der Entdeckung durch die Malerin Lee Krasner (Marcia Gay Harden) seinen Durchbruch. Doch weder Ruhm und kommerzieller Erfolg, noch Lees Liebe können Pollock aus seiner Depression und den häufigen Alkoholexzessen retten.
Als Regisseur, Hauptdarsteller und Produzent in Personalunion gelang Ed Harris ein beeindruckendes Biopic. Marcia Gay Harden erhielt für ihre Leistung den Oscar als beste Nebendarstellerin.

Jackson Pollock entwickelt 1947 einen eigenen Malstil, der seine Zeitgenossen irritiert. Sie nennen ihn verächtlich “Jack the Dripper”. Doch Künstlerkollegin Lee Krasner erkennt sein Talent, fördert ihn und verliebt sich in den verschlossenen Mann. Doch weder Ruhm oder kommerzieller Erfolg noch Lees Liebe kann Jackson aus seinen Depressionen und Alkoholexzessen retten.

1947 entwickelt Jackson Pollock die Stilrichtung des abstrakten Expressionismus, der konservative Zeitgenossen irritiert. Wegen des exzessiven Farbverbrauchs nennen sie ihn verächtlich “Jack the Dripper”. Einzig Kollegin Lee Krasner erkennt sein Talent, fördert ihn und verliebt sich in den verschlossenen Mann. Doch weder künstlerischer Erfolg noch Lees Liebe können Jackson vor seinen Alkoholexzessen und Depressionen bewahren. 1956 kommt der begnadete Kunstrevolutionär 44-jährig bei einem Autounfall ums Leben.

Mitreißendes Biopic über den Maler Jackson Pollock, dessen abstrakter Expressionismus Ende der 40er Jahre konservative Zeitgenossen irritiert und der Verständnis und Liebe bei seiner Kollegin Lee Krasner findet. Ed Harris glänzt als Hauptdarsteller, Produzent und Regisseur in Personalunion.
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source: teleramafr

Depuis son discret succès d’estime outre-Atlantique en 2001, cette ciné-biographie du peintre Jackson Pollock était retombée aux oubliettes sans passer par la case France. Aussi mystérieuse que son escamotage d’alors, son exhumation d’aujourd’hui est plutôt une bonne surprise. L’implication au long cours d’Ed Harris comme acteur, réalisateur, producteur, et surtout comme moteur du film confère à Pollock un peu de cette nécessité intime qui manque à tant de biopics hollywoodiens : Harris s’est manifestement attelé au projet comme à la grande affaire de sa vie. Il ne prétend pas proposer un nouvel éclairage sur la star de l’expressionnisme abstrait. Toutes les caractéristiques plus ou moins connues, toutes les étapes de la trajectoire officielle figurent dans le scénario ­ pourtant sobre et elliptique. Débuts difficiles à New York au début des années 40, coup de pouce de la galeriste Peggy Guggenheim, mariage avec la peintre Lee Krasner et mise au vert décisive dans une ferme de Long Island d’où sortiront les oeuvres maîtresses, en tout cas les plus connues ; enfin, rechute dans l’alcoolisme et la dépression. Avec un effet de ressemblance assez bluffant, Ed Harris ressuscite aussi la belle silhouette à la mode de l’Ouest du Pollock préquadra, en jean à revers et tee-shirt ajusté ­ silhouette que les photos en noir et blanc du peintre ont popularisée. Au-delà de la légende particulière de Pollock, ce sont les clichés universels de l’artiste rebelle, torturé, en butte à d’irrésistibles démons que le film convoque un à un. Plutôt que de chercher à les retourner coûte que coûte, Ed Harris tâche modestement d’éprouver ces clichés par la représentation, et parvient souvent à leur redonner une vérité. La séquence « obligée » où Jackson Pollock découvre par accident ce qui deviendra sa célèbre méthode à base de coulures, le dripping, est la moins réussie : trop facile. En revanche, restituer sans ridicule la danse sauvage du peintre au travail autour de ses toiles posées par terre était a priori impossible. Le film prouve le contraire, de même qu’il traite adroitement des effets de la célébrité médiatique sur Pollock : sentiment d’être « un coquillage sans coquille » et rage de possédé, qui éclate juste après avoir été filmé, avec son consentement, en train de peindre. Mais l’aspect le plus émouvant de cette reconstitution a trait au couple formé par Pollock et Lee Krasner, à l’origine une jeune consoeur new-yorkaise, qui abdique ses ambitions pour que s’accomplissent celles de son compagnon, c’est-à-dire celles qu’elle a pour lui. Marcia Gay Harden (récompensée par l’oscar du meilleur second rôle féminin) est formidable dans ce rôle à la fois ingrat et magnifique qui mène du coup de foudre aux insultes. Lee et Jackson traversent les années côte à côte, avec la gloire de l’un pour seul produit de leur union. S’aiment-ils ? Ed Harris, dont l’épouse de longue date est actrice (et joue Peggy Guggenheim), signe peut-être autant un film sur la vie (d’artiste) à deux que sur Pollock. Une histoire d’amour qui, cela va sans dire, finit mal – Louis Guichard