Hacker Cinema
Pollock
2000 · Film · 132 min
Directed by Ed Harris
In August of 1949, Life Magazine ran a banner headline that begged the question: "Jackson Pollock: Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?" The film is a look back into the life of an extraordinary man, a man who has fittingly been called "an artist dedicated to concealment, a celebrity who nobody knew." As he struggled with self-doubt, engaging in a lonely tug-of-war between needing to express himself and wanting to shut the world out, Pollock began a downward spiral.
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2 comments on Hacker News
I'm an American, and have never understood why others cheer or clap in movies. There are neighborhoods where loud comments on the movie in progress are not unexpected for discouraged. On the other hand, it was in an upscale movie where the guy behind me wanted to narrate Ed Harris's Jackson Pollock movie--sotto voce, but far from inaudibly.
Understanding the context of art is frequently as important as direct experience. Jackson Pollack has been decried as an alcoholic fraud by some, but like Da Vinci, it is the techniques he pioneered as much as his works that are fascinating. There was a study that claimed he (Pollock) represented fractals, even Chaos theory in some of this work. http://phys.unsw.edu.au/phys_about/PHYSICS!/FRACTAL_EXPRESSIONISM/fractal_taylor.html
On a tangent, this is the soundtrack to the eponymous movie, Pollock by composer Jeff Beal. Give it a listen, while taking a look at some of Pollock's catalog: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oD0nFjjUCQo&list=RDoD0nFjjUCQo
Like nwatson, I wasn't moved the first time I saw Mona. But understanding her history brought her to life the next time we met.