Читать книгу Pollock - Donald Wigal - Страница 28

Reference is made here to the Ed Harris movie several times because it follows the authoritative tome by Naifeh & Smith to which Harris had obtained the movie rights. However, the movie is a biographical entertainment which obviously isn’t a documentary. In contrast, the Hans Namuth 1950 ‘documentary’ film, supposedly showing the typical work method of Pollock, might be more acting and posing than cinéma vérité. The award-winning Harris movie is widely known. In its review of the best movies of the year 2000, Time Magazine notes Ed Harris “never lets his exhibitions of Pollock’s inexplicable gift soften or redeem the artist’s monstrousness.” The review concludes there has never been a more biographical film of an anti-hero than this one. However, have there been many artists since Beethoven with a greater contrast between the depressed artist and his inspirational art?

However, not all critics praise the film without reservation. Walsh and other critics believe the historical dimension of Pollock’s life is absent in Harris’ film. Some critics feel the film is much too narrow in its approach and fails to address many factors which influenced his life and work. While it deals with psychological issues and his response to social situations, it does not present his political history and social aspirations which surely also had to have a profound impact on his life[39].

Ed Harris began painting in the early 1990s, which certainly helped prepare him to play the role of Pollock so convincingly, especially during the painting scenes. In an interview Harris explains, “I’ve been painting and drawing off and on since I became committed to making this film. I had a little studio built so I’d have enough floor space to work on larger canvases.” (45). Walsh observes the Harris movie is “so narrowly focused and so limited in its approach that the most essential truths about Pollock and his circumstances are permitted to escape.”

Marcia Gay Harden was given the Oscar for best supporting actress for her role as Krasner, but some critics agree with those who felt Harris should have been given an Oscar for directing, if not also for lead actor.

Before the Harris movie, a film referring to Pollock’s life was being thought of. It might have starred Robert De Niro (as Pollock) and Barbra Streisand (as Krasner) but it did not develop[40].

In the Harris movie, Harden, not a native of Brooklyn like Streisand, very effectively takes on a Brooklyn accent, especially for the early scenes of the movie.

Number 26A, 1948: Black and White, 1948. Enamel on canvas, 208 × 121.7 cm, Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.

Number 28, 1950, 1950. Oil, enamel and aluminium paint on canvas, 172.7 × 266.7 cm, Collection Muriel Kallis Newman, Chicago.

The famous Life photo of a hostile-looking Pollock foreshadows the attitudes of the roles of restless rebels (with or without causes) played by actors. Barnaby Ruhe plays the mature Jackson Pollock in PollockSquared. Actor Richard Simulcik, Jr., in his publicity poses for the 1997 play, Number One: A Pollock Painting, also effectively captures the Pollock-like attitude and the arrogant pose[41]. In promotional Polaroid photographs for his 1986 play, One Gesture of the Heart, actor/director Victor Raphael also looks somewhat like Pollock, sans dissipation and anger[42]. However, Ed Harris surely captures the image of Pollock perfectly, and had a big advantage because in the movie he physically looks like the painter of the 1940s. Moreover, Harris amazingly learned the gestural technique and does an uncanny reincarnation of Jackson’s famous action painting Dance.