The lives of great artists, in fact, tend to make irresistible cinema because of their very affinities with melodrama and myth – most of them possessing ‘the whole kit’ as Tom Wolfe might say, of a classical, five-act tragedy.
– Michael Bracewell, Sight and Sound (June 2002)
As with writers, the lives of artists depicted on film imply that if you are creatively blessed then you will also be emotionally scarred. Many times, filmmakers fail to balance the art with the life. The two films discussed here come closer than many at exploring and making cinematic the actual act of painting itself.
The two case studies chosen explore the lives of two painters Frida Kahlo (Salma Hayek) and Jackson Pollock (Ed Harris). They were deeply personal projects for their stars, who also produced and worked closely on the screenplay; Harris also directed. Both place the exploration and depiction of their craft in parallel with the emotional turmoil of their lives.
Pollock (2000)
Director: Ed Harris
Screenwriters: Barbara Turner and Susan J. Emshwiller
Starring: Ed Harris (Jackson Pollock) and Marcia Gay Harden (Lee Krasner)
Subject: American painter Jackson Pollock (Paul Jackson Pollock 1912–56)
Ed Harris as Jackson Pollock in Pollock (2000)
In the late 1980s Ed Harris’s father, noticing a physical resemblance between his son and the painter Jackson Pollock, gave Harris a biography of the artist, Jackson Pollock: An American Saga (1989) by Stephen Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, which was used as the source material.
Over the next fifteen years Harris’s interest became a desire to bring Pollock’s complex life to the screen. Whilst developing a strong reputation as an actor, he continued to work on this project, and began to study and emulate Pollock’s free-forming drip-style painting techniques so that he could authentically recreate them in the film. He then worked with screenwriters Barbara Turner and Susan J. Emshwiller to bring the artist’s life to the screen and find financing. It was Harris’s first film as director.
Having convinced the Pollock–Krasner Foundation that he was not interested in exploiting Pollock and Krasner (his wife), they gave their full support. The sequences in Long Island were filmed in their actual house which is now the Pollock–Krasner Museum and Study Center. They granted him permission to use images of Pollock’s paintings, and he commissioned three painters to make faithful replicas for use in the film (the lead artist was Lisa Lawley).
This has not always been possible; permission was not given for Surviving Picasso (James Ivory, 1996) and Basquiat (Julian Schnabel, 1996) where the works featured were ‘in the style of…’, and in Love is the Devil focusing on Francis Bacon, no completed works are shown.
The film was shot chronologically, and mid-way through filming Harris took a break of six weeks to gain 30lbs for the painter’s final broken years, in the 1950s.
The film opens in the early 1950s when Pollock is at the height of his celebrity with people rushing (in slow motion) and thrusting copies of Life magazine at him for his signature. He is like a deer caught in the headlights; this fragile man is suddenly on the world stage and unable to cope. It then travels back to 1941 with Pollock as a penniless artist struggling to make a living in Greenwich Village. Lee Krasner, another artist influenced by the surrealist movement, strikes up a friendship which soon becomes romantic although rather dominating. Krasner is shown as a controlling influence; she begins to live for him and through him.
In 1943 he gets his first patron in Peggy Guggenheim (played by Harris’s real wife Amy Madigan) who hosts a show for him and commissions a mural. By 1945 Pollock and Lee, now married, moved to a small town on Long Island. In 1947 he begins working on his large-canvas action paintings (aka the drip paintings) and becomes a success. Life magazine turns him into a star. The narrative has now returned to the film’s opening scene. However, plagued by mental health and excessive drinking throughout his life, his relationship with Krasner becomes more and more strained, and his fame begins to adversey affect his work. By the mid-1950s he is having an affair with a young woman. She and a friend, Edith, are with the drunk Pollock when he crashes his car in 1956; both Pollock and Edith die in the incident.
The final few years of his life are rather skated over, offering no real sense of the deep abyss he was in. There were accusations that his work was getting progressively generic and those that had previous hailed him as American’s greatest living artist were beginning to lose faith in him.
Harris has stated:
It was all-consuming. It was non-stop. It was very exhilarating. It was also very demanding and exhausting, but I didn’t want anyone else to direct the film. I had worked on it long and hard and felt very intimate with it. In terms of playing Pollock, I just had been living with the guy and the thought of it for so long that I would just do it. We’d rehearse and stuff, but it was weird. Because, I’d shift. I’d act and then I’d go back behind a camera and check what we did. But I was able to separate my mind a bit so when I was playing Pollock, I was pretty much just in there. Sometimes I’d carry it a little bit over into the directing aspect of things. I might lose my temper a little bit or get a little abrasive or something. Because I was in character somewhat, but most people understood that was part of the deal. (Quoted in Kleinman 2003)
The film offers no flashbacks, there is no back story, no explanation as to how Pollock became the way he was, as there is in Ray. Early scripts did include flashbacks to his childhood as a way of explaining his later behaviour, but these were pulled because of budget constraints. Also, Harris has stated: ‘I never wanted to make it a psychoanalytic kind of trip. First of all, you can conjecture, you can guess what he was like in his youth growing up, but he was also just born differently. It’s like I don’t want to try to explain that’ (quoted in Cheng 2001). It was believed that he was a manic depressive and used alcohol as a prop, throughout the period covered in the film (1940–56), from his first meeting with Krasner to his death.
As Harris had been painting for ten years in the style of Pollock his performance lacks inhibition and has the intensity one would associate with Pollock. Having been commissioned to paint his first large-scale mural, in a montage scene the film sees him pacing, sitting staring at this huge canvas dominating his small apartment. It fills the screen – looming large, then in a frenzy of activity he begins to work. Harris had deftly choreographed the painting as though it was a dance. The fluid moments, mirroring the brushstrokes, creating the painting in front of us. ‘The idea was not to impersonate him, not to try to recreate anything specifically; but just to try to paint, in the moment, in his style’ (Harris quoted in Matheou 2002).
Pollock grossed just over $10.5 million at the international box office, the vast majority ($8.5 million) in the US. Both Harris and Gay Harden were nominated for Academy Awards, she winning Best Supporting Actress. Harris lost out to Russell Crowe in Gladiator. The film was also widely criticall praised:
The result is a quietly excellent movie, clearly a labour of love for Harris, and far superior to much of the current Hollywood product. It is aimed at educated adults. Daringly, almost experimentally, Harris repudiates the classic three-act drama template, with its explicit psychology and love-interest clichés, preferring to present Pollock’s troubled career in a more indirect, interior way. He shows us detailed, revealing scenes from a life, sometimes entirely wordless, photographed and acted with unhurried intricacy and care. (Bradshaw 2002)
Frida (2002)
Director: Julie Taymor
Screenwriters: Clancy Sigal, Diane Lake, Gregory Nava, Anna Thomas, Rodrigo Garcia and Edward Norton
Starring: Salma Hayek (Frida Kahlo) and Alfred Molina (Diego Rivera)
Subject: Mexican painter Frida Kahlo (Magdalena Carmen Frieda Kahlo y Calderón, 1907–1954)
This was a personal project for Salma Hayek who nurtured the film as producer. Working from Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo by Hayden Herrera (2002), the film covers Kahlo’s life from her near-fatal accident aged 16 to her death aged 47, played by Hayek throughout.
It details her development as an artist, hand-in-hand with her problematic marriage to Mexican mural painter Diego Rivera (Alfred Molina), her communist politics and her ill-health. It was directed by theatre and film director Julie Taymor, who observed ‘Most movies about artists wallow in the angst, and they repel me’ (quoted in Bosley 2002).
For Hayek it was a project that she had been nurturing for six years, first approaching Molina to co-star in 1998, fearful that other Hollywood actresses, including Madonna and Jennifer Lopez, were also developing projects. She secured the rights to use Kahlo’s art from Dolores Olmedo Patino, a former lover and patron of Rivera who administers the rights to much of the couple’s work. Rivera’s grandchildren were also involved and were on set to ensure historical accuracy. Even the dogs used were descendants of Kahlo’s dogs!
An original script by Gregory Nava was rewritten by Rodrigo Garcia (son of Gabriel García Márquez), and later re-worked when Walter Salles came on board to direct. He then left the project and Julie Taymor was signed-up, and she, Hayek, and her then boyfriend actor Edward Norton rewrote the script again. This version brought out more of the love story, and the politics. For Molina, ‘I think [Norton] was very interested in the political dimension of these two people. He wanted to bring in the fact that they weren’t just hugely talented artists, but also at the forefront of Mexican politics and progressive thinking’ (quoted in Tuckman 2001). However, due to a Writer’s Guild of America decision his name was not officially credited. Norton said, ‘I got shafted by the Writer’s Guild at the last minute, but I wrote the draft that got made’ (quoted by Fischer 2002).
Frida was filmed over twelve weeks in the spring of 2001. Its locations included sites in Mexico City and the outlying towns of Puebla and San Luis Potosi. Locals lent period costumes and props to the production. Taymor and cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto worked to ensure that the cinematography, colour, use of light and composition mirrored Kahlo’s paintings. Prieto said, ‘We wanted to see Frida’s world through her eyes, while still staying true to realistic settings and lighting designs. We took a lot of visual cues from her own letters and diaries; she wrote a lot about color and the “mystery of darkness”’ (quoted in Bosley 2002).
The film opens in 1953, at Kahlo’s first one-woman show in Mexico. Her doctor tells her she is too sick to attend, but she has her bed lifted into a flat-bed truck and carried to the gallery. Rivera’s narration recalls the first time they met. ‘There was this skinny kid with one eyebrow shouting up at my studio. She was an artist who tore open her chest and heart to reveal the biological truth of her feelings.’ The film then flashes back to 1923, with Kahlo aged 16, young and full of hope. It then continues in a linear fashion, up to her tragic death at aged 47.
Kahlo was left semi-invalided after the tram accident and during her recuperation she began to paint. She pours the near-destruction and failures of her body on to the canvas. Her work explored the pain in her life: pain caused by the accident, miscarriages and her marriage, his and her affairs, divorce and remarriage. This pain shown in her work is manifestly evident on screen. Taymor said:
When I read Herrera’s book, I could really understand where the paintings came from in her life, which makes her very different from an abstract painter like Pollock or Picasso, with whom that’s not so clear. Like many people, I found her paintings frighteningly gruesome and revealing, but as a film director, they appealed to me because of their narrative content. I thought that using photography and visual effects to make them unfold before your eyes would be a great addition to what might otherwise be a normal biopic. (Quoted in Bosley 2002)
Salma Hayek as Frida Kahlo in Frida (2002)
This is a film about an artist at work. Kahlo’s work literally comes to life, through a mix of cinematography, digital effects and animation. Hayek would have the make-up, hair and costumes as depicted in the paintings, the live-action image then dissolving to correspond with the paintings (‘The Two Fridas’, ‘Self Portrait With Cropped Hair’ and ‘The Broken Column’), or vice versa. Other paintings, such as ‘My Dress Hangs There’, ‘The Suicide of Dorothy Hale’ and ‘What the Water Gave Me’ were animated, retaining Kahlo’s naïve style. When Kahlo and Rivera went to New York, she created magnificent montages of her time there and the sequence is filmed in a style of a montage incorporating live-action footage of the actors, cut-outs of the city skyline, postcards and period footage of the Detroit factory that Rivera actually toured. Taymor said, ‘In the original script, Frida and Diego just walk down Fifth Avenue, and how boring can that be? Both Frida and Diego did montages in their paintings, so I wanted to do something in their style. That kind of agitprop photomontage is also true to that period. It was also a cheap way of creating a vast landscape’ (ibid.).
The film also features an animated ‘The Day of the Dead’ sequence by the Quay Brothers. Following her tram accident, Kahlo is delirious, hearing her doctors discuss her diagnosis and she hallucinates that they are skeletons. Taymor says, ‘I simply gave them a scenario; I said it was a nightmare featuring skeletons in the Mexican Day of the Dead style, and I stressed to make it abstract, comic but slightly frightening. I sent them books of woodcut artist [José Guadalupe] Posada and photos of the hospital room, and they ran with it’ (ibid.). This placing of Kahlo’s art so centrally lends a visually striking tone to what is otherwise a straightforward linear narrative telling of her life.
Hayek is on screen throughout and via a series of vignettes it becomes increasingly a film about her work and Rivera and less about the others that surround her. When it tries introducing her other lovers and relationships there is little time and it seems perfunctory and lacking emotional engagement. Alexander Walker noted that ‘protagonists seem to have next to no small talk, but are always discussing the great events of their own lives or times. The attempt to introduce intimacy into the meeting of celebrities – “Leon, tell me about your children,” says Frida, cuddling up to Trotsky’s goatee – invites easy mockery’ (2002).
The film’s budget was $12 million, and it took $56 million on its worldwide cinema release. It was nominated for 47 awards across the season, picking up 17, but the critical reception was mixed:
Long in gestation, the Frida Kahlo biopic, produced by and starring Salma Hayek, finally reaches our screens, bearing with it an Oscar nomination for best actress. Was it worth the wait? Well, it’s pretty stodgy stuff, by and large, that covers all the expected bases, distilling Kahlo’s relatively short, incident-packed life into the conventional parameters of the artist biography – lots of wine-drinking, dramatic gestures and arguments about communism. Director Julie Taymor takes considerable pains over small, animated interpolations that briefly illustrate and draw on Kahlo’s own work; however impressive these are, though, they’re not enough to offset the heaviness of the rest of the film. Kahlo’s iconic value – both as a poster girl for 1980s western bohemianism and for Mexico’s own sense of pride – is well established, and the movie doesn’t let them down. (Pulver 2003)
Basquiat (Julian Schnabel, 1996); Jean-Michel Basquiat (Jeffrey Wright)
Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus (Steven Shainberg, 2006); Diane Arbus (Nicole Kidman)
Goya’s Ghosts (Milos Forman, 2006); Francisco de Goya (Stellan Skars gaard)
Klimt (Raoul Ruiz, 2006); Gustav Klimt (John Malkovich)
Love is the Devil (John Maybury, 1998); Francis Bacon (Derek Jacobi)
Paradise Found (Mario Andreacchio, 2003); Paul Gauguin (Kiefer Sutherland)
Surviving Picasso (James Ivory, 1996); Pablo Picasso (Anthony Hopkins)
