Spoilers herein.
I'm skeptical of projects like this. A great artist is no more defined than that his work stands on its own. Kurosawa's work does. He is one of less than a half dozen people who invented film and thereby changed the way we dream.
I believe in biographies of historical characters, because a convincing case can be made for history as a collection of human actions, not ideas. So it makes sense to understand some of those people in some way. But art is different. Different enough that if we talk about the life, it has to be the life of ideas.
Pollock was a drunk. So what? The recent film of his life reduced his work to an unexplained obsession. What's interesting and important with that?
Anyway, the rationale behind these projects, this one surely, is an appreciation of a life, despite the repeated information that he was all film and nothing else. We do get snippets of some work, but largely wrapped around some fact: his difficulties with management, his financing, the hotel room he used when writing the script. A huge `discovery' is presented when explaining that a childhood expedition to see corpses from the great earthquake is reflected in later films.
Some lip service is given to his intensity and commitment. But nowhere can we find something about his ideas of visual grammar. We don't get any insight into the subjectivization of the camera, the revolution he wrought.
I'm sure that this was financed with school libraries in mind, so they dumbed it down to match TeeVee notions of what biographies are all about. But I am also sure that this master would rather see a film about him, centered on the work and with no dialog at all. None, even words as well intoned as those by Shepard and Scofield.
I'm skeptical of projects like this. A great artist is no more defined than that his work stands on its own. Kurosawa's work does. He is one of less than a half dozen people who invented film and thereby changed the way we dream.
I believe in biographies of historical characters, because a convincing case can be made for history as a collection of human actions, not ideas. So it makes sense to understand some of those people in some way. But art is different. Different enough that if we talk about the life, it has to be the life of ideas.
Pollock was a drunk. So what? The recent film of his life reduced his work to an unexplained obsession. What's interesting and important with that?
Anyway, the rationale behind these projects, this one surely, is an appreciation of a life, despite the repeated information that he was all film and nothing else. We do get snippets of some work, but largely wrapped around some fact: his difficulties with management, his financing, the hotel room he used when writing the script. A huge `discovery' is presented when explaining that a childhood expedition to see corpses from the great earthquake is reflected in later films.
Some lip service is given to his intensity and commitment. But nowhere can we find something about his ideas of visual grammar. We don't get any insight into the subjectivization of the camera, the revolution he wrought.
I'm sure that this was financed with school libraries in mind, so they dumbed it down to match TeeVee notions of what biographies are all about. But I am also sure that this master would rather see a film about him, centered on the work and with no dialog at all. None, even words as well intoned as those by Shepard and Scofield.