Harris: Pollock (2000)

Ed Harris’ Pollock is a biopic of the artist from 1941, when he met Lee Krasner (Marcia Gay Harden), to his death in 1956. It’s the period during which Pollock, played by Harris, moved from abstraction to drip painting – or, in the words of Pollock himself, from abstracting from life to abstracting from nothing. That’s quite a daunting trajectory for a biopic, and Harris responds by turning Pollock himself into something of an abstraction. For the most part, he’s given as little depth or content as his greatest paintings - a collection of tics and jumps, always trying to achieve just the right surface tension, he barely emerges from the foetal position, swathed in an amniotic alcoholism that places the burden of characterisation and charisma squarely on Harden, who puts in one of her most memorable performances. However, if the film’s not especially interested in Pollock’s personality, it’s fascinated with his process – time and again, Harris presents situations that suggest that Pollock lost a vital connection with his paintings the moment that they were exhibited. In that sense, the film sets itself the task of rexhibiting his paintings as processes – not just the literal process of repainting them (and Harris does all the painting in the film), but by recreating the first makeshift spaces and provisional conversations within which they were staged. It makes sense, then, that Pollock’s Long Island studio floor is reimagined as the first of his great drip-paintings: it’s only when he turns his attention to this by-product of the artistic process, hitherto invisible, that he “discovers” his distinctive style. And one of the surprising things about this attention to process is that it frames Pollock as an abstract lyricist as much as an abstract expressionist, as Harris folds his stylistic development into the rhythms of his Long Island home. Among other things, it’s only after he tills the ground that Pollock thinks to place his canvas on the floor – and it’s at this point that his canvases become large enough to frame Pollock in a similar way to Harris’ lyrical establishing shots, as he walks around on them, inhabits them. In fact, one of the most powerful things about the film is the way Harris discovers a connection between the abstract expressionist canvas, blank or otherwise, and the cinematic screen, as well as between drip-painting and directing. As both himself and Pollock, Harris produces surfaces that he never directly touches – he preserves surfaces - until the film feels more tactile than visual, a record of Harris’ own process, best exhibited on the cutting-room floor.