Method in the madness

Jackson Pollock was the wild man of American art and the hidden icon of American cinema, influencing Brando and Dean and films…

Jackson Pollock was the wild man of American art and the hidden icon of American cinema, influencing Brando and Dean and films from A Streetcar Named Desire to Apocalypse Now, writes Jonathan Jones.

He dances around the ring gracefully, in slow motion, to the music of Cavalleria Rusticana. Change the opera to jazz, replace the canvas of the boxing ring with the canvas of a painting laid out on the ground, and that could be Jackson Pollock, American artist, in the opening frames of Raging Bull.

It has taken almost half a century for a biopic of the painter who dripped and flicked paint on to horizontal canvases to create incomparable, heart-stopping masterpieces to reach our screens, as Ed Harris's Pollock arrives in Ireland a couple of years after its US release. Yet, in a sense, we have been watching Jackson Pollock on film for years.

Without ever being directly referred to, Pollack is the secret source - the fountainhead - of a certain style of movement and acting; a certain sense of rebellion, in films from A Streetcar Named Desire to Raging Bull, from The Wild One to Apocalypse Now. The best, most vital, most countercultural strain of American film-making owes a great deal, perhaps everything, to Pollock.

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It is impossible to overstate the importance of Pollock in American culture. He was the first purely American artist. It took the strange, inarticulate Pollock to break through to something not merely original, but unprecedented. The way he painted - dancing, letting paint fall - was not European at all. It asserted a freedom, a daring that marks a caesura in the cultural history of the US. There is "before" and "after" Pollock - precisely, the turning point is 1949-50, the years of Pollock's public triumph.

In the 1950s, something new started to happen in American cinema. It didn't have much to do with directors. It was to do with actors; the way they aspired to be spontaneous on screen. The Actor's Studio, the Method, Marlon Brando - everyone knows the story. And yet it pays to watch those films again, to see how startling Brando's presence is in films such as A Streetcar Named Desire and On the Waterfront. It is as if he is more alive, more human than the mannequins around him.

Everyone else acts from a script, in a character, while he does odd, improvisational things that introduce a randomness and jarring unpredictability - as in the scene in On the Waterfront when, for no logical reason, as he talks to Eva Marie Saint, he tries on one of her gloves: an effeminate, ludicrous gesture, one that is pure Brando.

And a lot like Pollock. In 1949, Life magazine gave unprecedented coverage to a modern, homegrown artist when it headlined a feature: "Jackson Pollock: Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?" But it was the pictures that shocked.

Pollock was photographed in his working clothes: dark blue denim, big boots. He posed in front of one of his paintings, Summertime (now owned by London's Tate Modern), whose horizontal tracery communicates instantly the radical nature of his art.

Like Brando, the tough Pollock standing in front of the painting, arms folded aggressively, cigarette dangling from his mouth, has this other, tender side, embodied by the painting's beauty. And like Brando's biker leader in The Wild One, you wouldn't want your daughter to marry him. This seems to be exactly how Pollack struck Middle America when it picked up that copy of Life. The magazine received 532 letters, almost all of them denouncing Pollock. To young people looking at the magazine, Pollock was instantly heroic.

The connection between Pollock and Brando is close. In the summer of 1944, Pollock and his wife, the artist Lee Krasner, met Tennessee Williams. Williams wrote in his memoirs about the "sturdy" Pollock and his rowdy, drunken antics. In 1947, he created a character who had much in common with the surly, inarticulate and aggressive artist - Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire, the stage role that defined Brando, and that he recreated on screen in 1951.

Art is simpler, more autonomous than working in Hollywood. Brando's acting tends to stand out in films that are, today, quite lumbering. As the idea of modern art took hold in '50s America, it was Pollock's image - socially alienated, angry, a visionary - that captivated the public imagination.

In his 1956 van Gogh biography, Lust for Life, released the year Pollock died in a car crash, Vincente Minnelli brings together the myth of the modern artist with that of the awkward outsider; the brilliant misfit.

Lust for Life is one of the rebellion films of the 1950s, made the year after the James Dean classic of teen alienation, Rebel Without a Cause, and it gives Kirk Douglas a role every bit as wild, dangerous and uncontrolled as the characters Brando and Dean were playing. Vincent van Gogh is a man who wants to contribute, to create, but society won't let him. He rejects his family's values, rejects conventional happiness, looks for something different - something he can only find when he is painting - and, in what is the most disturbing climax to any Hollywood film of the 1950s, shoots himself.

Lust for Life is an under-rated and key American film of the 1950s, and it is not only the definitive Hollywood movie about an artist. It has a violence - we see Kirk Douglas hack off his ear - that anticipates the intensity and danger of later films, precisely because it is more psychotic, less tragic than Brando getting beaten up in On the Waterfront.

Martin Scorsese is an admirer of Minnelli, and his Raging Bull resembles Lust for Life. There's the same brutal energy to the central character: the social dysfunction, and the inseparability of Jake LaMotta from his vocation, is like that of Vincent. Even more, though, he's like Jackson Pollock.

BOXING was the only sport that interested Pollock. He could be violent, though always, Lee Krasner claimed, to things rather than people, such as turning over dinner tables. Pollack's rage and frustration when he "lost his stuff", and couldn't paint masterpieces any more, makes you think of De Niro as LaMotta punching the wall of a jail cell.

The freedom of the camera in Raging Bull - the way it flies and dodges round the ring - is also pure Pollock. It took until the 1970s for the spontaneity and vitality of Brando's acting to find an equivalent in American film-making behind the camera. A certain kind of movement - wide, violent yet graceful, chaotically modern, always dangerous - makes their great modern American movies unique, and it comes not from European avant-garde cinema so much as from the cult of spontaneity that has its purest expression in Pollock.

You see it, in its original state, in a film that the photographer Hans Namuth made of Pollock at work in 1950. Namuth took a series of cinematic photographs of Pollock painting that capture him in blurred, spectacular motion. He then asked Pollock if he could film him. They worked outdoors in winter with repeated takes, but something about the experience unsettled Pollock and, after a day's filming, he hit the bottle and didn't stop again.

But the film should be looked at for itself, a beautiful piece of American cinema. Against a deep blue sky, from below we watch Pollock paint on a glass panel as if he is painting in the air, which is how those who knew him best described his method. His face is dark, lost in the ritual of it. His hand moves automatically to some internal rhythm; the paint flies, arcs through space.

The sense of motion in this film, and in Pollock's wide, epic paintings, animates the best American cinema, such as the camera moving through a crowded bar in Mean Streets. But perhaps the ultimate cinematic equivalent for Pollock, though, is a film that recalls the history of the spontaneous in American culture by setting out on a quest for Marlon Brando. Francis Coppola's Apocalypse Now is a paradox; at once monumental and created improvisationally. Like a Pollock painting, it is a visionary chaos, from the opening fantasia of helicopters, fire and trees, to Martin Sheen's narcissistic judo-dance in his hotel room, to the ritual slaughter of Brando.

Jackson Pollock and Marlon Brando both saw themselves as native Americans; Pollock claimed his inspiration came from the Indian sand painters of the west, and Brando's Oscar was picked up by a Native American activist. In Apocalypse Now, this desire for an irrational, wild state of nature - "I am nature," said Pollock - is at once consummated and exposed as insane, self-indulgent folly.

American individual self-expression consumes itself in the Vietnam war in helicopter gunship madness. Brando is a monster that must be killed. But Pollock lives on. - (Guardian Service)

Pollock opens at the Irish Film Centre, Dublin on July 19th