Blog 1

From the opening scene of the movie Pollock the viewer gets a glimpse at the artists character and idiosyncrasies that made him one of the most important and famous artists of the 20th century. In the first scene Pollock is standing in front of a large group of people, his artwork is hanging behind him, and while they are all jostling each other to get to him and as the camera closes in on his face he pauses and you can see in his eyes that he is staring off into space. It sets the tone for the rest of the movies, there are do many people that wanted to be with him or wanted a piece of him, but even when he is with people he is never really there. He is always thinking about something else it seems. The opening scene speaks to this. The movie then jumps to a scene of a drunk Pollock never really explaining what is going on, and the viewer is immediately thrown into the world of Jackson Pollock. The movie does an excellent job at explaining the erratic behavior and continual up and downs of Jackson's life. The movie does through the music and the silent pauses that are interspersed throughout the film. They set the tone for each scene and help to show when there is a lack of dialogue that there is something of substance happening in the scene. The silences only emphasized that he is living in his own world and everyone else is almost just background noise to him. He is completely isolated. The close up shots and use of music helps to set a tone for the film and gives us the ability to see things through Jackson's eyes.
The film in relation to schematic structure skips the first two stages and starts with youth. The film details his discovery by Peggy Guggenheim and other people in the art world, but it also details his discovery in terms of his relationship with Lee Krasner, another abstract artist who becomes involved with him. It is not until her discovery and her recognition of his talent does he truly begin to grow as an artist and have the ability to create works and unleash his talent in such a way that he gets "discovered" by Peggy Guggenheim and important woman in the New York art scene in the 1940's. However had he not become involved with Lee no one would have pushed him from being a youthful and slightly lazy painter to become the mature and important painter that the world knows him as. The second stage detailed in the movie is his transition into maturity. This comes about when Peggy commissions him to paint a mural for her New York apartment. It is when Jackson has his "breakthrough" quite literally shown when he breaks through the wall in his apartment, that he is able to produce high quality art that helped garner him the attention of the New York art world. He also gets his own show through his relationship with Peggy. Jackson continues to grow once he moves out of the city and moves to Long Island. Through his relationship out there with nature and a calmness he had not been experiencing before he is able to create art inspired by the images surrounding him.
Since antiquity people have always been inspired by something, poets, artists, actors they all have something that inspired them to create. Jackson Pollock was no different he had to draw his inspiration from something or someone. Plato illustrates through a conversation between Ion and Socrates his ideas on inspiration. He believes that there is no such thing as an original inspiration that everyone takes ideas from other people or from something that we see. No one creates something that is completely original. In the film however when Jackson is looking for inspiration for the mural for Peggy, he literally sits in front of the blank canvas. He is not drawing inspiration from someone else and when he begins to paint it appears to be something that came to his head. I disagree with Plato, because as illustrated in the movie it is possible to create something that is original and not inspired by stolen ideas.