SPLATTER FEST.

IT'S CUSTOMARY TO KICK OFF a review of an artist's biopic with a few chuckling asides about classic cinematic representations of artistic genius, like Lust for Life (Kirk Douglas as Van Gogh!) and The Agony and the Ecstasy (Chariton Heston as Michelangelo!). The reviewer knowingly ticks off the elements of neo-Romantic myth as they pile up--madness, creativity, rebellion, berets, work boots, poverty, and, of course, originality. Ed Harris's new movie is Pollock, but maybe we're supposed to understand it as Pollock!!!, the larger-than-life version. True to type, the film, which premiered at the New York Film Festival in September and opens in theaters next month, promises the kitschy thrill of seeing your favorite AbExers impersonated on the screen.

But Harris and Marcia Gay Harden, who costar as Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner, both do a better than respectable job; in fact, they deliver quite graceful interpretations. The supporting cast is fine as well: The actors who play Tony Smith (John Heard) and Howard Putzel (Bud Cort) are particularly good in small roles, and Jeffrey Tambor's Clement Greenberg is suitably droll. Amy Madigan, Harris's wife, gives us Peggy Guggenheim as a barking bohemian, more laide than jolie. The only real clinkers are Va! Kilmer as de Kooning and Stephanie Seymour as Helen Frankenthaler; their dumbness surfaces and distracts. Former teen dream Jennifer Connelly plays luscious Ruth Kligman with appropriately manipulative faux-naivete; she's good, but a young Shelley Winters could have played the hell out of the art tart (who, according to Warhol, wanted Jack Nicholson to play Pollock). Still, more than wishing for recasting, one is grateful for the near misses. Pollock strikes a chord in every actor's imagination--was there m ethod to his madness?--and major stars like De Niro and Pacino, even Streisand, have at one time or another optioned a biography or expressed interest in the artist.

Why are actors so intrigued by Pollock? Because his is a great story, full of highs and lows, with plenty of opportunities to chew the scenery, which for the most part Harris eschews. On the few occasions he does succumb, such as the family-dinner scene in which an enraged Pollock starts banging on the table like Gene Krupa, you get the feeling it might really have been that horrible and embarrassing.

For the past thirty years or so, art-history insiders have referred knowingly to the "Pollock Myth" to which the larger culture is allegedly so susceptible. Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith's 1989 Pulitzer Prize-winning biography (on which the film is based) answers this mythmaking with exhaustive research; the book is a reference tool rather than a true life of the artist (no one who lived forty-odd years--or for that matter, ninety-odd years--requires 900-odd pages). Aside from a few persistent themes (such as the implication that Pollock was homosexual), there is little narrative shape. The film takes the opposite tack. It is spare and anecdotal, stringing together major moments from Pollock's early days in New York through his death in 1956: Here Pollock pisses in Peggy Guggenheim's hearth; there he befriends a crow. The story's rhythm suffers from too little, not too much.

As the movie follows Pollock from downtown to the Springs and down the tubes, we do pick up information. Many of the details are taken directly from primary sources; fans will recognize re-created snapshots and reviews recited verbatim throughout. The period setting of the various locales isn't bad, although inevitably cleaned up (this is a movie, after all); the tin-ceilinged East Village as much as the pastoral Springs may induce fits of real-estate envy in New York viewers. The Cedar Tavern is here, of course, hosting a short, smoky roundtable with de Kooning, Smith, William Baziotes (Kenny Scharf?!--poor William), et al. Guggenheim's Art of This Century is especially accurate and entertaining: aggressively, progressively arty, filled with geometric jewelry and largely forgotten art-world figures. Along the way, the film sketches Pollock's character: a need to impress his mother, sexual difficulties, artistic competitiveness, closeness to nature, inarticulateness.

Aside from his work, the main theme is the relationship between Pollock and Krasner. The script seems to permit complexity: She subordinates her work to promoting and caring for Pollock, but he is not ungenerous (also, by our standards, not unobnoxious), declaring on his first visit to her studio that she is a damn good woman painter." The two are represented as partners when things are good; when things are bad, he disregards her emotionally and sexually. Harden as Krasner elicits empathy, and Harris as Pollock is not a complete jerk.

The most laughable part of the movie should have been the painting scenes (think of Nick Nolte in Martin Scorsese's segment of New York Stories, flinging paint around his loft, all brute force and muscular inspiration). But here the actor-artist is expressive, and also skillful. Harris's execution is convincing (he trained with artist Lisa Lawley); his Pollock has an ease and an engagement on display only when he paints. Even Harris's rendition of the earlier work, like Male and Female, 1942, looks good; with the drip paintings, the actor had the advantage of being able to crib from Hans Namuth's two films of Pollock painting.

The second of Namuth's documentaries (1951)--the one with the famous "canvas's-eye view"--also functions anecdotally in Pollock: Its making pushes the psychically fragile artist over the edge. In this interpretation, by now a commonplace in the popular literature, Pollock is split between (private) authenticity and its (public) representation, which sends him into an alcoholic tailspin he kicks off by knocking over a whole Thanksgiving dinner table. As Naifeh and Smith put it in their bio, "By striking a Faustian bargain with Namuth--celluloid immortality for artistic integrity--by clinging to the image of the great artist, he had only confirmed it: he was a fraud." It is, of course, a great irony that this film portrays a filmic representation of Pollock as the falsification he couldn't bear.

In the scholarly literature, art historians have tied Namuth's still photos to Harold Rosenberg's 1952 essay "The American Action Painters," as promoting an emphasis on the act rather than the end of painting. But Rosenberg (who actually seems to have had de Kooning in mind) was speaking not only of the existentialist act but the actor, in the more conventional sense. In 1948, he wrote an essay on the character drama that clarifies his point: In artistic or political endeavors, we often deliberately play a role, inhabit a character of our own devising, based on both personal and historical myths. Rosenberg later wrote specifically of Pollock, "In the creation of art, the puppet one makes of oneself is of the first importance." The myths the artist created "helped make it possible for Pollock to paint under hardships that regularly filled him with despair." One familiar character is that of the laconically masculine cowboy; critic Thomas Hess referred to another: "'Jack' never treated Pollock the Great Painter with irony or at a distance." In other words, Pollock created and inhabited his own representation before Namuth (or Greenberg, or Life magazine, or Harris) ever got there.

Art professionals will almost certainly criticize Pollock for repeating cliches, for promoting outdated myths, even those generated by the artist himself. Yet they'll continue to praise the art of the real Pollock, which might never have happened without the support of the preexisting myth. Shouldn't we learn (or relearn) to take the myth a little more seriously? It doesn't seem to go away, despite all the carping. Why did "genius" and even "greatness" mean so much to Pollock (and to Krasner)? What did they mean in 1950, as opposed to 1890, and what do they mean now? In a culture that enforces a certain mediocrity, not to mention the tedious conformity of resistance via subculture, the lessons that Pollock and his work embody may have as much to do with artistic ambition and achievement as with freedom or expression (the values that Meyer Schapiro and others championed in the '50s).

The downside of Harris's version is the condensation of complex experiences into single dramatic episodes, such as the "breakthrough" when Pollock accidentally discovers drip painting, no Siqueiros or Sobel in sight. This makes achievement seem either too easy or too chancy. But however partial the film's success in making sense of the material, there's something valuable or even--dare I say it?--inspiring about the idea that an artist could do something great, despite, or because of, everything.

KATY SIEGEL, assistant professor of contemporary art history and criticism at Hunter College, CUNY, is a frequent contributor to Artforum. The author of forthcoming catalogue essays on Lisa Yuskavage (ICA Philadelphia) and Rineke Dijkstra (ICA Boston) as well as "Breakthrough: The 1950s and '60s," which will appear in the collection Tempus Fugit (Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City), Siegel is currently at work on a book about the changing sense of time in postwar American art and culture. This month, Siegel considers Ed Harris's new film Pollock, an examination of the life and career of the painter.

DIGITAL STREAM

LAWRENCE CHUA 

I have it on good authority that mermaids don't exist in China, yet Lou Ye captured one from the depths of Shanghai's unclean waterways in his second film, Suzhou River, which made its US debut at New Directors/New Films in March and opens this month at New York's Film Forum. The mermaid in Lou's film is a slippery apparition, the coy ghost of a suicide who swims half-naked in a seedy nightclub floor-show, and her presence intimates that this gritty film, like the man-made river it's named after, is rife with impurities. Suzhou River is a story of love and betrayal, a posthuman noir told by a down-and-out videographer, and the entire narrative is seen through the lens of his camera. When I asked Lou how he had arrived at this first-person technique, the thirty-five-year-old director responded, "I tried to put myself in the story. But in any case, when you tell another person's tale you always run the risk of being implicated in it."

A graduate of the Beijing Film Academy, Lou belongs to the so-called sixth generation of Chinese filmmakers. Their predecessors, the celebrated fifth generation, which includes such luminaries as Chen Kaige (Farewell My Concubine) and Zhang Yimou (Raise the Red Lantern), came of age during the Cultural Revolution and set their epics in China's past or in the rural countryside, emphasizing traditional Chinese customs, costumes, and culture. Directors like Lou began making films after the Tiananmen Square massacre, during a period of unprecedented--and disruptive--economic liberalization, and they often refer to themselves as the 386 MHz generation (referencing the then-fastest computer processor; three for over thirty, eight for educated in the '80s, and six for born in the '60s). Their movies are impudent and urban, and their influences range from Dziga Vertov and Jean-Luc Godard to Alfred Hitch-cock and MTV, all of which are visible in Lou's film. "I don't need to make a costume drama to prove that this is a Chinese film," Lou says.

Suzhou River has not yet been approved for public viewing in China, but Lou is critical of those who invoke the specter of censorship as a way of marketing Chinese cinema in the West. On the other hand, he says, "The censors are a bit more nervous than necessary. The time when one movie could shut down the government is long gone." Lou won acclaim abroad for his 1994 thesis film, Weekend Lover, but since then he's been working for state television, where he's cranked out everything from soaps, commercials, and music videos to a "non-narrative expressionistic psychomystery," Don't Be Young, which aired on Chinese television in 1995. Lou's experience in TV may have influenced his decision to shoot Suzhou River entirely in digital video.

Both the "I" and the "eye" in Lou's film are the video camera, an instrument that appears to record truth but in fact simulates reality. As our identification comes to rest with the camera, Lou exposes the ways that the technology of memory displaces human remembering, making every girl in the film the girl we would follow to the ends of the earth. "The camera," Walter Benjamin wrote, "introduces us to unconscious optics," and in Suzhou River we follow the polluted flow of the camera's desires, a digital stream in which even true love is a projection.

Lawrence Chua is the author of Gold by the inch (Grove Press, 1998).