Mr. Turner to Pollock to The Square. The films that took the working life of visual artists seriously rather than as backdrop for romantic spectacle.
The artist film is one of cinema's most-difficult genres. The protagonist's work is, by definition, the production of a different medium; the film must find ways to depict that work cinematically without reducing it to spectacle. The films that succeed do so by treating the artist's working life as actual labour rather than as romantic stage-managed creation.
Our picks across visual-arts cinema.
The artist film is, structurally, almost designed to fail. The conventional approach — depict the artist's life chronologically, climax on the production of the most-famous work, end on the recognition or death of the protagonist — produces films that almost no one wants to watch. The artistic process does not, in real life, fit a three-act structure. The genuine work happens in studios across years; the dramatic biography happens in romances, breakdowns, and patron relationships that are only adjacent to the work.
The films above mostly find ways to refuse the conventional biographical structure. Mr. Turner stays inside Turner's working life and almost never zooms out to historical or romantic context. The Square is structurally a comedy about the absurdities of contemporary art rather than a biographical film at all. Pain and Glory is a meta-film about the impossibility of cleanly biographising one's own life. The films that work are the ones that treat the artist's life as cinema's subject rather than as cinema's framework.