Dripped
2010 · 8m · France
Directed by Léo Verrier
Genres: animation, biography, dark comedy
Tones: darkly comic, surreal, whimsical
À New York en 1950, Jack, passionné de peinture, écume les musées et vole les tableaux des grands maîtres pour littéralement les dévorer et s'imprégner de leur substance. À court de toiles, il se met à peindre lui-même et, jetant ses couleurs au hasard, invente malgré lui le dripping.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A film about an artist literally consuming masterpieces to become great, then accidentally inventing abstract expressionism while throwing paint — it's the kind of irreverent, conceptually insane premise that makes you laugh and then realize it's actually saying something true about artistic anxiety and theft. Nobody else would greenlight this, and that's exactly why it works.
Verrier positions himself squarely in the lineage of biographical animation that interrogates artistic creation, and the formal choice to render Pollock's accidental dripping as the culmination of obsessive consumption shows real curatorial intelligence about how modernism actually happened.
The decision to animate this as tactile, almost grotesque consumption—paint entering the body as literal sustenance rather than inspiration—is what elevates what could be a clever concept into something physically unsettling and true, and that single formal commitment carries the entire eight minutes.
Reviews
Coloré, mystérieux et musical, le film de Léo Verrier est un hommage à la création picturale et à Jackson Pollock en particulier. Quand la peinture inspire l'animation, le stock sans fin et impersonnel des courts métrages actuels se personnalise, ne fut-ce que grâce à un bon et curieux film en mouvement.