The Best Art Movie Ever!

"I will talk to you of Art, for there is nothing else to talk about, for there is nothing else... Life is an obscure hobo bumming a ride on the omnibus of Art. Burn gas, buggies, and whip your sour cream of circumstance and hope, and go ahead and sleep your bloody heads off."

There are many acclaimed films about artists and art, Caravaggio, Lust for Life, With My Left Foot, Frida, etc... But for me the best by far is Roger Corman's 1959 short, sharp, and, above all, economical A Bucket of Blood.

With a budget of only $50,000 and shot in just five days, A Bucket of Blood is a brilliant dark comedy that tells the story of Walter Paisley, a nerdy nonentity who works as a waiter and general dogsbody at "The Yellow Door", a trendy beatnik café favoured by artists, poets and musicians. Yearning for the celebrity and popularity of his clientele (for whom art is all), he aspires to become an sculptor – despite having no discernible talent whatsoever...

"Be a nose... Be a nose! BE A NOSE!!" – Walter struggles with his clay...

When he accidentally kills his landlady's cat and covers its body in clay to hide the evidence he is acclaimed as a brilliant sculptor and lauded by those who had previously dismissed and ridiculed him.

The artist with his seminal first work; "Dead Cat"

Intoxicated by his success and new found popularity, his life begins to unravel as the pressure to create more "art" drives him toward murder and madness...

This movie is much more than a cheap-as-chips exploitation flick – thanks to Charles B. Griffith's bitingly witty script, it is a clever satire of pretensions the art world and the fickle nature of celebrity. Sometimes it falls to Low Art to show up the failings of High Art...

You can watch the whole movie right here!


I'll leave the last word to bearded beatnic poet, Maxwell H. Brock:

"Where are Leonardo, Rembrandt, Ludwig? Alive! Alive! Alive! They were born! Bring on the multitudes with a multitude of fishes: feed them with the fishes for liver oil to nourish the Artist, stretch their skin upon an easel to give him canvas, crush their bones into a paste that he might mold them. Let them die, and by their miserable deaths become the clay within his hands that he might form an ashtray or an ark.

Pray that you may be his diadem: gold, glory, paint, clay, that he might take you in his magic hands and wring from your marrow wonder. For all that is comes through the eye of the Artist. The rest are blind fish swimming in the cave of aloneness. Swim on you maudlin, muddling, maddened fools, and dream that one bright, sunny night the Artist will bait a hook and let you bite upon it. Bite hard and die!... in his stomach you are very close to immortality."