How Willem de Kooning inspired Kathryn Bigelow: “I liked those big gestures”
It was indicative on the state of Hollywood as a whole that Kathryn Bigelow first gained attention and a reputation for being a trailblazer solely for being a woman who directed the typically male-dominated arena of genre films, but that’s only a small part of her legacy as one of the most important female filmmakers of the modern era.
From her debut on biker thriller The Loveless to neo-Western vampire story Near Dark, underrated action thriller Blue Steel, cult classic Point Break, and dystopian sci-fi Strange Days, Bigelow specialised in high concept and pulse-pounding tales that allowed her to put her own stylistic spin on stables of genre cinema, before K-19: The Widowmaker saw her become the first woman to helm a $100million production.
Unfortunately, it flopped, but that distinction could never be taken away. When she returned from a six-year directorial sabbatical, Bigelow made history again after ‘Best Picture’ winner The Hurt Locker made her the first woman to win ‘Best Director’ at the Academy Awards. Despite her success in the industry, though, she initially had her sights set on a career in the art world.
Bigelow gained a degree in fine arts from the San Francisco Art Institute before being accepted into the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program, where she lived with fellow painter-turned-filmmaker Julian Schnabel for a spell in an apartment owned by performance artist Vito Acconci in the early 1970s.
One of her most notable artistic influences was Willem de Kooning, the Dutch-born abstract impressionist who was a key figure in the style that would become known as ‘action painting’, which makes him a fitting touchstone for Bigelow considering she made her name in the arena of action cinema.
Befitting the name, action painting was less concerned about careful brushstrokes and meticulously created scenes, with paint being liberally splashed and smeared on the canvas for a more immediate impact that signified the act of painting as being of equal importance to the artist’s work as the end result of the process.
The parallels between the artists she enjoyed and the films she ended up directing wasn’t lost on Bigelow, either, as she explained to the Sydney Morning Herald. “I liked those big gestures,” she explained. “And moving into film and looking at it as this truly visceral medium, that was exciting for me.”
That’s not to say any of Bigelow’s movies have been abstract in the most typical sense of the world, but the way in which de Kooning and similar practitioners of his style would favour a more instinctive and emotionally-charged process can be felt across her fast-paced, propulsive, and immersive features that saw the filmmaker inject familiar genre spaces with her own sensibilities.
