Director: John Maybury DOP: John Mathieson Screenplay: John Maybury Cast: Derek Jacobi, Daniel Craig, Tilda Swinton, Karl Johnson, Anita Pallenberg Rights: BFI Distribution

British artist Francis Bacon is among the most important figures of 20th-century art, his oeuvre spanning a wide spectrum of techniques and expressional registers, ranging from photocollage to pop art. This cinematic treatment of Bacon’s life is an explosion of nearly incomprehensible fragments of imaginative visions, static glimpses of everyday rituals and, above all, insights into Bacon’s complicated relationship with his lover George Dyer, who finds living with the egocentric artist impossible to endure. Seeming to follow in the footsteps of Derek Jarman, not to mention Godard, director John Maybury eschews the chronological approach of a traditional biopic. Those who know nothing about Bacon won’t come away much the wiser. Instead, the film focuses on evoking the artist’s feelings of isolation and various mental states, capturing Bacon through his own expressional lens, in part by employing a collage-like narrative technique. The result is a (self-)portrait of an artist created in the spirit of his paintings.