About
Nick Knight used André Breton’s poem Freedom of Love as the guiding text for this short film of Hollywood star Brad Pitt, created while shooting the actor for a special issue of Vanity Fair magazine in 2004. During the shoot, Knight created a number of intriguing scenarios for Pitt to perform, so as to engage the actor in deliberately self-reflective performance.
The shoot began in a photo booth set up in a studio in Los Angeles, where Knight asked Pitt to take his own passport photograph and then write over the resulting prints, which were blown up to 3 x 4 metres. Knight then filmed Pitt energetically painting onto the huge blow-up of his own face and adding captions while reciting Breton’s poem, a one stanza, sixty-line homage to the poet’s wife.
A meditation on image and celebrity, and on an actor’s response to the way he is seen by others, the film is presented alongside the original June 2004 Vanity Fair editorial and the text of Breton's verse.
