“It was during the act of painting that Pollock engaged in the act of communicating,” noted Namuth, who convinced the artist to be filmed while sloshing and dripping his paints onto a canvas spread outdoors on the ground. This gestural activity was his way of being in his painting, and no other artist has been so intimately caught, literally, in the act. Informative to all subsequent generations of painters, the film was such a traumatic experience for Pollock that one wants to ask: What is the price of documentation?