If you’ve visited Bilbao in recent years, you’ve encountered Frank Gehry. Alternately a visionary, sensationalist, living legend or practitioner of logotecture - there’s no denying his profound impact on modern architecture. An organic artist, Gehry turns drawings into sculpture into buildings – Berlin’s DG Bank, Barcelona’s Fish and Weil Am Rhein’s Vitra Furniture Museum foremost among them. Most significantly is Bilbao’s Guggenheim Museum, a signature piece so comfortably illogical it looks ‘as if it fell from space several centauries ago’.

That’s the work, but what of the man? Gehry starts with a quick outline, the form that Pollack chose to inform his documentary. Filmed over five years, these sketches of Gehry are intended to reveal the artist. If it reveals much about Pollack along the way, well that’s a handy sidebar. One of the director’s greatest distractions is himself as the long-term friend turns most conversations back on filmmaking: “it’s the for me” or “that’s how I find personal expression within stringent commercial demands”. That sort of thing. Fortunately it’s not all mutual ego-stroking as Pollack finds some notables to do it for him; Bob Geldof, Dennis Hopper and Michael Eisner among them. There’s a small voice of disagreement from those who aren’t so convinced of Gehry’s God-like status, though they’re quickly hustled behind the nearest highly photogenic building.

With scant attention paid to Gehry’s contemporaries, Pollack creates an isolated, narrow and somewhat choppy view of the man and his work. There’s precious little understanding how this grandfatherly figure creates such magnificent, daring, egocentric works of art. Gehry wonders where it all comes from. Ultimately, so do we.

// COLIN FRASER