10 great films about artistic rivalry

“You can always put that award where your heart ought to be,” Bette Davis, playing an ageing Broadway star, tells the young actress who’s seized her limelight. The caustic dialogue is from Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s All About Eve (1950), one of the great movies about show business. Its theme of ruthless ambition between oversized creative egos has proved enduring for directors with a self-reflexive bent – even if the seductive magic of cinema is a more comforting illusion.

Scheming and sparring is the very stuff of great melodrama for those who believe there is no art without pain. Lee Sang-il’s Kokuho, out on 8 May, is a sumptuous, spellbinding tribute to Japanese classical kabuki theatre and the centuries-old discipline of suffering for your craft. New German Cinema’s chronicler of power games Rainer Werner Fassbinder – whose own emotional wars were notorious – suggested great work emerges despite not because of interpersonal chaos in wry comedy Beware of a Holy Whore (1971), but was never without storms.

Of course, cinema is the domain not only of big personalities but of clashing ideas, which fuel as much as they disrupt. The status quo is rarely swept aside by the new without fierce resistance, whether it is an expressionist painter clashing with Europe’s buttoned-up traditionalists in anti-establishment pioneer Peter Watkin’s Edvard Munch (1974) or queer trailblazer John Waters decimating sacred respect for high art with the “battle of filth” that is Pink Flamingos (1972).

Here are 10 films in which art is a battle not all can win.

Director: Joseph L. Mankiewicz

Eve Harrington (Anne Baxter) craves applause. When she’s invited backstage one rainy night to meet Margo Channing, the Broadway star she is fixated upon (Bette Davis in her most iconic role), it’s the opportunity the young fan has been waiting for. Eve manoeuvres her way into the celebrated diva’s home as her personal assistant, and emulates her to gain a foothold in the seductive theatre world. Prone to bouts of insecurity, Margo is already self-conscious about ageing, and distrustful of her younger husband, when Eve is made her understudy. But the ruthless machinery of the fame game will not stop for any actress. 

Written and directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, based on a Mary Orr short story and also featuring Marilyn Monroe in one of her earliest roles, this razor-sharp dissection of the seamier side of the business is an American classic that has lost none of its acerbic bite.

Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Rainer Werner Fassbinder, known for punishing sets and all-consuming appetites, indulged his high-strung, acid-humoured self-awareness in a film about filmmaking – not its creative highs but the suffocating inertia and destructive interpersonal chaos that can erupt when the production flow is frustrated. He loosely reproduced, in Spain, the wild dysfunction and in-fighting of his recent shoot of spaghetti western melodrama Whity (1971). The energies of the crew, stuck waiting in an elegant hotel on the coast, are channelled into sexual intrigues and resentful one-upmanship to pass the time, as they order cuba libres from a lobby bar that stands as an island amid smashed glasses. 

Beware of a Holy Whore’s volatile, alcoholic director Jeff (Lou Castel), who has the talent to envisage the picture he wants to make and is less than diplomatic on how he plans to realise it, is an obvious surrogate of the German director, right down to the trademark leather jacket.

Director: John Waters

Drag queen Divine stars as a notorious criminal who lives in a Maryland trailer under the pseudonym Babs Johnson and pursues filth as an art form, proclaiming: “Filth is my politics, filth is my life!” Dubbed the “filthiest person alive” by tabloids, her reign is threatened by jealous rivals and sleazy reprobates Connie and Raymond Marble (David Lochary and Mink Stole), who enlist a spy and vie to surpass her in transgressive, gross-out acts. 

This independent black comedy, conceived as an “exercise in bad taste” by America’s ‘Pope of Trash’ John Waters, is now widely considered among the most significant queer movies ever made. A precursor to punk, it is a riotous taboo-smasher, which fires its subversive bullets at genteel notions of striving for transcendence through high art, and the hypocrisy of a bourgeois establishment that turns up its nose at the marginalised while cloaking its own power abuses.

Director: Peter Watkins

In 1895, Norwegian painter Edvard Munch, a man wracked throughout his life by the pain of seeing his lovers with other men in their bohemian circle, endeavoured to express jealousy in oil on a canvas. His radical break with strict realism for a more personal art of dark anxiety and intense feeling revolutionised 20th-century art – and sparked incensed resistance among adherents of tradition. 

English filmmaker Peter Watkins, himself a controversial innovator, explores the troubles and tensions that shaped the key expressionist in his remarkable portrait. Munch shook the Berlin art world when he exhibited in Imperial Germany, scandalising conservative “boots and uniform” painters with works they denounced as “anarchistic smears”. The critical assault on his unsettling pictures didn’t let up, with the ideological rivalries among his contemporaries just as extreme as the intimate ones that unfolded around the Black Pig tavern where the German and Nordic creative iconoclasts gathered.

Director: Miloš Forman

An exuberant take on boundless creativity and the terror of mediocrity, which won eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and was inspired by an 1830 Pushkin play, Amadeus was written by Peter Shaffer and directed by Czech New Wave figurehead Miloš Forman after his successful move to Hollywood. 

In Vienna in the 18th century, Antonio Salieri (F. Murray Abraham) studies music and becomes court composer to the emperor after a freak event that leads him to believe that his fame has been divinely ordained – until the obnoxious and dissolute prodigy Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (Tom Hulce) bursts on to the scene, and dazzles with clearly superior talent. Consumed with violent jealousy and feeling betrayed by God, Salieri schemes for Mozart’s downfall, while the radical new favourite pushes the boundaries of what is permitted on the royal stage and puts his health, finances and marriage at risk through his impulsive, erratic excesses.

Director: Patricia Rozema

“I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think that they will sing to me,” reads the T.S. Eliot poem that provided the title for writer-director Patricia Rozema’s debut feature. The low-budget indie, which blends satire and fantasy in its whimsical send-up of art-world gatekeeping, was key to the early Toronto New Wave, and has become a queer classic. 

Polly (a flame-haired Sheila McCarthy) lives for photography but lacks the courage to show her work. When she lands a gallery temp job, the awkward daydreamer becomes recklessly fixated on curator Gabrielle (Paule Baillargeon), whose worldly glamour represents a possible successful life, even though she is frustrated as a painter, and miserable in a secret affair. A twist makes this a smart take on shallow posturing and glass ceilings in a scene where status is controlled by men, and solidarity between women is losing its vital signs.

Director: Spike Jonze

Some of the best films on writers are about the torment of not writing. Directed by Spike Jonze, and written by Charlie Kaufman in an ultra-meta format that channelled neurosis into a dizzying, post-modernist ode to artistic limitations, Adaptation was an early-2000s phenomenon, and its absurdist surrealism of the failing man attracted, paradoxically, quite a mainstream following. 

Self-loathing screenwriter Charlie Kaufman is stuck trying to adapt Susan Orlean’s sprawling nonfiction book about Florida rare orchid poachers, The Orchid Thief. His torment is exacerbated by his more outgoing but lowbrow brother Donald penning a script for a thriller rammed with Hollywood clichés, The 3, which sells for a massive sum. Charlie seethes with resentment, even as he entertains a new, begrudging respect. Nicolas Cage plays both the fictionalised version of Kaufman and his twin, in a film that satirises the pressure to sell out and the vapid side of blockbuster popularity.

Director: Darren Aronofsky

The world of ballet is rife with stories of dancers pushed over the edge by vicious competition – and Darren Aronofsky, a director intrigued by the pitfalls of obsession and the tyranny of paranoia, mines the milieu for masterful modern psychological horror with Black Swan. Natalie Portman plays Nina Sayers, a dancer with the New York City Ballet who wins the dual roles of the White Swan and Black Swan for the new season but struggles to embody the uninhibited sensuality of the darker part and unravels over the threat that newcomer Lily (Mila Kunis) might replace her. 

Aronofsky drew on the folklore notion of the doppelgänger that haunts the self in unsettling ways, as found in literary classics such as The Double by Fyodor Dostoevsky. He conceived the film as a companion piece to The Wrestler (2008), which explored performance pressure and career implosion in the sporting arena.

Director: Levan Akin

High-stakes rivalry and forbidden desire make for a combustible relationship between a star member and a talented newcomer to a traditional Georgian dance troupe, in the Tbilisi-set drama that was a breakout hit for Swedish-Georgian director Levan Akin. Merab (Levan Gelbakhiani) is in intensive training for an audition, but is deeply conflicted and spurred to rebel against the institution’s strict codes of masculinity as he develops feelings for Irakli (Bachi Valishvili), who is also vying for a top ballet spot. 

As the pressure of outward expectations at the cost of personal authenticity closes in, the dancefloors of Tbilisi’s underground nightlife offer an outlet for Merab’s inner turmoil, and a different kind of expression to the fiery but more controlled energy of the ballet and its rigidly defined roles. The shape of an artistic life freed from the tyranny of rules and competition slowly emerges as a near-impossible hope for him.

Director: Lee Sang-il 

Kabuki is an exacting art, and its system of patronage cutthroat, as Japanese director Lee Sang-il dramatises to sensational and visually stunning effect in Kokuho, his sprawling tale of ambition and betrayal. It spans 50 years in the relationship between two disciples of the form, whose hearts suffer as much tumult as their onstage alter egos. In 1960s Nagasaki, teenager Kikuo (Ryo Yoshizawa) becomes an apprentice, taken under the wing of Hanjiro Hanai, a famed Kabuki actor whose son Shunsuke has already dedicated himself to a life on the theatre stage. Together, the budding performers train to master the heavily stylised performances in which love is painful and even a wisteria branch in a painting can become painfully smitten with unrequited yearnings. 

Adapted from a bestseller by Shuichi Yoshida, the epic melodrama weaves in elaborately staged classic kabuki plays, with their dramatic make-up, multiple kimono changes, snow, blossom and blood.

Kokuho is in cinemas from 8 May.