May 17 movie: Le Mystère Picasso. I've seen this once before and I was excited when it showed up on TCM. It was part of a series of Cannes winners. It's a documentary by Clouzot (who directed Diabolique and The Wages of Fear) that attempts to illuminate Picasso's creative process. There's almost no dialogue; you just watch Picasso paint for ninety minutes.
In the first part of the movie they use special sheer canvases and Picasso works with ink. The camera is set up on the back side of the canvas, making the paintings seem to appear on their own, line by line. About half-way through Picasso says that he'd rather work with oil paints and they switch to aiming the camera at the front of the canvas and using stop-motion as the paintings develop.
The oil paintings have much more depth, and this is the part of the movie I enjoyed the most. On both viewings I've been amazed by how much the paintings change from beginning to end. He might do a face over ten times, then remove the figure entirely, then put it back, only larger and more abstract. With the ink paintings, I often felt like there was a point at which the painting looked done to me, and then he he kept adding stuff and cluttering it up. That didn't happen so much with the oil paintings because he would add a bunch of stuff, then paint it all out and start over.
At the end they said that Clouzot and Picasso intended to destroy the paintings created during the movie, so that the movie would stand on its own as the primary work of art. Which would be a tragedy, except that according to Robert Osbourne it didn't happen. He said that several of the paintings have shown up at auction and are believed to be in private collections. It's too bad they aren't in museums! I would love to see these paintings in real life.
Leave a comment