The Mystery of Picasso

One of the greatest filmmakers of France, Henri-Georges Clouzot, makes a film about his friend Pablo Picasso, perhaps the 20th Century's most renown artist. Clouzot begins with a proposition: if one were present at the conception of a great artistic masterpiece such as Mozart's Jupiter Symphony, and could peek inside the mind of the artist, what would one see? Fortunately, the visual art of painting offers a filmmaker that insight, and so Clouzot begins with Picasso in a dark room with white light directed at an empty canvas. The artist, like a bullfighter, confronts and ultimately displaces the empty space with drama and suspense. Clouzot takes a minimalist approach which chooses to focus on the art rather than the artist, and he achieves this objective by having Picasso sit on one side of a translucent canvas, and the camera on the other capturing only the ink or paint that has been administered, without the distraction or impediment of the artist - pure creation. A window into the mind of the artist! Twenty artworks are created in this manner, each being overlayed with the often suspenseful sounds of Georges Auric's excellent score. With THE MYSTERY OF PICASSO, art becomes exhilarating as one attempts to anticipate what Picasso will do next. "How will he resolve this problem?" Clouzot has created a priceless document for anyone seriously interested in art.

Director Henri-Georges Clouzot, best known in America for his expert thrillers (Diabolique, The Wages of Fear, Le Corbeau) captures a different kind of suspense in this astonishing documentary: can the viewer think faster than Picasso?

Of course not, don't be ridiculous. Pablo Picasso, seen here in his seventies, creates 20-odd paintings for the camera (a couple of them in real time), running rings around us as he goes. We see a line cross the screen, and then another, and then color spatters about; drawn on bleed-through paper the images come to us unmediated, like daydreams. Before we know it scenes take shape, populated by Picasso's stock company of matadors, clowns, leering old men, and towering, serene, bare-breasted women, their faces regally aloof.

This is Picasso Playful. Clouzot informs him at one point that there are only five minutes of film left and asks him what he wants to do. The old man replies "It'll be a surprise," quickly sketching a bouquet of roses and then taking it through acrobatic transformations, faking us out with deadpan glee. His buoyancy counterweights some of the director's more awkward touches, such as the portentous intro, some over-dramatic music, a few probably staged conversations... but who cares? This is dynamic, visual cinema-- in a sense, a great animated film.

Some of the earlier drawings are merely a master's doodles; others make your jaw drop with their absolute sureness of line. He'll send a stroke wriggling upward, graceful as a ribbon of smoke, and suddenly that wriggle is a bull with man tossed on its horns, and as the shapes gather and the colors erupt the thing becomes impossibly beautiful, a small perfection. Picasso returns to the image later, breaking out the oils, and here the film truly takes off. "I want to go deeper," Picasso tells Clouzot, and he does. We realize what we were missing in those first drawings: texture. The head of a goat coheres and takes on animal reality, the pigments bright as stained glass. Picasso ages it, makes it solid. What would be a major work for a lesser artist here is a throwaway, literally; the paintings were destroyed after filming. The least of them could have paid for my house.

In that intro Clouzot says something about "looking into the mind of the artist" or somesuch, but the title really says it all. At the beginning the artist saunters out shirtless from the studio's shadows. At the end he declares, "It is finished," and saunters back. What could possibly account for the existence of a Pablo Picasso remains a mystery untouched.

Henri-Georges Clouzot, the French director of the masterpieces "Les Diaboliques" and "Le Salaire de la Peur" convinced his friend Pablo Picasso to make this documentary, painting twenty paints in front of the cameras. Using some special technique, Clouzot filmed from the other side of the canvas or stop-motion, and the result is this movie, where two geniuses are gathered: one behind and the other in front of the camera. In accordance with the information on the DVD, the canvases have been destroyed in the end of the shootings. Further, in 1984, the French government declared this documentary a national treasure. Clouzot and Picasso deserved this beautiful homage. My vote is eight.

Title (Brazil): "O Mistério de Picasso" ("The Mystery of Picasso")

I've always known that Pablo Picasso was one of the most prolific characters of the 20th century. I've also heard about how this film was made many times before, that is with the translucent screen between the camera and Picasso. At the beginning I thought that it was a bit slow and I remember wondering if I was in the midst of 2 hours of Picasso drawing picture after picture. And indeed it was, with a few breaks where we actually see and hear Picasso interact with the camera men. But, amazingly, once you get into watching the short drawing exercises, it becomes very captivating. You aren't sure what he's drawing, and then a line and a squiggle later it is a bull or a woman or whatever. The most mesmerizing part though, as another writer said, was when he was painting the beach scene and he kept painting over his work over and over again. What he was painting over was amazing and it made you wonder why he felt like it just didn't work.

A fascinating look at the creative process, filmed in a unique fashion, using a clever technique to capture Picasso's work as he is painting without his hand or his brush getting in the way. This method is actually shown and explained during a live action sequence in the middle. Although the film is mostly just a set of different Picasso paintings in action, interactions between the film's director and Picasso are added in, which not only decreases tedium from the at times monotonous paintwork, but it also makes it a whole lot more interesting, as it feels as if we are there with Clouzot and Picasso in a film studio. The material still becomes a tad repetitive and it tires before the film is over, but set to some great music and actually showing Picasso working through his creative process, this is remarkable, one-of-a-kind film-making and definitely worth checking out.