After
winning both the Golden Bear at the 1953 Berlin Film Festival and the coveted
Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival for the French blockbuster thriller The Wages of Fear and his Hitchcockian
psychological horror film Diabolique,
French filmmaking maestro Henri-Georges Clouzot took a brief hiatus from
fictional narrative storytelling. A painstakingly
perfectionist and fastidious auteur, Clouzot made a detour from feature film
directing to instead turn his cameras on the great Cubist painter Pablo Picasso
in his one and only documentary film to date, The Mystery of Picasso.
Predated
by Paul Haesaerts’ 1949 Belgian documentary Visit
to Picasso which photographed the artist from the other side of a glass plate
which he painted upon, Clouzot’s documentary utilizes a similar visual approach
with transparent canvases which the director films from the other side of the
canvas being painted. In a wild bit of
technical bravura, mid-picture Clouzot even switches from Academy Ratio 1.33:1
black-and-white photography to panoramic CinemaScope 2.55:1 color widescreen
photography, providing more room for Picasso to illustrate with time-lapse
editing designed to show in quick succession how the painter arrived at his
finished drawings.
Something
of an outlier for Clouzot who mostly keeps out of the way with some additional
pressure put on Picasso here and there, The
Mystery of Picasso functions like a moving art installation with a finished
canvas being wiped off before a new one begins.
Though largely silent despite some occasional words exchanged by Clouzot
and Picasso, much of the soundtrack alternates between production audio
capturing the soft echoes emanating from paintbrushes dipped into ink and soft orchestral
pieces by Georges Auric accompanying the paintings in motion.
Cinematography
by Jean Renoir’s nephew Claude, who also went on to shoot The Spy Who Loved Me, is naturally elegant and ornate though the
real stars of the piece are Picasso’s paintings which seem to come to life when
shot and presented in motion on film.
One standout sequence near the end shows one drawing evolving constantly
into a series of several paintings which come and go like the weather, changing
from frame to frame rapidly. The
progress of the paintings changes dramatically as the film proceeds also,
moving from black and white marker drawings to oil paintings bursting with
color and detail.
Winning the Special Jury
Prize at the 1956 Cannes Film Festival, The
Mystery of Picasso today remains something of an outlier in the otherwise
uncompromising provocateur’s oeuvre and for Picasso fans doesn’t seek to solve
any of the mysteries surrounding the Cubist painter. If anything, watching the film is like being
taken through an art museum one painting at a time. The experience of Clouzot’s film can either
be, depending on the viewer, hypnotic or soporific. For myself, it’s a curious change of pace for
the director who doesn’t try to figure out Picasso so much as he tries to capture
him in the act of artistic creative expression.
Clouzot fans will come away feeling a little perplexed but intrigued
while Picasso fans will likely emerge elated with this.
--Andrew Kotwicki
