The Mystery of Picasso

Like a matador confronting a bull, the artist approaches his easel, his eyes blazing. As he wields his brush, we see through the canvas as the artwork unfolds, erupts, dances into being before our eyes. Pablo Picasso, the most influential artist of the twentieth century, is making a painting, and Henri-Georges Clouzot, the famous French director (The Wages of Fear and Diabolique), is making a movie.

In 1955, Clouzot joined forces with his friend Picasso to make an entirely new kind of art film "a film that could capture the moment and the mystery of creativity. Together, they devised an innovative technique" the filmmaker placed his camera behind a semi-transparent surface on which the artist drew with special inks that bled through.

Clouzot thus captured a perfect reverse image of Picasso's brushstrokes and the motion picture screen itself becomes the artist's canvas. Here, the master creates, and sometimes obliterates, 20 works (most of them, in fact, destroyed after the shoot), ranging from playful black-and-white sketches to Cinemascope color murals "artworks which evolve in minutes through the magic of stop-motion animation. Unavailable for more than a decade, The Mystery of Picasso is exhilarating, mesmerizing, enchanting and unforgettable. It is simply one of the greatest documentaries on art ever made. The French government agreed" in 1984 it declared the film a national treasure.


Using a specially designed transparent 'canvas' to provide an unobstructed view, Picasso creates as the camera rolls. He begins with simple works that take shape after only a single brush stroke. He then progresses to more complex paintings, in which he repeatedly adds and removes elements, transforming the entire scene at will, until at last the work is complete.

Bonus Features:

Alain Resnais' short film Guernica (1950)
A film, by Alain Resnais (Last Year at Marienbad, La Guerre est finie) and Robert Hessens that uses various works by Picasso along with images of newspaper headlines to illustrate an anti-war sentiment, with his mural Guernica (1935-7), painted as a cry against the Spanish Civil War, as its centerpiece. The reading by Jacques Pruvost and actress Maria Casares (Children of Paradise, Cocteau's Orphee) is tres serieux and reads like a Beat anthem-it was written by poet Paul Eluard-and is supported by a properly discordant score. The image shows the wear of time and has a preponderant darkness, but one can still be moved by its content as intended.

Theatrical Trailer (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHlTvE-AI3Q)
Commentary track by Peggy Parsons, curator, Film Program at the National Gallery of Art.
Second commentary track by Archie Rand, painter and professor of Art at Columbia University.




"The Mystery of Picasso is one of the most unique documentaries ever produced, and because it eschews exposition in favor of direct presentation of the artistic method – not just the trickery of painting but of cinema as well – it is easily accessible by an audience that may know little of art history or the iconography of modern art. Cubism may seem obscure when presented in a textbook, but just watching Picasso layer in perspective after perspective answers more questions in a few minutes than a professor likely can in an entire class. Nevertheless, Picasso's work, not to mention his psyche, maintains a degree of mystery, allowing us to read into the paintings what we will. The result is a documentary that allows viewers to learn something new with each viewing – something few documentaries can claim." – DVD Verdict