“We’d love to know the secret process guiding the creator through his perilous adventures.”– Henri-Georges Clouzot, Le Mystére Picasso (1956)
Picasso, seated shirtless in the studio, stares at the easel opposite him (its back turned to us), a rare moment in which the figure of the artist is shown. Two paintings hang on a wood partition to his left, positioned between the artist and his canvas. As Picasso stands and approaches the partition, Clouzot cuts to the painter examining his work, his eyes staring intently, matador-like, before cutting to the works themselves. Even without the filmmaker’s voiceover, his question, his underlying conundrum is stated clearly in these opening three shots. There is the artist and there is his completed work; what, though, was his process in making them, what was his “secret” method? In the 75 minutes that follow Clouzot will challenge his viewer to examine this question, to try and understand the artist not through his biography, past work, or what he says about himself, but instead through what he creates before us.
Clouzot cuts to the easel, the blank canvas standing out in the shadows of the studio. A cloud of smoke is blown from the right into the frame, an introduction to the painter as he approaches the paper. Picasso doesn’t pause or wait to examine the canvas as he did before with the previous two, but instead begins drawing immediately. We don’t see him put the pen to paper, though, as Clouzot cuts from the wide angle of the artist and easel to a close-up of the canvas. Picasso’s hand moves across the paper, sketching a cartoon-like face with a dove behind it. The filmmaker then cuts to the shadowed face of the artist and back again to the paper. It is only after he’s finished drawing that Picasso steps back to examine his work. The artist and canvas are separated here. It is the hand that connects them; and it is through the hand, as Clouzot states in voiceover, that we can see and experience “what’s going through [his] mind.” Although this here is made as a statement, it seems as though the filmmaker is inherently asking whether we can ever truly know the inner dynamics that drive the artist’s work.
Clouzot narrates over these opening shots that we can only wonder what Rimbaud was thinking when he wrote “The Drunken Boat,” or Mozart when he composed his symphony “Jupiter.” What were their secret processes? Painting, Clouzot says, is different in that it allows us to follow the artist’s hand at work. By mounting the camera on a frame behind a semi-translucent piece of canvas, Clouzot is able to make the figure of Picasso (and thus his hand) disappear, leaving only the lines, colors (the only instances of color in the film. All the shots of Picasso and Clouzot in the studio are filmed in black and white), and figures that he paints visible to the audience. Image is layered over image, constantly changing and transforming. Characters are drawn, altered, erased, redrawn, erased again, and redrawn again. Clouzot here raises a question of medium. As he states in the film, “what is impossible to know for poetry and music is not the case for painting.” It is difficult to know whether Clouzot is intentionally elliptical here or not. What is it that separates the painter from the poet or musician? Couldn’t we just as easily follow the artistic processes of music and poetry as with painting? It is film, as a medium, that stands apart here then. It is film, with its unique temporality that makes it possible for us to view the artist at work. Like Picasso who paints himself painting in the studio throughout the film, Clouzot films himself filming the painter in the studio. The Mystery of Picasso thus has as much to do with the medium of film as it does with painting; it is a film that exemplifies Clouzot’s skills as a filmmaker as much as it does Picasso’s as a painter.
In Clouzot’s earlier film The Wages of Fear (1953), four men must drive two trucks of nitroglycerine 300 miles from Las Piedras over mountainous roads in South America. Over the course of the film, Clouzot (often referred to as the French Hitchcock) creates one of the most intense experiences in cinematic history. There is an undercurrent of suspense and tension in The Mystery of Picasso as well. The drama here, though, comes from the creation and transformation of the images, their construction and deconstruction, from imagining what will appear next, from watching the scene as it unfolds. The subject matter of many of these is deeply personal for the painter, as Picasso often portrays himself and his friends and inspirations (Matisse, Delacroix, and Miró and his then lover Jacqueline)[1]. Like a film, these works tell stories, they employ a cinematic narrative; they have settings and situations, characters and relationships that grow, change and develop.
By filming Picasso in process, Clouzot forces us to establish a complex relationship with these paintings. Our emotions are manipulated as the artist blots out large sections he’s meticulously crafted or repetitively tinkers with a face, shape, or detail over and over again. By watching the artist work, layering figures, colors, and new designs on top of each other and weaving them seamlessly together, the images become inextricable from one another. As viewers, we’re unable to look at the final product without seeing the series of transformations and changes that went into creating it. We can hate the image one minute, love it the next, hate it again, and be ultimately left unsure of how to feel.
But what is the value of seeing these works transform and unfold, what is our fascination with the process? Is there the hope that by watching Picasso work we will somehow unravel what pushes him, what drives him creatively, artistically, or intellectually? Clouzot creates a “documentary” on Picasso in process in order to reveal to the viewer the inner dynamics that compel his work. But while it shows us the transformative stages and evolution his paintings undergo, does it ever truly reveal anything about the artist himself? As Clouzot leads us to believe (and as the film’s title would suggest), the artist is a mystery, something to be to solved or unraveled. And yet, is the real Picasso revealed here through his work, or is he simply putting on a show for the viewer. Even by the end of the film, we are still left wondering, who is Picasso? Is he a performer, a showman? Is he the creative genius we expect him to be? To a certain extent, Clouzot is right; we can follow what the painter is thinking through his hand. The creation and evolution of these images give us a momentary glimpse into the artist’s mind, and through filming the transformation of the image Clouzot allows us to see what Picasso sees, experience what Picasso experiences. But by allowing us to follow Picasso’s hand as he works, Clouzot is ultimately showing us that we cannot solve the mystery of the artist, especially in the case of Picasso. The painter’s secret process is not simply how his works transform on the canvas, but instead what happens internally, the psychologically charged creative forces that drive his hand. Clouzot’s true focus in the film then is not simply in unraveling the process behind the artist’s work to better understand him, but instead to raise a certain deeper question of media.
What is this final product, what is the medium here? Does Clouzot transform the screen into a canvas or the canvas into a screen? Is this painting, is it film? Is it animation, or maybe a medium in between? Clouzot doesn’t necessarily create something entirely new; the photographer Hans Namuth had worked on a similar project with Jackson Pollock previously in 1951. But where as Namuth’s film focuses only on Pollock’s process of working, Clouzot moves further by creating something that challenges us to define it, that pushes us to respond to a work of art in a different way. The Mystery of Picasso is, in the literal sense, painting filmed. And yet by turning the dimensions of the screen into the canvas we are no longer able to view the film as we would a typical narrative or documentary; our approach and response is inherently different. We’re driven to look at and consider these works as paintings as well, and yet somehow we can’t. The temporality of film changes our experience with them; by seeing how they transform and evolve, we’re unable to look at them as if they were hanging on a wall.
Currently Watching: The Wages of Fear (Clouzot, 1953), The Class (Cantet, 2009), Moon (Jones, 2009), Sugar (Boden and Fleck, 2008), In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-wai, 2000), Bio-Dome (Bloom, 1996), The Hurt Locker (Bigelow, 2009), Breaking Away (Yates, 1979), Gomorrah (Garrone, 2009), The New World (Malick, 2005), The Pest (Miller, 1997), Thirst (Park Chan-wook, 2009), The Limits of Control (Jarmusch, 2009)
[1] Archie Rand, painter and professor of Art at Columbia University
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