Le Mystère Picasso (1956)
Directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot

Film Review

In 1952, Henri-Georges Clouzot had the idea of making a documentary featuring the already iconic Spanish painter Pablo Picasso.  The two men had known each other since the 1920s when they were living in Paris, and by the early 1950s Clouzot had taken up painting and was beginning to exhibit his own work.  Never one to turn down an opportunity to publicise himself and his art, Picasso gave his enthusiastic support to the venture, although it would be another three years before it came to fruition.

By the mid-1950s, H.G. Clouzot had acquired a worldwide reputation through his immensely successful suspense thrillers Le Salaire de la peur (1953) and Les Diaboliques (1955).  It wasn't long before this that he was considered persona non grata in France, after being widely condemned for his association with the German-run film company Continental at the time of the Nazi occupation.  The most significant film to come out of this ignominious phase of Clouzot's career was Le Corbeau (1943), a dark work which bears witness to the director's famously misanthropic view of human nature.

Picasso had already made an art film of the kind that Clouzot had envisaged in 1949.  This 20 minute black-and-white short, entitled Visit to Picasso, was made by the Belgian filmmaker Paul Haesaerts and showed the artist painting onto a transparent screen - an approach that is likely to have inspired Clouzot for his film.  What was originally intended to be a 10 minute long short film, to be shot in the summer of 1955, soon mushroomed into something far more substantial.

Running to around 75 minutes, Le Mystère Picasso depicts the artist churning out twenty or so sketches and paintings, in a similar manner to that employed on Haesaerts's far less well-known film.  Picasso is positioned behind a see-through canvas which fills the field of view, onto which he is able to draw or paint.  The camera remains fixed, statically shooting the canvas from the other side.  Gradually the artist's hands and tools disappear from view as his art comes into being.  The film starts out briskly, in monochrome, with a series of quickly completed sketches; then it switches to vibrant colour when Picasso moves on to painting in oils.

The use of time-lapse photography speeds things up, giving a false impression that the artist is working much faster and more effortlessly than he actually would have done in reality.  Picasso would no doubt have approved of this piece of trickery, as it serves to bolster his mythic standing as a creative genius.  The impression the film gives is that he is a relentless art machine, capable of knocking off one masterpiece after another without the need to rest or carry out other human functions that might diminish his god-like status.

In fact, the film was shot over several days, if not weeks, and it is interesting to speculate just how many breaks in filming were involved - probably quite a few considering the pathologically perfectionist nature of both the director and his subject.  Le Mystère Picasso is more a flagrant piece of self-promotion by a famously egoistical artist than a genuine attempt to probe his creative capacities.  Even so, it is an utterly compelling work of art in its own right, a worthy tribute to a great artist.

The film is at its most fascinating when Picasso feels compelled to take a dramatic change of tack in the course of a composition.  Before our eyes, a half-completed image suddenly transforms itself into something totally different, and if we are lucky it changes again - each stroke of the brush altering its character and intent.  This is how most good art is born - not as a preconceived idea suddenly manifested in physical form, but as a vague fragmentary germ of a notion that develops like an organic entity into something solid, mutating, shifting, blossoming in the process of its birth.  As we watch Picasso dabbling with the forces of creation and chaos, we are made witnesses to the miracle of creation.

It is fair to say that few, if any, of the compositions that Picasso serves up for us are worthy of his reputation.  Most are pretty insipid variations on his familiar repertoire of nudes, landscapes and bullfights, all offering the sketchiest of insights into his turbulent inner self.  None of these substandard works is believed to have survived, although rumours persist that a few were salvaged and might still exist in private collections.

The other aspect of the film that is worth commenting on is the tension that exists between the director and the artist.  In the fleeting shots of Clouzot and Picasso both men appears intensely absorbed in their work, so that the film periodically feels more like a battle of egos than a cooperative venture.  A more controlling and hard to please pair of artists it is hard to conceive of, and you wonder how either of them manages to bear the strain.  At one point, Clouzot forcefully hassles the artist into completing a canvas, insisting (mendaciously) that the film is about to run out.  Reports that H.G. was a strong-willed autocrat who delighted in bullying his actors and technicians would seem to be borne out by his treatment of an implausibly compliant Picasso in this film.

By placing himself in the frame so visibly (along with his cinematographer Claude Renoir, the nephew of the famous painter Auguste Renoir), Clouzot introduces an element of suspenseful antagonism that the film could well have done without.  Georges Auric's score is equally redundant, its uncomfortable melange of traditional Spanish themes and contemporary jazz tending to distract from the visual drama that Picasso and Renoir are striving so hard to achieve.

Although the film was a notable commercial failure, it was widely lauded by the critics and received the Special Jury Prize at the 1956 Cannes Film Festival.  A comparatively minor entry in Clouzot's oeuvre, Le Mystère Picasso is essential viewing for anyone interested in Picasso's work or the creative process in general.  What can be more enchanting than watching a work of art gradually coming into being, pouring out of a human mind and filling a canvas with an anarchy of daubs that gradually coalesce into a unique visual statement revealing the soul of an artist?

Film Synopsis

Henri-Georges Clouzot is a renowned French film maker, best known for his pessimistic suspense thrillers.  At the age of 75, Pablo Picasso is a legendary artist, one of the most celebrated creative talents of the 20th century.  Perhaps in the hope of shedding some light on the mystery of his art, Clouzot films Picasso as he creates a series of drawings and paintings in his inimitable style.  The bare-chested artist fills one canvas after another, sometimes struggling to create the effect he is after.  In doing so, he gives us a rare insight into the creative process of a genius at work.