{"id":591,"date":"2008-06-25T23:47:04","date_gmt":"2008-06-26T03:47:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/?p=591"},"modified":"2008-06-25T23:47:04","modified_gmt":"2008-06-26T03:47:04","slug":"the-mystery-of-picasso-1956-henri-georges-clouzot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/archives\/591","title":{"rendered":"The Mystery of Picasso (1956, Henri-Georges Clouzot)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Music by Georges Auric, who also scored Cocteau&#8217;s movies.  Shot by Claude Renoir, who also shot a handful of his uncle Jean&#8217;s films and also <em>Barbarella<\/em>.  Director Clouzot made this between a mystery thriller and a spy parody.<\/p>\n<p>A nice companion movie to <em>La Belle noiseuse<\/em>, another one where we actually watch a painting being created in real time.  The movie introduces Picasso, then cuts to a full shot of a transparent canvas, Picasso&#8217;s brush (or pen, whatever) on one side, the camera on the other, so there are a few over-the-shoulder shots but mostly we&#8217;re seeing (a mirror image of) the canvas with the painting magically appearing upon it.  There are edits and time-lapse too &#8211; areas of wet paint dry in an instant, whole areas of color or pattern suddenly appear.  Sometimes we&#8217;re clearly watching a painting from start to finish in real time, and sometimes they&#8217;ll tell us in voiceover how long it actually took.<\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s no narration &#8211; rather what little verbal information we learn is in the form of (obviously staged) conversations between artist and camera crew.  My favorite bit is when Picasso asks for a very large canvas and suddenly the movie goes into Cinemascope ratio (&#8216;scope was less than three years old, so still a cool novelty).<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s a suspense\/art film as you watch the work in progress and try to wonder what PP is planning, where the painting is heading (even he doesn&#8217;t seem to know half the time), and when it&#8217;s &#8220;done&#8221;.  The wonder of this film is that the paintings exist through time &#8211; most of them look great when complete, but the process and intermediate steps are just as great&#8230; you&#8217;re not just waiting for good art to appear at an unknown end point, you&#8217;re watching it all along.  The filmmakers keep it short (<80 minutes), the music styles vary greatly between paintings, and there are some bursts of crew participation, like the time they pressure PP to finish a painting before their reel of film runs out.\n\nWhat a great movie!  My favorite of documentary month.  Katy and Jimmy liked it too.\n\n<img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/image08\/picasso1.jpg\" alt=\"image\"><\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/image08\/picasso2.jpg\" alt=\"image\"><\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/image08\/picasso3.jpg\" alt=\"image\"><\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/image08\/picasso4.jpg\" alt=\"image\"><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Music by Georges Auric, who also scored Cocteau&#8217;s movies. Shot by Claude Renoir, who also shot a handful of his uncle Jean&#8217;s films and also Barbarella. Director Clouzot made this between a mystery thriller and a spy parody. A nice companion movie to La Belle noiseuse, another one where we actually watch a painting being [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[429,430,302],"class_list":["post-591","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie","tag-henri-georges-clouzot","tag-pablo-picasso","tag-painting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/591","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=591"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/591\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=591"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=591"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=591"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}