The Mystery of Picasso

The camera stands behind a canvas. Picasso draws from the other side and the ink comes through the fabric. The viewer is therefore watching not the painter but the line itself: where it starts, what gets erased, which figure is removed and what replaces it. The subject is not a portrait of an artist but a painting's final state being merely where it stopped. Across the film many pictures change completely in front of us; a bullfight scene turns into something else and nobody will ever see the version underneath again. The form rests on one idea and takes it all the way. When the colour sections arrive the frame widens; Henri-Georges Clouzot does this not as spectacle but because the size of the painting has changed. Claude Renoir is the cinematographer. The rule of the production was that the paintings made for the film would be destroyed afterwards, so that they existed only as film. Picasso agreed. It won the Special Jury Prize at Cannes in 1956 and was declared a national cultural treasure by France in 1984. There is a clock too: the colour stock was limited, Clouzot tells the painter so, and the count runs. Who it is for: viewers curious about how painting actually happens and anyone who likes formal experiment. Who it is not for: anyone wanting Picasso's life; this is not biography and it tells almost nothing about the man.