Working Outwards: The Mystery of Picasso (1956)
++ Guernica (1950)
And Picasso was indeed mysterious, an image it’s fair to say that he was aware of, but not exactly correct to say that he cultivated for its own sake. Unlike the Kaneian (as in Charles Foster) grandeur of, say, Dalí— a man who literally built a museum to himself— or the sentient advertising campaign and teleological expression of late capitalism that was Warhol, Picasso did not seek to aggrandize his work into the mystical. Critics and viewers we content to do that for him. As one of the most prolific and celebrated painters of his era, having pioneered several styles and been at the vanguard of many more, he may have simply been too busy doing his work — which he kept producing at a prodigious pace over his long life, well after having achieved fame and fortune — to engage with the public more than was necessary. His efficiency could be viewed as brusque, but never dishonest, and most certainly never ironic:
[having completed an elaborate canvas, recorded to film via stop-motion, the director interjects]
Clouzot: “It troubles me that our viewers may think you made this in 10 minutes.”
Picasso: “How long was I working?”
Clouzot: “Five hours.”
Picasso: “Now our viewers know.”
What a fucking gangster!
And where is the director? Largely in brackets. The majority of the film is comprised of the work itself: ink drawing through a transparent screen, and later stop-motion photography of canvases in oil, some making use of collage. There are very few moments of dialog. Clouzot achieves much by doing little. Both men were known to be irascible, highly opinionated, domineering. Picasso is literally bare-chested through most of the film. And yet here both are absolutely present, immersed in the moment and transcendence of actualization. In the (sadly few) moments we get to peek over the canvas, we see Picasso’s eyes wide, impossibly intense, floating with the magic of creation: that combination of spiritual transcendence and intentional physical control that most of us, if we are lucky, only fleetingly achieve. In the face of this, Clouzot eases his hand, at one point even “cheating” the camera to give the maestro a few moments extra to complete a work. It’s so inconceivable to imagine him doing this for anyone, that in fact Picasso makes Clouzot repeat himself, as the former coolly refills his ink blotter. Clouzot is irritated, but is soon again serene, blowing a perfect ring of smoke from his pipe as if it were automatic, his face resting with compassion. A sentiment he shares at several other junctures, such as when the master loses the thread in a seaside portrait of two bathers (“it’s not working”, Picasso relents, after hours of brutalization) or expressing irritation at not finding the correct inky conclusion to a transmogrific fishperson. It’s at these cliffs’ edges whence the muse abandons us that the artist is faced with the most revealing choice: take up bridge-building, leap and pray, or simply walk away. The latter, vocalized: “je terminé”.
Two real heroes of this film are the editor, Henri Colpi (Hiroshima mon amour, L’Année dernière à Marienbad), who especially in the later stop-motion sequences created remarkable cadences, and Claude Renoir, who filmed it, and imbues the piece with masterful compositions of space, as well as the technical know-how to pull off the main feature. Renoir presents the anonymous studio as stark, otherworldly, still but for cigarette smoke. You can smell the paint thinner in that high-contrast grain.

Many of the works with ink are cubist in nature. I was most taken with the order of these elaborations: beginning from an axis (or rather axes) that hint at three dimensions but misdirect the eye, figures radiate outwards in improbable, intersecting planes. When paired with such intentional kinetic motion, they recall not the illusionism of “literary art” (in Masson’s sense), but rather an expressionistic one that serves to create the “complete picture”, albeit through a maximal approach. My modern mathematical eye sees also a possible means of illustrating higher dimensionality. To whatever formalist end it might be, this sense of the total composition even in these simpler works show us the invisible essence being materialized through gesture — the magical dialog between the artist and their inspiration. Indeed, it’s quite exciting when we get to see the brush in his hands, moving with gestures alternately wide and precise. It’s especially poetic when the pen is lifted, yet the motion continues. That we don’t get enough of these shots is my one complaint.
Most remarkable are the later canvases, done with oil and collage, where Picasso endeavors to show us the “layers” in his work. These consist of painting and overpainting and overpainting again until we either have a work of impeccable structure or a buckled, melted frame. Either way it is thrilling. My favorite of these works depicts a bull goring a matador. The kinetic and complex composition of this is by itself incredible, but in the “layers” we get to see him ascending from skeletal structure (recalling an almost classical impulse), to realism, to decorative/muralistic, to african symbolism, to a flattening of plane, to an explosion of plane, to impressionistic color, to plastic color, to an ultimately “crystal cubism”, foregrounding the structure as physically disconnected but spiritually cohesive fragments. The most crucial point is that each layer is tethered literally and conceptually to the last, and the whole is greater than the sum. He is working outwards from the molecular level: through quantum jumps of isomerism, to the actual physical being, to the conscious, to the extrasomatic, to the brahman. We see a bull, we see a matador; the blood is our own.

Presented as stop-motion, the jumps between states are sometimes shocking. One thing that stop-motion makes clear is that cinema is a four-dimensional endeavor. It breaks the fifth wall. For some of the later pieces, as visual complexity rises, the framerate may lower to frames-per-minute, before rising once more in a frenetic flurry. The excellent soundtrack occasionally reminds us of this with its plantive Spanish rubato for one piece, picking up into an almost Ed Blackwell-ish, free-jazz-via-New-Orleans drum solo for another. Time in this world is linear, though discontinuous, and it is as crucial to its foundation as space, sound and color.
This careful superposition of an artificial world where the canvas is elevated to reality (the audience having seen the process by which the art is captured to screen) and a “natural world” reduced to dimly lit, narrow, expressionist vignettes is perhaps one of Clouzot’s most brilliant filmic conductions. It is a very musical film, and in that way an innovative one. These are not the tidy setups and arcs of Fantasia (1940), but rather swinging jump cuts that are often off the beat, reinforcing a sense of not-knowing that is both distancing and dramatic. As in the flesh, where we can only admire the totality of a picture from a distance, so here, Clouzot proposes we take a step backwards.
The DVD release is accompanied by Guernica (1950), a short film from Resnais and Hessens that is not so much a literal exposition of the eponymous masterwork as it is a surrealist tableau of that atrocity’s pathos, realized in the illustrations, sculpture and painting Picasso made roundabout that time, which stylistically transcends several of his periods. In the so-fucking-French manner, it is accompanied by a recitation of a poem (and quite a good one, from the magnificent geometrician Paul Eluard), and an orchestral score that accurately approximates those horrors as sound. While the dramatic zooms, flashing imagery and such other darkroom magics are most definitely a product of their time and not very subtle, they are still effective, though our bodies may initially reject them, as some do shellfish, its contents are likewise worth devouring.
It’s a study in contrasts. Stylistically, we get humanity in many forms: the neoclassical jester, the proud young soldier, a beautiful feminine hand, the proud/simple Basque villagefolk, all products of flowing lines, humanist, real. Later, as the violence erupts, we have angled faces sharp as knives, the indifferent lightbulb hanging (symbol of man’s progress, technology, god-in-heaven, enabler of horrors), grotesque man-beasts, bulls all, some serene, some crying, all dying. The neatness of soldiers — “wearing helmets and boots — polite and handsome men-aviators drop their bombs. With such care.” While below, now as then, stabat mater dolorósa.
Our technologies have changed. We are more precise quantitatively (the drone pilot having GPS, computers, etc.) while grossly less so qualitatively (having never to see or remotely experience the consequences of his actions, or even engage with the humanity of his target). And yet, to “try to tell the mother why her child died” is still impossible. Guernica, the painting, was not a picture of just a place or event, but is a symbol of man’s capacities for evil both borderless and timeless. There is an intention of a prophylactic. That today, Picasso would be able to paint such a scene from Syria, as well as countless locales since, is not a statement on the limitations of a piece of art, but rather the danger of outsourcing of our empathy to symbols (states, prophets, money) in the first place.
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