General News
THE MYSTERY OF PICASSO Screens at The Classic French Film Festival This Friday
The Classic French Film Festival celebrates St. Louis’ Gallic heritage and France’s cinematic legacy. The featured films span the decades from the 1920s through the 1980s (with a particular focus on filmmakers from the New Wave), offering a comprehensive overview of French cinema. THE MYSTERY OF PICASSO will screen as part of the festival at 7pm Friday, June 20th at the St. Louis Art Museum.
In 1955, Henri-Georges Clouzot, the acclaimed director of “The Wages of Fear” and “Diabolique,” joined forces with artist Pablo Picasso to make an entirely new kind of documentary, a film that could capture the moment and the mystery of creativity. Together, they devised an innovative technique: The filmmaker placed his camera behind a semi-transparent surface on which the artist drew with special inks that bled through. Clouzot thus captured a perfect reverse image of Picasso’s brushstrokes, and the movie screen itself became the artist’s canvas. For the film, Picasso created, and sometimes obliterated, 20 works (most of them, in fact, destroyed after the shoot). The pieces ranged from playful black-and-white sketches to CinemaScope color murals, with the artworks evolving in minutes through the magic of time-lapse photography.
Exhilarating, mesmerizing, enchanting, and unforgettable, “The Mystery of Picasso” ranks as one of the greatest documentaries on art ever made. The LA Times writes: “Even creative genius can get boring if it becomes repetitive. Clouzot sidesteps that possibility by adding George Auric’s music and changing pace from instant creations to more complex compositions. Soon whole lines and blocks of color and pattern appear in a dazzling parade of visual evolution. This is film about aesthetic decisions, but they happen so fast that the point is almost lost in the fascinating spectacle.”
THE MYSTERY OF PICASSO screens at 7pm Friday, June 20th at the St. Louis Art Museum, 1 Fine Arts Drive, Forest Park.
With an introduction and post-film discussion by Bradley Bailey, associate professor of art history at St. Louis University.
Admission: $12 general admission; $10 for students, Cinema St. Louis members, Saint Louis Art Museum (SLAM) members, and Alliance Française members; Webster U. screenings free for Webster U. students.
A PDF version of the Classic French Film Festival program is available to download HERE:
Check back later in the week here at We Are Movie Geeks for more information about the Classic French Film Festival
0 comments