''The Mystery of Picasso'' (french: Le mystère Picasso) is a 1956 French
documentary film
A documentary film or documentary is a non-fictional motion-picture intended to "document reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction, education or maintaining a historical record". Bill Nichols has characterized the documentary in te ...
directed by
Henri-Georges Clouzot. In it, the painter
Pablo Picasso
Pablo Ruiz Picasso (25 October 1881 – 8 April 1973) was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist and Scenic design, theatre designer who spent most of his adult life in France. One of the most influential artists of the 20th ce ...
produces 20 drawings and paintings, at first using inks that bleed through the paper on which he is drawing, with the act of creation filmed in real-time from the backside of the easel, and later using oil paints, with Clouzot employing a
stop-motion-like effect to depict the development and modification of the works. The film begins with Picasso creating simple marker drawings in black and white, and he gradually progresses to full-scale
collages and
oil painting
Oil painting is the process of painting with pigments with a medium of drying oil as the binder. It has been the most common technique for artistic painting on wood panel or canvas for several centuries, spreading from Europe to the rest of ...
s.
The pieces created before the camera were supposedly subsequently destroyed so they would only exist on film, but there are reports that some survived.
Release
''The Mystery of Picasso'' was released in France on 18 May 1956.
It won the
Special Jury Prize at the
1956 Cannes Film Festival and was shown out of competition at the
1982 Festival.
See also
* ''
Visit to Picasso
''Visit to Picasso'' ("Bezoek aan Picasso") is a short Belgian documentary film from 1949 about painter Pablo Picasso, directed by Belgian filmmaker Paul Haesaerts. In an effort to capture the nature of Picasso's creative process, Paul Haesaerts ...
'' – A short Belgian documentary from 1949 that employed a similar method to film Picasso at work. In both films, the artist was filmed from the backside of his work surface, but, in the earlier film, he painted on glass.
References
External links
*
*
French black-and-white films
French documentary films
1956 films
CinemaScope films
Films directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot
Pablo Picasso
Documentary films about painters
1956 documentary films
1950s French-language films
Films with screenplays by Henri-Georges Clouzot
1950s French films
{{art-documentary-film-stub