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The mystery is artistic creation itself, "the secret process that guides through perilous adventures." You can't see how Rimbaud or Mozart created, says Henri-Georges Clouzot, yet check out Picasso with brush in hand and there's the mind at work—a dubious notion but a good springboard. The film frame as a translucent canvas advances on Reed's screen-as-zither opening in The Third Man, shirtless at the easel is Picasso hoping from sketch to sketch, a merry doodler. Bare lasses and runty satyrs are recurring images: Models in ateliers, riders and clowns in a circus cavalcade, Matisse curves versus cubist edges. The corrida arena is given a panoramic view (inky silhouettes surrounded by round spectators), then a closer one as the bull gores the matador. (The sounds of scratching pens give way to Georges Auric's pseudo-flamencos.) A miniature Guernica with black-and-white lines, blotchy watercolor to turn a landscape into a slumbering giant. "Risk is exactly what I'm going for." He asks for more space and like Tom Ewell in The Girl Can't Help It gets the CinemaScope rectangle. The film introduces time-lapse for longer works and in the process arrives at animation: A reclining nude's poses, painted over each other repeatedly, make her dance on the canvas. Clouzot's Cahiers du Cinéma foes enjoyed the show and heralded the dictatorial auteur's newfound exploratory side, though the control-freak doesn't easily acquiesce to the freewheeling old minotaur. Puffing on his pipe by the camera's side, the director can't resist asserting his grip and imposes a time limit. Picasso plays along, "it'll be a surprise." Floral bouquet? Fish tail? Spotted rooster? Aha, visage géant. "You wanted drama, you got it." Harris in Pollock evinces a close study. Cinematography by Claude Renoir.
--- Fernando F. Croce |