The Mystery of Picasso

This film (drama)Also known asLe mystère Picasso，is aFranceProducerwomen sex，At1956Released in year 。The dialogue language isFrench，Current Douban rating8.8(For reference only)。

"The Mystery of Picasso" (Le Mystère Picasso, Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1956 | 80 minutes | 35mm | Black and White & Color | Sound) uses the techniques of a suspense film to document the painting process of Spanish artist Pablo Picasso (1881–1973). In the summer of 1956, in a studio in Nice, a coastal city in southern France, facing the unbearable heat and the intense glare of lights, Picasso enthusiastically picked up his brush: vivid lines swiftly danced and transformed on the paper, a flower first turned into a fish, then into a beauty, next into a rooster, and finally into a satyr. The film's director, Henri-Georges Clouzot (1907–1977), was known for his suspense films (it is said that for Hitchcock, there was only one competitor, and that was Clouzot), with notable works including "The Raven" (1943) and "The Wages of Fear" (1953). In making this art documentary, Clouzot abandoned the popular biographical or preachy filming style of the time. While the film contains many suspenseful moments, they are not the dramatic suspense typical of narrative films; rather, they stem from the artist's creative process itself, with its endless transformations providing viewers with a thrilling experience. French film theorist André Bazin saw in this film the distinctive qualities of film art, emphasizing that only cinema can seize and express the flow of time in an instant (Bazin wrote a review titled "The Mystery of Picasso: A Bergsonian Film" in which he discusses the film, found in André Bazin's "What is Cinema?", China Film Publishing House, 1987 edition, pages 204-214). This film uniquely documents the detailed process of Picasso creating over 20 paintings, making it the most effective way to have an intimate encounter with this master of painting. After the film was completed, Picasso destroyed all the paintings created during its making, thus increasing the film's value. Additionally, the film's cinematographer, Claude Renoir, is the grandson of renowned painter Auguste Renoir and the nephew of famous film director Jean Renoir. The film received the Jury Prize at the 1956 Cannes Film Festival.