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6 Filming Picasso and Karajan This chapter deviates from the chronological sequence followed hitherto in order to consider the documentary films which Clouzot made with Pablo Picasso and Herbert von Karajan. Le Mystère Picasso was filmed at La Victorine studios in Nice from June to September 1955 and first shown at the Cannes festival in 1956, where it was awarded a special jury prize. Following the popular success of Le Salaire de la peur and Les Diaboliques (and the critical reservations which the second film had attracted), Clouzot was able to afford to undertake
This book charts the changing nature of cinematic depictions of the Spanish Civil War. In 1936, a significant number of artists, filmmakers and writers – from George Orwell and Pablo Picasso to Joris Ivens and Joan Miró – rallied to support the country's democratically elected Republican government. The arts have played an important role in shaping popular understandings of the Spanish Civil War, and the book examines the specific role cinema has played in this process. Its focus is on fictional feature films produced within Spain and beyond its borders between the 1940s and the early years of the twenty-first century – including Hollywood blockbusters, East European films, the work of the avant garde in Paris and films produced under Franco's censorial dictatorship.
Despite his controversial reputation and international notoriety as a filmmaker, no full-length study of Henri-Georges Clouzot has ever been published in English. This book offers a re-evaluation of Clouzot's achievements, situating his career in the wider context of French cinema and society, and providing detailed and clear analysis of his major films (Le Corbeau, Quai des Orfèvres, Le Salaire de la peur, Les Diaboliques, Le Mystère Picasso). Clouzot's films combine meticulous technical control with sardonic social commentary and the ability to engage and entertain a broad public. Although they are characterised by an all-controlling perfectionism, allied to documentary veracity and a disturbing bleakness of vision, Clouzot is well aware that his knows the art of illusion. His fondness for anatomising social pretence, and the deception, violence and cruelty practised by individuals and institutions, drew him repeatedly to the thriller as a convenient and compelling model for plots and characters, but his source texts and the usual conventions of the genre receive distinctly unconventional treatment.
7 The final films Le Mystère Picasso and Les Espions both showed Clouzot attempting to renew himself, with an experimental documentary and an absurdist thriller. Though critics noted these innovations with varying degrees of approval, neither film drew the large audiences to which he had become accustomed over the previous decade. La Vérité, released in November 1960, returns to a more familiar, conventional manner. This well-crafted courtroom melodrama, starring Brigitte Bardot, ably supported by the director’s stalwarts Paul Meurisse, Charles Vanel and Louis
twentieth century: Surrealism, the Groupe Octobre and the Left, Poetic Realism, Miró, Picasso. If Audiard and Jeanson are screenwriting stars, Prévert has attained the status of myth. Roland Barthes ( 1957 ) has described the function of myth: to render a constructed entity natural, thus emptying it of its political signification. The mythologising of such a deeply political figure
vision uniquely capable of crossing national frontiers and generic borderlines (in an interview included with the UK DVD extras, he claims that it is his ‘most personal’ film). Accepted as a Spanish film in Spain and a Mexican movie in Mexico (hence its eligibility for both Goyas and Ariels), it is in fact a co-production between del Toro’s own Tequila Gang and Picasso Studios, the successful feature-making arm of Spanish
erasures (coin for key, image for object, shadow for person, paintings that are copies or that never were signed by artists who didn’t paint them; de Hory literally invents Giacometti paintings that were never painted and the fictional grandfather invents an entire Picasso ‘period’). Truth205 Most of the material in the film was shot not by Welles but by Reichenbach for a film he was making on Elmyr de Hory. Some of the sequences were indeed shot by Welles but most of the film, in so far as it is a Welles film, is a film made in the editing room. If the characters are
example the paintings of Rauschenberg (his Combines), of Picasso (his collages), the density of citations in the films of Godard (his Histoire(s)), the music of Ravel and Stravinsky (their use of popular motifs and their incorporation of jazz), the writings of Carlo Emilio Gadda, one of Pasolini’s literary models, who juxtaposed not only texts but languages and speech, as Godard does and Pasolini does (Italian, Latin, dialect, the slang of the slums), and as modern composers do. But Godard and certainly Picasso, Rauschenberg and the Pop artists, though they cite and
, evocations and the banality of the collection of its found objects, echoed works of Dada, particularly Kurt Schwitters’s Merzbau and of the common objects, or odd conjunctions, some scandalous, displayed by Marcel Duchamp (his urinal, for example and the moustache on the Mona Lisa). It also resonated with the Combines and installation pieces of Robert Rauschenberg which in turn echoed strategies in Cubist collages, those of Picasso, for example, and before Picasso the purified, almost abstract, sculpted and geometric paintings of Paul Cézanne. There was as well an echo of
beauty, eroticism and fatality, a lure and doubly deceitful: she deceives as a character (betraying O’Hara and seducing him as Oja Kodar does to Picasso in F for Fake), though the seduction is imaginary and she deceives by the fact of being an actress and a star (acting, faking, simulating). The duplicity and multiplicity of Hayworth–Bannister and Welles– O’Hara are part of the constituents of the other characters: Arthur Bannister deceives, plots and mystifies and is a grotesque, a distortion, a parody, a reflection-mirage of himself; the same is true of George 138