The Creator's Perilous Adventures

This may be slightly off-topic, but I’ve recently watched two films that really ought to be seen by anyone with an interest in creativity.

One is The Mystery of Picasso, a 1956 documentary by French filmmaker Henri-Georges Clouzot, who is best known for the wrenchingly suspenseful The Wages of Fear. It opens with a shot of Pablo Picasso sitting in his studio smoking a cigarette. The voiceover says:

One would die to know what was on Rimbaud’s mind when he wrote “The Drunken Boat,” or on Mozart’s, when he composed his symphony “Jupiter.” We’d love to know that secret process guiding the creator through his perilous adventures. Thankfully, what is impossible to know for poetry and music is not in the case of painting. To know what is going through a painter’s mind, one just needs to look at his hand.

This is debatable, of course, but whether or not it tells us what made the man tick, The Mystery of Picasso does provide us with a unique opportunity to watch him work. For the first half-hour or so he draws on translucent paper that is filmed from the other side, allowing us to see the lines appear as the artist adds them. There’s an offhand quality to this work, not to mention an overreliance on naked ladies, but it’s fascinating to watch the pictures emerge in something like real time. Later color is added to the mix as Picasso works with watercolors, collage, and oils; much of this work is captured through time-lapse photography, with the layers appearing one after another as if by magic.

The Mystery of Picasso climaxes with a breathtaking 10-minute sequence that begins as a few lines that evolve into abstract shapes, then stylized figures, before turning into a complex seasdie scene. The master is not satisfied, however; he continues painting over whole sections of the canvas, many of them quite amazing, in pursuit of some elusive goal. At last, having blotted out a small museum’s worth of ideas in favor of greater simplicity, he announces that now that he knows where he’s going with the painting, he will get a new canvas and start over.

And that for me is the take-away from this film: Picasso’s remarkable combination of playfulness and work ethic. Really they are two parts of the same thing, a joy in experimenting with ideas and a willingness to abandon them, a productive non-attachment. Reportedly all the art made for The Mystery of Picasso was destroyed afterwards so that it would exist only on film; put that in your pipe and smoke it.

The other movie I want to point you toward is a little (30-minute) art film called The Way Things Go, which documents an elaborate chain reaction involving fire, water, gravity, foam, duct tape, plastic bags, and God knows what else. I don’t think I can adequately describe it in words, which is painful to admit as a semi-professional writer, but check this out:

What amazes me about The Way Things Go is the simple fact of its existence. Someone—actually, Swiss artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss—thought it up, made it happen, and filmed it. To think about the sheer amount of work that went into setting this thing up boggles the mind. It is, in a word, inspirational; it inspired me to write this, and will inspire you to do whatever it is that you do, and that is a whole other kind of chain reaction. May it go on and on.