Picasso and Braque Go to the Movies

Picasso and Braque Go to the Movies

60 Minutes

Picasso and Braque Go to the Movies has, if you can’t already tell from the title, a highly specific subject and focus. Despite this, it admirably manages to avoid being easily pigeonholed as to what it’s “about.” Although its visual language is almost entirely rooted in Ken Burns-ian documentary filmmaking, this is more an essay than a traditional documentary. Its narrative arc and intellectual scope, at least partially attributable to its impressive cast of talking heads and their frequently interesting observations and digressions, is un-thesis like, difficult and somewhat willfully impossible to place. Arne Glimcher’s short feature has a specific focus that quickly zooms out into the macro; it seems designed to do so from the get-go. In tracing the birth of Cubism and cinema in parallel, Picasso and Braque attempts to find the influence that film had on its titular pair and their work. Glimcher, usually a gallerist and curator, assembles an interesting blend of people, from historians and writers, to famous artists like Chuck Close and Julian Schnabel, to discuss in some way the influences they gained from Picasso and Braque’s work, and the influence they sense was gained from and which commented upon, not just the nascent cinema, but the overall “moment” at the turn of the century, which the film approaches as a paradigm shift in human history, the birth of Modernity.

The film makes its way through Picasso’s and Braque’s careers in chronological order, giving each speaker an opportunity to have an extended riff on a single concept as the spare narrative simultaneously develops. The film is careful to not rely overly on biographical information; it’s not concerned with embodying or evoking its two ostensible subjects, only their minds, the thought processes which drove them to come upon their multivalent styles, isolating a social and cultural thread through these two iconic individual examples. At the turn of the century, aviation was invented, radio was invented, automobiles were newly available; in every way the world was shrinking, and consequently so was the way that we were able to perceive it. At this exact moment, cinema – an art centered on the notion of compacting time and space, of capturing active, real-time moments forever and fragmenting them – came along and humans collectively began to learn how to look at it.

This gives each speaker ample opportunity to connect, via visual rhymes and conceptual exploration, all sorts of ways in which each of the subjects were reflected in one another, and how they reflected the world. Among the ideas explored: what it takes to experience a total image and what that entails relative to each medium – a painting allows its viewer to meditate on its meaning, looking at one image which is always there and never changes, creating an open sense of exploration; a film only gives its audience a complete image of its total parts after it is over and no longer visible, is experienced differently each time it is approached and requires assembly. The painting as a physical object versus the film as light reflected through a physical apparatus, an ephemeral thing whose experience is physical. The density of detail one needs to process in real time in order to understand a moving frame as opposed to a static one, and how this reflected in Picasso and Braque’s work as a desire to capture that same intensity without movement. The sense of an external light source in their work at this time, which suggests a flickering projector light in the center of the room, as movies were screened in the day, lighting up the canvas.

Back and forth, Picasso and Braque explores the way that communication, transportation, art and film came together to shape the mental state required to watch a film, to live as we do. Glimcher (despite his pedigree as an expert) chooses to speak in the medium he’s selected, scattering throughout gorgeous montages of archival film, some of it the go-to Lumiere stuff, but also a huge selection of rarer imagery, and well-selected moments from Méliès, Edison films, and others, intercut with artworks which result in exactly the sort of ineffable connections this film talks about cinema having the capability of synthesizing. That it skews closer to cinema’s effect on painting without discussing painting’s effects on cinema is only slightly disappointing, given the bounty it offers up in spite of its omissions.

by Andrei Alupului