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ABSTRACT
Henri-George Clouzot’s The Mystery of Picasso (1956) and Lars von Trier’s and Jørgen Leth’s The Five Obstructions (2003) are celebrated experimental documentaries on the creative process in the visual arts and cinema made (or co-made) by renowned narrative film auteurs. Ludic exercises in on-and off-screen cinematic co-creation, together they foreground creativity and its constraints; artistic style and authorship; and filmmaking as simultaneously a means of personal expression and a collaborative enterprise. The main concerns of this article, both films are also marked by an overlapping self-reflexivity, intermediality, and formal hybridity, rooted in their innovative incorporation –or nesting– of pre-existing and in-progress art works (films, paintings, drawings). Focused on multiple forms of reflexivity and a distinctly process-based incorporation of works-within-the-work, juxtaposition of the films sheds new light on these dynamics generally, as well as on the styles and careers of Clouzot and Picasso, Leth and von Trier.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. See Yacavone, ‘Recursive Reflections: Types, Modes and Forms of Cinematic Reflexivity’ (in Reflexive Cinema, ed. David LaRocca, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, CitationIn-press). I will be further developing these and other categories in greater detail in a future book on cinematic reflexivity.
2. In keeping with my reading of the film, Lloyd sees Clouzot as ‘one of many agents’ Picasso used to advance his artistic goals, including through film and photography (2007, 142).
3. Von Trier’s overtly Brechtian (in stylistic terms) comedy The Boss of it All (2006) is an exception to such ‘indirect’ reflexivity in his work, in as much as von Trier, mounted behind a camera, directly interrupts the fictional diegesis to comment upon the drama as it unfolds in a ‘self-exhibitionist foregrounding of the apparatus’ (including the film’s promotion of the computer-determined ‘Automavision’ process it utilizes). (Koutsourakis 2103, 137–138).
4. The 1967 film is included in its entirety as a supplement on the original dvd release of The Five Obstructions.
5. Schröter notes in passing that this last opposition is at the heart of Mystery (2011, 28).
6. Both Smith and Livingston stress the role-play and role-reversal dimensions of Five, the latter suggesting, rightly in my view, that rather than a simple dramatic conceit the ‘the play of roles within roles has genuine ironic complexity’ (Citation2008, 69). See also Smith (Citation2008, 136–137).
7. These other collaborators include Leth’s actors and members of his changing crews, as well as Sabiston and cinematographer Claude Renoir (in another film-painting conjunction, the grandson of impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir and the nephew of Jean Renoir), who appears on screen in Mystery.
8. As they together meet this challenge, Livingston defends the idea that Leth and Trier are genuine ‘joint authors’ of the film (Citation2008, 73).
9. With reference to philosopher Nelson Goodman’s conception of art as world-making, I have elsewhere cited Five as a powerful demonstration of the cinematic creation of symbolic and affective ‘worlds’ from parts of other, older film and art worlds. See (Yacavone Citation2015, 93–94).
10. As Livingston wisely cautions, we should question whether Trier’s text read by Leth is a truly ‘unmasked and sincere statement of von Trier’s thoughts and intentions in this affair,’ or another self-concealing mask and continuation of the game (Citation2008, 69).
11. See Smith for a similar and more detailed take on the ‘convergence’ and ‘overlap’ between von Trier and Leth in the film’s final section (Citation2008, 136).
12. On the therapeutic dynamics of Five, see Claire Perkins (Citation2010) ‘In Treatment: The Five Obstructions.’
13. For more on these psychological/authorial and auto-reflexive aspects of Five, and von Trier’s cinema, see Perkins (Citation2010) and Bainbridge (Citation2007).
14. Mystery’s championing by art educators and its classroom use attests to both the film’s intentions and achievements in this respect (see Rand Citation2003).
15. Mystery does not address, for instance, its own role in further propagating Picasso’s legend, as, in part, a self- and media created phenomena, both specifically French and global. A role and legend in other words, not unlike those other ideologically coded ‘mythologies,’ turning contingent cultural phenomena into seemingly necessary, ‘natural’ ones, which Roland Barthes was actively deconstructing during the period of the film’s making (see Barthes, Mythologies. Paris, Editions du Seuil, 1957).
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Daniel Yacavone
Daniel Yacavone is Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) at The University of Edinburgh, where he has been the director of the film studies program. Currently a Fellow-in-residence at The Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences (Amsterdam), he is the author of Film Worlds: A Philosophical Aesthetics of Cinema (Columbia University Press, 2015).