Kaplan, Nelly
Le Regard Picasso, Suivi De Andre Masson A La Source La
A same vision across three-quarters of a century of uninterrupted creation; how can you take inventory of that?" Nelly Kaplan, a writer and unavoidable figure in French films (to whom we owe La FiancEe du pirate, Charles et Lucie_) asked that very question about the work of Picasso. She provided her own answer in the form of a magnificent medium-length film that received the Golden Lion at the 1967 Venice Film Festival. The style of her film, at once fluid (in its use of tracking-shots and zooms) and vigorous (lighting-effects, editing_) stayed intimately as close as possible to the great Spanish master's expressive contours and continually renewed audacities of form. This first film is now available to the public again through FrEmeaux & AssociEs, together with a second short-film entitled A la source, la Femme AimEe, a film where the director, full of complicity, takes a look at the erotic drawings of AndrE Masson, whose bodylines transfixed by the dizzy vertiges d'Eros have an expressiveness that sometimes doesn't exclude humour. The reissue of these cinematographic works provides the opportunity for a fresh overview of the work of two of the greatest representatives of desire in painting, two artists who could, as Arthur Rimbaud wrote (quoted by Nelly Kaplan in her epigraph), "reproduce sentiments thanks to lines, colours and diagrams [_] simplified or tamed. True magic." Christophe LOINTIER & PATRICK FREMEAUX