Picasso and Braque Go To The Movies

Picasso and Braque Go To The Movies Directed by Arne Glimcher At Cinema Village Runtime: 62 min. Every time someone asks if a new movie is going to be a hit, it’s a blow against civilization. Director Arne Glimcher enlists Martin Scorsese’s help in the almost-lost cause of reminding people that film is an art form in the new documentary Picasso and Braque Go To the Movies. As Bow-Down-To-Hollywood season gets underway, this is the perfect time for cultural reflection—to pull back from the heedless pop frenzy of sequels and grosses and 3-D. Our culture needs to be reminded that movies are an art form, and this Glimcher-Scorsese doc traces its roots to the early 20th-century cinematic discoveries that paralleled modernist developments in paintings—especially those of Pablo Picasso and George Braque.

The names Picasso and Braque probably mean nothing to Fincherheads, Cameron morons and Chris Nolanknowitalls—that’s because those filmmakers give little evidence of how the two-dimensional form can become kinetic, evoking mystery and spirituality. The first film-art findings such as early special effects of France’s Méliès brothers and then the Surrealists, created the basic cinematic spectacle that today’s “immersive 3-D” only superficially surpasses. The Picasso-Braque connection shows the unembarrassed impulse to study vision and philosophy through art—not trite, childish, “Lookit!” exploitation.

Glimcher focuses on the moment artists and the public all appreciated “the chance to relive time and chance to monkey with it”—as Robert Whitman points out. As the digital era progresses, this knowledge—and its thrill—are forgotten. Only the movies and paintings from this era—what Natasha Staller identifies as “the enabling environment of 1900 Paris”—preserve the thrill. A visit to the Gagosian Gallery’s current show of late Monet also contains this thrill; Monet’s painting are more stirring than the fantasy world of Avatar’s Pandora.

In addition to Scorsese, several artists, scholars and historians also testify to cinema-painting kinship: Eric Fishcl, Julian Schnabel, Chuck Close, Coosje Van Bruggen, Tom Gunning and others reveal the conceptual foundations of painting that led to the deus ex machina of cinema. As Scorsese romanticizes: “A machine that creates something ephemeral. You’re [watching] a dream.” While covering the 1907-1914 period of Braque and Picasso’s experiments, Glimcher fails to mention of D.W. Griffith who, in every way, was Picasso’s contemporary. Despite that error, I hereby nominated Glimcher’s film for the National Society of Film Critics’ Best Non-Fiction Prize.