Irish Film Institute -FRENCH FILM FESTIVAL: CLOUZOT: THE MYSTERY OF PICASSO

FRENCH FILM FESTIVAL: CLOUZOT: THE MYSTERY OF PICASSO

Director: HENRI-GEORGES CLOUZOT

78 mins, France, 1956, Digital, Black and White/Colour, Subtitled


Ticket deal: 5 films for €45 / 10 films for €80 available from the Box Office or on 01 679 3477.

Winner of the Special Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, this invaluable document allows us to watch Picasso at work, and explore his methods and inspiration. Picasso paints on glass while the camera films from the other side. From black-and-white drawings to colourful creations destroyed by the end of the film, the paintings exist only through the recording. The French government declared Clouzot’s film a ‘national treasure’. The radiant photography is from Claude Renoir (son of filmmaker Jean Renoir, grandson of painter Pierre-Auguste) and music by Georges Auric.

Notes by Marie-Pierre Richard

This screening will be introduced by Seán Kissane, Curator, Exhibitions, Irish Museum of Modern Art.

We are delighted to present four features by writer/director Henri-Georges Clouzot (1907-1977), which established him as a master of suspense, often termed ‘the French Hitchcock’. Dark, stylish, with an uncomfortable realism, Clouzot’s cinema brings us critique of bourgeois society, human obsession, neurosis, anxiety, paranoia and fear, all in meticulously detailed, atmospheric scenes and with wonderful turns by some of the great postwar French actors –Pierre Fresnay, Bernard Blier, Louis Jouvet, Paul Meurisse, Simone Signoret, Yves Montand, Charles Vanel, and without forgetting his wife Véra Clouzot. Click for details.

Programme organised with the support of the Institut Français, Paris and the French Embassy in Ireland. Special thanks to Christine Houard, Institut Français; Cultural Services of the French Embassy in Ireland.

Screening as part of the IFI French Film Festival – November 14th to 25th

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