“Picasso & Braque Go to the Movies”

American dancer Loie Fuller in footage from “Picasso and Braque Go to the Movies.”

Arne Glimcher's discursive documentary, “Picasso and Braque Go to the Movies,” argues that films, from the earliest days of Thomas Edison and the Lumière Brothers, were a crucial formative influence on Modern painting, especially Cubism.
Using prolific visual comparisons, it tries to show how Cubism, founded by Picasso and Braque in 1907, supposedly translated the movies' revolutionary portrayal of time, space and motion into fine art. Photography had already captured moments that might have eluded the eye. The movies enabled visual artists to freeze blocks of time and analyse them at varying speeds. In consciously anatomising motion and adopting multiple perspectives, the documentary implies, the Cubists may even have been trying to co-opt the brash new art form.
“Picasso and Braque Go to the Movies” is filled with celebrated talking heads, including Martin Scorsese, who produced the film with Glimcher and Robert Greenhut; artists like Julian Schnabel, Chuck Close, Eric Fischl and Lucas Samaras; and the video performance artist Robert Whitman (the most articulate), discussing the relationship of movies to the artists' work. Much of the documentary is a jumble of people extemporising about this and that, but there is no connective overview.
What holds the film together, more or less, is the steady stream of mostly slapstick clips from early cinema especially Georges Méliès' photographic magic tricks whose playful spirit found its way into Cubist paintings and drawings, especially those of Picasso. A voracious consumer of popular culture, he was first exposed to the movies in 1896, at 15, and was immediately smitten. Later Picasso became an ardent fan of Charlie Chaplin; he and the more cerebral Braque even founded a film club. Their passionate interest in new technologies extended to aviation, and they nicknamed each other Orville and Wilbur.
In 1900 Picasso attended the World's Fair in Paris, where he was captivated by the American dancer Loie Fuller, who wore billowing veils onto which colored light was projected. Those images, noted the art historian Bernice Rose, found their way into his seminal 1907 painting, “Les Demoiselles d'Avignon.” There is also speculation that the images of fans and musical instruments in Cubist paintings were borrowed from the movies. The more minutely the film analyzes Picasso's paintings, the further it drifts from its subject.
“Picasso and Braque Go to the Movies” proceeds from the assumption that changing technology drives artistic innovation. In the language of Scorsese, a vociferous champion of cinema as a serious art form: “Cubism was not a style,” he said. “It was a revolution that instigated a profoundly radical change of form in fact a radical change of vision itself.” In his eyes, movies were the engine behind that revolution.

Source: The New York Times