PICASSO AND BRAQUE GO TO THE MOVIES

(director: Arne Glimcher; cinematographer: Petr Hlinomaz; editor: Sabine Krayenbühl; cast: Martin Scorsese (Narrator), Jennifer Wild, Chuck Close, Julian Schnabel, Adam Gopnik, John Richardson, Lucas Samaras, Eric Fischl; Runtime: 60; MPAA Rating: NR; producers: Martin Scorsese/Robert Greenhut; Arthouse Films; 2008)

“For those with a scholarly outlook towards film or art it’s worth checking out, while others will probably not get much out of it.”

Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz

A dry but adequately presentedacademic documentary by art gallery notable dealer Arne Glimcher (“The Mambo Kings”) on the founders of Cubism digging film in its infancy. Trouble is that it’s too much like attending a stuffy museum lecture and being bored even if being informed, as a group of talking heads ramble on endlessly and, to its credit, the filmmaker mixes in the showing of a number Cubist paintings and rare film clips of the early short silents that include those of the Lumiere brothers and the inventor magician Georges Melies. In a meandering way it studies the effects of the industrial revolution on the Cubist paintings of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque and compares their art to the early development of films in primarily the period starting in 1907, when Picasso was introduced to Braque by the poet Apollinaire. The study stops by 1914. We’re told that both painters loved film and and their radical paintings along with the early films revolutionized the way the world viewed art. For those with a scholarly outlook towards film or art it’s worth checking out, while others will probably not get much out of it.

REVIEWED ON 2/16/2013 GRADE: B-