The Cinema’s Lesson for Cubism

This presentation explores the forgotten features of the early cinema experience in Paris that were central to the development of both analytic and synthetic Cubism. While cinematic movement undoubtedly transformed the representational paradigms of painting and literature, the focus of this talk is on the varied spatial contexts and styles of projection that made Parisian film exhibition a radically modernist event. This talk will revisit the early theaters, cafés, and brasseries of the era between 1900 and 1915, demonstrating how the early cinema environment contained some of the most challenging formal problems to which Picasso, for one, returned repeatedly, obsessively. This talk will be followed by a 75-minute screening of Henri-Georges Clouzot's Mysteries of Picasso (1956).