Matisse paints directly on celluloid in this forbidden 8-minute fever dream.
Between 1950 and 1955, Henri Langlois tried to produce, on behalf of the Cinémathèque française, several films devoted to great artists, with their cooperation, by entrusting them with virgin film stock. Wrote Langlois on the unfinished project, epic in scope: "We had the idea of asking poets, painters, scholars, writers and even repressed filmmakers [...] to make films in 16mm, with the means at hand, without taking into account any commercial concern or censorship." What precious little came of the project was eight minutes of film from Matisse and twenty-some from Marc Chagall, released at a later date.
Direction
Langlois's radical anti-commercial manifesto in motion.
Practical Effects
Matisse literally painting on film stock itself.
Director
Frédéric Rossif
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Langlois conceived this as a cinematic pantheon: Cocteau, Picasso, and others were approached before commercial reality crushed the dream.
Most of Langlois's 'great artist films' never materialized—making this fragment a ghost of cinema that never was.
FR
