3.
In Paris, by autumn 1907 everyone was going to the movies. During the previous six or seven years, technological advances had been rapid. Cinema audiences could now see historical films, chase films, even drama documentaries – the first biopics. Picasso and his friends had started going to the pictures at least once a week, on Fridays when the programmes changed, an innovation introduced that August, when Pathé began to distribute films for rent. (Until then, cinema venues had bought film priced by the metre and used the print until it wore out and was melted down to make new stock.) The cinema now vied with the circus as Picasso’s all-consuming passion. Film actors were being recruited from theatres, music halls and circuses and the actors themselves becoming the main draw; people now went to see a film because of its star. Posters on Morris columns all over Paris appealed to prospective cinema audiences with glamorous photographs of the new cinema stars, many of whom had already made their names in the theatre. One of the painters in Montmartre found a way of earning a few sous as a stuntman when all the professional actors turned the job down as too dangerous. He became so successful he gave up painting, and the Bateau-Lavoir gang went to the open-air cinema in the rue de Douai to see him in Zigoto se suicide and Calino cambrioleur (Zigoto Commits Suicide and Calino the Burglar).
By now, Fernande, too, was captivated, particularly by the heady appeal of the female stars. She modelled herself on the vamps and sirens of the screen and, thanks to the steadily increasing numbers of purchasers for Picasso’s work, had taken to wearing extravagant outfits and hats top-heavy with feathers which looked, someone remarked, like an aviary in the Jardin des Plantes. The cinema, for Fernande, at least, had become associated with glamour. And the quality of films was improving all the time. More films were colour-tinted, the tinting and stencilling done by Pathé’s growing workforce. Over 1,200 workers, many of them female, had found employment splicing and colouring prints, a process similar to work they would otherwise have done in the textile factories. Le Pêcheur des perles (1907) was one such visually spectacular rags-to-riches story enhanced by tinting and stencil colour.
That year, hundreds of permanent cinema venues sprang up all over Paris. The first, the 300-seat Omnia-Pathé, next to the Théâtre des Variétés, had opened on 15 December the previous year. On the place de Clichy, the giant Hippodrome, formerly one of the major circus arenas, debuted as a cinema, and by December 1907 the Cirque d’Hiver’s programmes also included films. Already by the summer, there were at least fifty new or converted permanent cinemas throughout the city, with posters on every wall, advertising films designed to appeal to audiences of all ages, from every social class. The main attractions were often Georges Méliès’ new ‘longer’ films (five or ten minutes in duration; sometimes more), featuring increasingly eye-catching special effects. The programmes were interspersed with lantern slide shows and live vaudeville acts. Méliès’ films were formulated in tableaux (scenes), so the cinema audience had the same experience as the theatregoer, with an orchestra providing the sound. The actors performed before sets, the walls, skies and backdrops painted in trompe l’oeil. Sometimes, to complete the illusion, the title of the film would rise like a curtain. Often, at the end of a scene, the actors returned to salute the audience and thank them for their anticipated applause. Outside the city, fairground cinemas sprang up, running on electricity produced by their own generators, which were transported by train along with the performers, who set up camp in fairground spaces for three or four weeks at a time, most of them using Pathé projectors and film. In France, the year 1907 was dubbed ‘the year of the cinema’.
In an abrupt volte-face, the music halls, formerly the inexpensive haunts of the working classes, now became luxury entertainment. With entry to the cinemas so cheap, the cabarets of bas Montmartre increased their entry fees. Entry to the Folies Bergère was now at least three francs; the newly renovated Moulin Rouge charged upwards of four francs; the Scala and the Olympia were seven or eight. The cinemas had even taken over the programming format used by the cabarets, normally a two-hour programme every evening, with an additional matinee on Thursdays and Sundays (unlike the American nickelodeons, where screenings were from morning to midnight). The popularity of the cinema had also spread to most other ‘First World’ countries. In France, the café-concerts and music halls survived by incorporating film showings into their live programmes, advertising exclusive screenings in mass dailies such as Le Petit Parisien. The domain of the cinema was a world of magical phantasmagoria. A few years later, Paul Éluard would describe the flickering enchantment of the silver screen: ‘Between nine o’clock and midnight, between evening and bedtime, a plethora of real images overwhelmed this world of unreality. The cinema revealed a whole new world, an imaginary version of the real, like poetry; and when it tried to imitate the old world of nature or the theatre it produced merely phantasms.’
Cinematic technology evolved fast. Gags were accentuated by frame changes; objects could be absurdly transformed before the audience’s eyes. In L’Accordéon (1906), the instrument expanded to giant proportions before being reduced to normal size; a paper-thin image of a young man then fell to earth from between its folds. Objects in films took on a life of their own, displaying ‘magical’, transformative powers, in their own way as powerful as the African carvings in the Trocadéro. By 1907, techniques had developed to incorporate moving shots, close-ups, reversals and altered or transformed objects.
The image in art was being destabilized by this new medium. Unlike the spectator at the theatre or the cabaret, the camera eye could change position, altering whatever was being looked at from one moment to the next. It was this multi-perspectival view that Gertrude Stein was aiming to incorporate into her shifting, repetitive narratives; this is what she meant when she compared her techniques in writing to those of the cinema. The movie camera transformed the act of spectatorship. Whereas in the theatre or cabaret, the act of looking was always collective, in the cinema it became a more private, individual experience. Now, too, the peepshow found its way from the brothel, or the wooden box in the corner of a café, on to the big screen. Some of Pathé’s earliest erotic (peepshow) films from 1902 onwards were about painters, for ex-ample, Le Peintre et son modèle (1902); Borgia s’amuse (1902); and Le Bain des dames de la cour (1904). In many of them the main attraction for the audience was the theatrical sensation of the voyeur being caught in the act of watching the erotic show, thus the artist and his model made ideal subjects; and the new technology even enabled sequences composed of two shots: one of a person looking; another of what was being viewed through the keyhole.
Cinema also exposed the fundamental difficulty of photography as art. If the cinema confounded everyone by projecting the moving image from all angles and in many changing perspectives, photography also posed a major challenge to the modern artist. The fact that the image in cinema could change drew attention to a whole range of infinitely complex pictorial problems and opportunities that had come to light with the use of photography. Druet, the art dealer who had started as a photographer and also dealt in photographic reproductions, was among those championing Matisse, but photographic reproductions and photographic works of art were two different things. One evening, as usual, the Picasso gang was gathered at the home of one of their Montmartrois neighbours. Though hardly new to most of them, on this occasion the opium they were smoking seemed to have a strong effect on them all. Max Jacob fell uncharacteristically silent. Apollinaire shouted out that he was in a brothel. Maurice Princet was in tears. Picasso, in despair, announced that there was nothing left for him to live for; he had discovered photography. His stricken lament may have been merely throwaway – or perhaps it was more profound. David Hockney would later note that ‘Picasso and Braque saw the flaw in photography’: that the act of looking from more than one viewpoint creates problems of time as well as space; because there is not enough time within a single photograph to perceive the space being depicted, the photograph is rendered essentially static. Picasso and his circle would discuss this problem in the months and years to come.
And Picasso had yet to uncover his new masterwork – if such it was. Though he completed it during the summer of 1907, it was autumn (once Braque was back in Paris) before he found the confidence to reveal it. Who knew what would be unveiled? As Norman Mailer later pointed out, this was a period of great turmoil for the artist, one in which he and Fernande were regularly taking opium. The drug made Picasso’s mind race with extraordinary images while at the same time inhibiting his desire to paint. If the previous summer in Gosol had had a calming effect, it was because there had been no distractions, no challenges from threatening competition – and no stimulants. In Paris, he was surrounded by friends (including Max Jacob), who practised various forms of mysticism, stimulated by various substances. Impeded rather than inspired by the effects of opium, Picasso was also increasingly aware of his main competitor, Matisse. If the latter’s reputation was based on his skill as a colourist, perhaps – as has often been suggested – Picasso felt under pressure to prove himself by experimenting with form. For the time being, however, Picasso continued to work on his preparatory sketches and figure studies. And the painting was not his only problem. Picasso at this point was in two minds about Fernande. He had never felt entirely secure with her, especially in Paris. When he was anxious, he became combative, then inhibited, first accusing her, then being reduced to sullen silences.