ABSTRACT
The Picasso Mystery constitutes the second revolution in films about art. I have attempted to show the importance of the first, as it was initiat ed by the films of Emmer and Gras2 and so beautifully developed in all its ramifications by Alain Resnais.3 This revolution lay in the abolition of the frame, whose disappearance makes us equate the pictorial universe with the universe itself in all its tangibility. To be sure, once it had penetrated “into” the paintings, the camera would have taken us along on a descrip tive or dramatic journey of a certain duration. The real novelty, however, was not at all temporal in nature but rather exclusively spatial. It is true that the eye also takes its time as it analyzes, but the dimensions and bor ders of the painting-despite the camera’s abolition of the latter-remind it of the autonomy of the pictorial microcosm, which is forever crystal lized outside time.
