53 minutes / Color/B&W
Closed Captioned
Release: 2021
Copyright: 2020
On the same home video DVD as PICASSO AND SIMA, ANTIBES 1946
A group of friends meet up in the country to spend the summer together. They go to the beach, play cards, and take day trips in the surrounding region. But these aren’t everyday city folk on vacation. The hosts are Pablo Picasso and Dora Maar. Among the friends are some of the leading painters, photographers and poets of the day.
ON THE FRENCH RIVIERA WITH MAN RAY AND PICASSO tells the story of the group in the summer of 1937. The film is told largely from the point of view of photographer, filmmaker and painter Man Ray, using footage he shot (including some on the then-experimental Kodachrome), a wealth of photos, and excerpts from his autobiography. The other guests at the pension in the village of Mougins are Man Ray’s girlfriend, Ady Fidelin, a dancer and model from Guadeloupe; poet Paul Éluard and his wife Nusch, and writer Roland Penrose, with photographer Lee Miller, who would go on to be the first to document the horrors of the Nazi death camps.
ON THE FRENCH RIVIERA WITH MAN RAY AND PICASSO captures the complex swirl of their relationships, the art they made—during a period in which Ray was transitioning to painting—and the looming end of an era of personal and social experimentation, as war rages in Spain and Second World War looms.
“An exceptional film… A rare documentary!” —Télérama.fr
“An exhilarating whirlwind… not to be missed!” —La Croix
“A little gem of a film!” —Le Monde
“A beautiful journey through time, steeped in insouciance.” —Télé 2 semaines
“Art and friendship form the central theme… and unite these characters through images that are as rare as they are amazing.” —Télé-Loisirs
Select Accolades
The story plunges us into Parisian life at the beginning of the twentieth century, a hotbed of artistic creation with the blossoming of Fauvism, Cubism, Dadaism and Surrealism.
Amelie Harrault, Pauline Gaillard and Valerie Loiseleux | 2020 | 300 minutes | Color | English; French
Uses the famous painting by Picasso to bear witness to the atrocities of the Spanish civil war and fascism.
Alain Resnais and Robert Hessens | 2021 | 14 minutes | French | English subtitles
In 1946, Pablo Picasso asked fellow artist Michel Sima to document Picasso's artwork-in-progress.
Christian Tran | 2017 | 58 minutes | Color | French | English subtitles
