Man Among Men: Alberto Giacometti (1963)
By Jean Marie Drot
A Man Among Men: Alberto Giacometti (Jean-Marie Drot, 1963). Sometimes we see the interviewer. Sometimes we hear him. Sometimes we even see a wide shot of the studio that reveals the simple, face-to-face architecture of the encounter. But most of all, we see Giacometti in mid-shot, extemporizing on his obsessions, assiduously working the damp clay of an as-yet inchoate figure. As his fingers probe and tear, he wryly pooh-poohs the interviewer's anxieties about disrupting his creativity: "The filming draws me to the work... it's a chance to work..." And so Giacometti, the charming, witty unrepentant workaholic emerges, reliving in what the poet Jacques Dupin called an "intense, rasping voice," the cathartic moments of his artistic career. Giacometti located his creative epiphany in 1945 when he emerged from a Montparnasse cinema and saw the world as if for the first time, unclouded by the veil of the real. From that moment, he felt the need to account for what he saw, knowing that all the time he would fail, but that only failure itself would lead to the truth. As he later noted, "The more you fail, the more you succeed. It is only when everything is lost and -- instead of giving…
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