Pablo Picasso stands behind a sheet of transparent paper and glass, painting directly toward the camera while Henri-Georges Clouzot films from the other side. A special ink that soaks through the canvas lets the lens catch each stroke as it happens, so lines and colors seem to appear from nothing, building into finished Cubist compositions in real time. Stop-motion and time-lapse photography compress the slower stretches, letting a painting form and dissolve into another in the space of a few minutes. Picasso works fast and talks little, scrapping some canvases the moment they're finished and pushing others through repeated revisions, so the film becomes less a portrait of the man than a record of decisions made stroke by stroke. Clouzot occasionally cuts to Picasso's face or hands, but the sustained focus stays on the canvas itself. None of the works shown were sold or preserved afterward; they exist only as this footage, made for the film and destroyed once the cameras stopped rolling.