Henri-George Clouzot's The Mystery of Picasso (1956) and Lars von Trier's and Jørgen Leth's The Five Obstructions (2003) are two celebrated experimental documentaries on the creative process in the visual arts and cinema made (or co-made) by renowned narrative film auteurs. Ludic exercises in on-and off-screen cinematic collaboration and co-creation, they foreground creativity and its constraints; artistic authorship and genius; and the challenges of creative filmmaking as simultaneously a means of personal expression and a collaborative undertaking. As the main concerns of this article, both films are also marked by an overlapping self-reflexivity, intermediality, and documentary and artistic hybridity, rooted in their innovative incorporation of pre-existing and in-progress art works (films, paintings, drawings). Focused on multiple forms reflexivity and a distinctly performance and processbased "nesting" of works-within-the-work, juxtaposition of the films sheds new light on these dynamics generally, as well as within the styles and careers of Clouzot and Picasso, Leth and Trier.--Beyond a shared existential pessimism, the films of Henri-George Clouzot, renowned for their fastidiously-crafted classical cinema suspense, and Lars von Trier, often cast as paradigmatic examples of genre-defying postmodern provocation and irony, appear to have little in common. One notable similarity between the 'French Hitchcock' and the former enfant terrible of European art cinema, however, is that Clouzot and Trier, narrative film auteurs on any reasonable definition, made innovative documentaries on the subject of artistic creation: The Mystery of Picasso (Le mystère Picasso, 1956) and The Five Obstructions (2003, co-credited to Jørgen Leth). Both entertaining docudramas of an unconventional kind, they follow the artistic process from beginning to end; explore the nature of creativity and its constraints; highlight the challenges of creative filmmaking as simultaneously a means of personal expression and a collaborative art; and potently exemplify the expressive, as well as informative, capacities of documentary.
