They mocked me. They treated me like a lunatic instead of an artist. They didn't understand that I could think with my paintbrush...
So begins the film, in the first person. It goes on to tell a story which is a distillation of the blazing intensity of a brief and highly unusual artistic career.
Using archival footage, art work and fictional reenactments, François Lévy-Kuentz has composed a fascinating (auto)biography which radiates a powerful consciousness, that of
the artist in the intimacy of his creation, his doubts, and his disappointments; that of a visionary buoyed by his confidence in his genius. His career, which lasted from 1955 to 1962, was cut short by death. He had had only seven years to create and convince.
A unique phenomenon in contemporary art, Yves Klein, inventor of both the monochrome and the happening, died at the age of 34 of a surfeit of passion. He had exhausted himself striving to make art life, and life art; to bring forth a superior and invisible world. Few of his contemporaries understood the focus of the mission he had given himself. Today, it is still being discovered.
This film Yves Klein: The Blue Revolution, which can be viewed in English, won the prize for the best portrait at the 25th FIFA (International Festival of Films on Art in Montreal), as well as the Etoile SCAM 2008 award.
