"Disjointed Piccaso's Face" (partially found footage aired on Japanese TV; 1983-1984)

Disjointed Piccaso's Face.

Status: Partially Found

On October 16, 2011, a video of a commercial was uploaded to YouTube by draftee0528. The commercial was for Donto, a warmer sold by Kincho, a Japanese insecticide manufacturer, and that was the main focus of the video, but that was not what people focused on. Immediately after the commercial ended, a creepy and bizarre 2 second clip of a disjointed face moving was shown.

On March 8, 2022, in a commercial search thread on the anonymous message board 5ch, one user asked for a search for this creepy clip that appeared after the Donto commercial^[1].

Speculation

Other users of the thread expressed interest in the creepy clip and began predicting the details of the clip. One user mentioned that the Donto commercial in the video was the "Jomon Era version," first aired in 1983, and speculated that the clip was also aired around the same time.

One user assembled the disjointed face and found it to be Picasso, and further found that the Picasso face was from a photograph of Picasso taken by David Douglas Duncan in 1957.

Picasso seated in a rocking chair by David Douglas Duncan in 1957.

The speculation that emerged from this find was that the clip was part of a program introducing cubism, but the objection was raised that it could not be the start of another program, since the message card at the beginning of the video reads, "Please continue to enjoy Haguregumo after this" (ひきつづきこのあとも浮浪雲をお楽しみ下さい).

Incidentally, Haguregumo is a Japanese manga series that was adapted into a live-action TV series in 1978 and an anime film in 1982. The Haguregumo logo on the message card is written in horizontal characters, making it more likely to be from the anime film, and furthermore, it was aired in 1984 on the TV Asahi network. In addition, Haguregumo's TV airing was on January 5, so it is not unnatural to air a warmer commercial at the right time of the year.

Another speculation was that it was a commercial for the Picasso exhibition held at the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo in 1983, but it was objected that if a commercial was to be aired, it should be aired on NTV, which is a member of the Yomiuri Group, since it was co-sponsored by the Yomiuri Shimbun. Furthermore, one user discovered that a Picasso book from the Heibonsha's "World Famous Paintings" series was released in February 1984, and speculated that the clip might be a commercial for that book.

Availability

The identity of this Picasso footage remains unclear, and it is also unclear whether the footage is commercial. Incidentally, the video of the Donto commercial containing Picasso's face was clipped and reposted from a video of a collection of commercials from the 70s and 80s that was uploaded to Niconico on November 8, 2008^[2], and the original video poster It is possible that he has the full video of Picasso's face.