Cinemagritte: René Magritte Within the Frame of Film History, Theory, and Practice

Cinemagritte

Contemporary Approaches to Film and Media Series

A complete listing of the books in this series can be found online at wsupress.wayne.edu.

General Editor

Barry Keith Grant

Brock University

Advisory Editors

Robert J. Burgoyne

University of St. Andrews

Caren J. Deming

University of Arizona

Patricia B. Erens

School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Peter X. Feng

University of Delaware

Lucy Fischer

University of Pittsburgh

Frances Gateward

California State University, Northridge

Tom Gunning

University of Chicago

Thomas Leitch

University of Delaware

Walter Metz

Southern Illinois University

Cinemagritte

René Magritte within the Frame of Film History, Theory, and Practice

Lucy Fischer

Wayne State University Press

Detroit

© 2019 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without formal permission. Manufactured in the United States of America.

ISBN 978-0-8143-4637-2 (paperback)

ISBN 978-0-8143-4636-5 (hardcover)

ISBN 978-0-8143-4638-9 (e-book)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019941125

Published with the assistance of a fund established by Thelma Gray James of Wayne State University for the publication of folklore and English studies.

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Visit us online at wsupress.wayne.edu

For my granddaughter, Talia Sage Wicclair—may she grow up to love and be sustained by art

Contents

Preface: Magritte and Me

Acknowledgments

Part 1. Backstory

1. Introduction: A Trampoline for the Imagination

2. Art Documentaries about Magritte/Magritte’s Home Movies

3. Honoring the Artist: Cinematic Tributes to Magritte

4. The Belgian Surrealist Cinematic Avant-Garde

Part 2. Resonances of Magritte in Film History, Theory, and Practice

5. Voyeurism and the Gaze

6. Fictional versus Real Persons and Spaces

7. Word versus Image

8. Pictures and Landscapes

9. Empty Frames and X-Ray Vision

10. Mindscreens

11. Petrification, Horror, and Fantasy

12. Animation

13. Faces and Masks

14. Science Fiction

15. Human-Animal Hybrids

16. Magic: Dismemberment and Decapitation

17. Windows

18. Bells and Belle

19. Curtains

20. Film History, Techniques, Processes, and Modes of Reception

21. Concluding Thoughts

Notes

Magritte Works and Credits

Index

Preface

Magritte and Me

My fascination with the work of René Magritte began long ago. In the 1970s, I worked in the Film Department of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City and spent most of my pecuniary salary at the MoMA store. Among the initial things I bought there (and the first framed print that I ever owned) was one of Magritte’s The False Mirror (1929) (which appears on the cover of this volume)—the image of a huge eye—which hung in the museum’s galleries. It was expensive and quite a splurge for me at the time. I immediately placed it on a wall above my desk in my home office. That purchase was soon followed by another, a print from the Domain of Light series (1949–67)—a gift for my husband. Ultimately, I bought an elegant art book about Magritte that contained myriad color reproductions—another strain on my limited finances. Finally, while working in MoMA’s 16 mm Film Circulating Library, I was able to place in the collection an experimental film by Anita Thatcher titled Homage to Magritte (1974)—surprisingly, one of the few works of that kind (now or then) to openly engage the artist’s vision.

My love of Magritte’s creations continued through the years, and whenever I learned of a show that featured his art, I made a point of attending it, if possible. As for recent years, I traveled to New York in 2013 to view MoMa’s exhibition Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary, 1926–1938 and then later, in the summer of 2018, to San Francisco to see the SFMOMA exhibit The Fifth Season, focused on Magritte’s late work. In between, in 2015, I journeyed to Brussels (the city in which he had long resided) to visit the Magritte Museum—one entirely devoted to the painter’s oeuvre. As always, I was impressed by the beauty and wit of his work as well as the way it raised resonant (and perplexing) conceptual, artistic, and philosophical issues.

As I began my professional life as a film scholar (completing a doctorate in cinema studies at New York University), Magritte began to factor into my academic world as well. Even before working at MoMA, I had taken a stimulating course from Annette Michelson on Dada, Surrealism, and film, in which paintings by Magritte were referenced. Then, while writing a dissertation on the work of Jacques Tati,¹ I came across Magritte’s painting Hegel’s Holiday (1958), a title that bore an intriguing connection to that of Tati’s Mr. Hulot’s Holiday (1953). Furthermore, Magritte’s quotidian bourgeois man in the bowler hat seemed ripe for comparison with the figure of Hulot, an ordinary guy equally known for his signature (though different) headgear. I was pleased to learn only recently that Magritte had, in fact, admired the work of Tati.²

When I received my PhD and began teaching, without consciously willing it, I often found myself bringing into class pictures of Magritte’s work in order to highlight some aspect of a film’s theme, point of view, or style. For instance, in teaching Being John Malkovich (Spike Jonze, 1999)—a fantastical movie about a portal that leads into the head of a famous actor—I would show slides of Not to Be Reproduced (1937) and The Glass House (1939)—paintings that got closer to the sense of subjectivity in the film than most of the critical articles written about it. (This film and these paintings are discussed briefly in chapter 20.)

Periodically, it would occur to me that there might be a rich research topic in the subject of Magritte and film, but being involved in other publishing ventures, I routinely tabled the idea. Now, however, having found myself free to contemplate a new project, the idea proposed itself again—this time, with a vengeance.

When recently I began to seriously investigate the matter in the scholarly literature, I was not entirely surprised to find a dearth of material on the subject beyond the mention of certain established facts: Magritte made Surrealist home movies; he painted images of Louis Feuillade’s hero, Fantômas, including The Flame Rekindled (1943) (see figure 1.1) and The Barbarian (1928); and he titled one work Blue Cinema (1925) and another Homage to Mack Sennett (1934). I also found passing references to Magritte in film critics’ consideration of various movies—rarely any in-depth analyses.

Given, however, that I like investigating uncharted territory, now seemed the time to face my Magritte fixation. Furthermore, my work had recently focused on cinema and the arts, having edited a volume on art direction and production design and written two separate monographs on Art Deco and Art Nouveau in relation to film history.³ Finally, I had previously examined the links between movies and the work of another painter in my essay The Savage Eye: Edward Hopper and the Cinema.⁴

It is my contention that of all Modernist artists, René Magritte is, perhaps, the most interesting one to examine in relation to the cinema. Rather than being an abstract painter or one who simply modifies modes of representation, Magritte makes realistic art (like the unadulterated photographic image) while, at the same time, creating myriad visual conundrums that raise intriguing conceptual and philosophical issues pertinent to cinema. This makes his work resonant for a comparative analysis with film.

Such is the task I gave myself in writing Cinemagritte.

Acknowledgments

In many ways completing this book has been one of the most pleasurable and difficult writing experiences of my career—pleasurable because I love the work of Magritte and the task of imagining his connections to film and media studies, difficult because of the complex and expensive process of clearing rights for the copious images required to illustrate the text. In that regard, I would like to thank the many people who helped in that endeavor, although unfortunately I have not been able to use all the images to which they gave me access. In particular, I appreciate those institutions that allowed use of their images gratis—a great help to an underfunded humanities scholar—the Menil Collection, Houston (and Kara Thoreson), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (and David Rozelle), the National Gallery (and Peter Huetis), the Museum of Fine Arts Houston (and Shelby Rodriguez), the Albright-Knox Gallery (and Kelly Carpenter), the Philadelphia Museum of Art (and Miriam), and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (and Bonnie Rosenberg).

I would also like to thank the following other individuals and organizations who helped me secure rights to Magritte’s works: Robbi Siegel of Art Resource (who had great patience in my selection of myriad images), Todd Leibowitz of the Artist Rights Society, Laura Povenelli of the New Orleans Museum of Art, and Colleen Hollister of the Baltimore Museum of Art.

As for my publisher, I am grateful to Barry Grant (editor of the Contemporary Approaches to Film and Media series) with whom I first discussed this project and Annie Martin (who was then acquisitions editor and is now editor-in-chief). I was buoyed by their enthusiastic response to it. I have had a long relationship with them as a member of Wayne State University Press’s advisory board for the series and am pleased now to be one of its authors as well. I am also appreciative of the work of Marie Sweetman, who took over for Annie as acquisitions editor and has been wonderful to work with during the long and laborious preparation of the manuscript for publication. Ceylan Akturk was helpful in vetting permissions, as was Jude Grant in dealing with the copyediting process.

There are also many individuals and institutions I need to credit at the University of Pittsburgh for supporting this project: two deans and one former dean of the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences (Kathleen Blee, Kay Brummond, and James Knapp), the University Center for International Studies, the European Studies Program, and the Jean Monnet European Union Center of Excellence. I have also profited from help by two graduate assistants in the Department of English: John Kennedy and especially Rachel Mabe.

As ever, I have benefited from the support (mental, physical, and intellectual) of my husband, Mark Wicclair, who saw me through some very trying times during the preparation of this manuscript, and of my broader immediate family—my sister, Madeleine; my son, David; my daughter-in-law, Leigh; and my lovely, delightful granddaughter, Talia, to whom this book is dedicated.

1

Backstory

1

Introduction

A Trampoline for the Imagination

The true value of art is a function of its power as a liberating revelation.

René Magritte¹

In this book, I investigate the connections between the great Belgian Surrealist/Modernist painter René Magritte (1898–1967) and the cinema. I seek to do so in a variety of ways—by discussing the scant observations that critics have made on the topic, exploring art documentaries about Magritte, investigating explicit cinematic homages to the painter, analyzing Magritte’s amateur movies, examining the broader scholarship on painting and film, and, most notably, surfacing what I deem to be resonances between his oeuvre and diverse films.

I choose the word resonance carefully because in conceiving it I am not generally claiming the direct influence of Magritte’s work on the movies or vice versa (though instances of this do occur). Rather, film history is inflected by many of the thematic discourses, conceptual issues, and iconographic tropes that Magritte routinely engaged—not surprising, since he and cinema came of age in and the same era (the early twentieth century). As Xavier Canonne writes, The Surrealists were born with the movies.² Such parallels between Magritte’s work and the cinema exist because the artist’s creative interests involved subjects having direct relevance to film theory and practice—framing, scale, montage, illusionism, the gaze, theatricality, point of view, the face, and the status of objects. In cataloging these issues, I am reminded of what Magritte once said about the cinema in a letter to a friend—that he used it as a trampoline for the imagination, helping him to conceive his art.³ I will honor but reverse Magritte’s process, using his work as a creative jumping-off point for considering film.

In my choice of the term resonance, I am encouraged by its use by art historian A. M. Hammacher who applied it to Magritte’s work. He states: Magritte attempted, as it were, to achieve a controlled resonance in his work. After he had finished a painting, it set up a resonance within him. . . . Magritte probably attached more than usual importance to having people feel the right kind of resonance. That he could do anything about this himself was an illusion; the others were the critics, the art historians, the museums, the art dealers, the collectors, who play their own game with a variety of intentions.⁴ My intentions are to take seriously the resonances of Magritte’s work and foreground their implications for film history, theory, and practice.

Why Magritte?

But one may ask: Why choose Magritte out of all possible artists? I would assert that as one of the central painters of the Modernist era, he deserves more attention than the paltry consideration he has received in the annals of film studies. I would not make such a claim about many others. While the styles of Pablo Picasso or Piet Mondrian, for instance, may have relevance to experimental cinema, their methodologies do not readily apply to the dramatic fiction film. Magritte’s work, on the other hand, has ties to both cinematic modes—avant-garde and mainstream. Furthermore, while one can imagine a biopic about an artist like Edward Munch or imagery marked by his visual sensibility, one cannot conceive of a unique conceptual stance that cinema might inherit from him—while, with Magritte, one can.

This is so because Magritte considered himself a philosopher more than an aesthete. As Ellen Handler Spitz states, his paintings are questions as well as paintings, or paintings as questions. . . . [T]hey illustrate links between the abstract and the personal, the paradoxical and the perverse.⁵ Some of the topics she asserts he confronts are: how things living differ (and yet do not differ) from things dead; how important objects can appear small and insignificant (while others, when charged with strong feeling loom large); how looking differs from experiencing; how art differs from life; how the same object that frightens and angers us at one moment can seem funny or absurd the next; how the concrete can become suddenly abstract and the abstract all too horribly concrete.⁶ Magritte’s own words support this view. As he states, My paintings are visible thoughts.⁷ In fact, he conceived of his art as solving a series of problems. As he notes (in rather awkward language): Any object, taken as a question of a problem . . . and the right answer discovered by searching for the object that is secretly connected to the first . . . give, when brought together, a new knowledge.⁸ One such search involved doors. As Magritte observes: "The problem of the door called for an opening that someone could go through. In La Réponse imprévue [The Unexpected Answer, 1933] I showed a closed door in a flat in which an odd-shaped hole unveils the night."⁹

In comparison to Magritte, some of his compatriots in Surrealism have been studied in more depth by film scholars—namely, Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí—because, unlike Magritte, they made experimental or narrative movies that were publicly screened and have become classics (e.g., Un chien andalou [1929], L’âge d’or [1930], The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie [1972]), or they collaborated with mainstream directors (e.g., Dalí with Alfred Hitchcock on Spellbound [1945]). In a certain sense, however, in comparison to Dalí, much of whose art contains an element of abstraction or distortion (and is therefore unlike the unvarnished photographic image), Magritte’s is at least superficially realistic—though the situations he creates are patently unreal. When asked why he employed this style, he responded, Because my painting has to resemble the world in order to evoke its mystery.¹⁰ In this regard, Magritte falls into what Bruce Elder calls the veristic wing of Surrealism versus the automatist wing (which believed that the way to freedom in painting was to break from depiction). The veristic artists were interested primarily in the mind’s activity of forming the world that we inhabit.¹¹

Clearly, Magritte’s work conforms to certain tenets of Surrealism: an interest in a world beyond the quotidian—one informed by mystery, poetry, and enchantment. As André Breton once famously asserted in his 1924 Manifesto of Surrealism, Existence is elsewhere.¹² As this chapter’s epigraph demonstrates, Magritte put it somewhat differently, speaking instead of liberating revelation.

While many of the Surrealists drew on dreams and the unconscious for their imagery, Magritte generally did not, gleaning his ideas instead from intense concentration. Neither did he depend on chance (also valorized by the Surrealists); rather, his paintings arose from conscious choices. Like most Surrealists, Magritte was also interested in bizarre and often humorous juxtapositions—be it an open umbrella atop of which sits a glass of water (as in Hegel’s Holiday [1958]) or a birdcage that contains an egg rather than an avian creature (as in Elective Affinities [1933]). It is no accident that in both of these cases Magritte utilizes an iconography of objects—also an interest of the Surrealists—though freed of their utility and always in strange contexts. Here we may think of Man Ray’s Cadeau (1921) a sculpture comprising a clothes iron with nails jutting out of its surface. Furthermore, Magritte shares the Surrealists’ interest in playing with language in ways that defy coherence and rationality (as in the Interpretation of Dreams series [e.g., 1927, 1930, 1935], in which pictures and word labels are often mismatched). Here a precedent may have been the Surrealist game of exquisite corpse (begun around 1925) whereby one player would write a phrase on paper, hide most of it with a fold, and pass it on to another player to continue. The result was a collectively authored nonsense composition. While Magritte generally worked alone, he did often farm out the creation of titles for his works to other members of the Belgian Surrealist circle so that the titles would not reveal authorial intent. Finally, the Surrealists (a group composed almost entirely of apparently heterosexual men) were fixated on the female erotic image. Magritte is no exception, although (perhaps in a bourgeois move), the woman he most often painted was his wife, Georgette. As previously noted, while many of the Surrealists worked in abstraction (e.g., the Chilean painter Roberto Matta), Magritte preferred a style superficially faithful to the everyday world.

Here, of course, we recall that until recently, with the advent of computer-generated imagery (CGI), film theory has stressed the verisimilitude of the cinematic image, with André Bazin deeming the latter a decal or transfer of reality onto celluloid.¹³ Likewise, Siegfried Kracauer sees film as offering a redemption of physical reality.¹⁴ So Magritte’s pictorial realism has potential ties to the ontology of the medium. Moreover, as already noted, his art is marked by a focus on objects (balls, tubas, frames, combs, etc.)—often removed from their usual framework. As Magritte has remarked, Setting objects from reality out of context [gives] the real world from which these objects were borrowed a disturbing poetic sense by a natural exchange.¹⁵

Here again, film theorists have often noted the medium’s ability to concentrate on things instead of people. As Bazin writes in Theater and Cinema, On the screen man is no longer the focus of the drama. . . . The decor that surrounds him is part of the solidity of the world. For this reason, the actor as such can be absent from it, because man in the world enjoys no a priori privilege over . . . things.¹⁶ Again, Kracauer agrees. He sees one of cinema’s special capacities as that of capturing the inanimate (a clock on a mantel or a vase on a table)—parts of material reality that would otherwise go unnoticed in daily life. Significantly, Magritte’s art has been linked to the realm of the every day. Finally, the originality of Magritte’s method lies not so much in his painting skill as in the inquiries and conundrums his canvases raise about topics like vision, identity, illusionism, framing, or language versus picture—all matters that are highly relevant to filmmaking practice and theory.

But conceiving the connections between Magritte and cinema is a process that is far less literal than detecting the parallels between Dalí’s Spellbound sequence and his painting style. Magritte’s artistic signature attaches to no such movie, other than his amateur ones (see chapter 2 for further discussion). Moreover, aside from the few cases of acknowledged cinematic tributes to Magritte or documentaries about him, there are no films (to my knowledge) in which images from his canvases are literally transferred to the screen—although there are some in which his paintings themselves appear as part of the decor (one is The Thomas Crown Affair [1999], discussed in chapter 3). Rather, the task of unearthing cinema’s ties to Magritte requires intuitive and imaginative leaps, though ones based on a knowledge of film history and discourse. Of course, such factors are always at play in successful art criticism, but they are rarely acknowledged as such.

The Critical Field: Magritte and Film

In the English language, there is little published in any detail about Magritte’s broad relation to the cinema—barring a few articles or book chapters, to be discussed later. Instead, for the most part, we find numerous brief comments on the subject that tend to touch on assorted issues and move on. In part, this is the case because Magritte himself failed to write about film. As Xavier Canonne notes, Magritte did not theorize about [the cinema], but savoured it.¹⁷ Though except in a few cases, the prior work on Magritte and film is lacking in depth, I will summarize it thoroughly in order to survey scholarship in this area (and give credit where it is due).

Almost all biographers and authors of monographs about Magritte mention his attendance at movies during his youth in Belgium¹⁸ and his particular love of the Fantômas serials directed by Louis Feuillade between 1913 and 1914.¹⁹ Here the title of Magritte’s painting Blue Cinema (1925)—which memorialized a childhood theater in Charleroi where he moved in 1913²⁰—will be cited, as well as the subjects of Homage to Mack Sennett (1934) (which celebrates a famous early comedy director) and that of The Barbarian (1927)²¹ and The Flame Rekindled (1943) (figure 1.1) (which picture a masked Fantômas).²² But Canonne thinks that it would be an exaggeration to claim any decisive influence of the cinema on his work. Rather, it would be more accurate to see it as a general context from which Magritte extracted some memory flashes.²³

Figure 1.1. The Flame Rekindled (Le retour de flamme/The Return of the Flame) (1943)

Not surprisingly, many critics have observed aspects of Magritte’s art that echo certain movies—for instance, how a split-head image in one of his illustrations for Les chants du Maldoror by the Comte de Lautréamont (1945) suggests a shot from Germaine Dulac’s The Seashell and the Clergyman (1928). Often mentioned is how the scene portrayed in Magritte’s The Murderer Threatened (1927)—with its cadaver lying on a table and armed men standing guard—seems to evoke Feuillade’s crime stories.²⁴ In particular, Anne Umland mentions the episode, The Murderous Corpse (1913), for its parallels with the Magritte canvas.²⁵ It is possible that she does so because on one occasion in the film there is an unconscious woman reclining on a sofa and, on another, a man lying in a hospital bed. Alternatively, she may have referenced it because it involves the uncanny notion of a villain wearing a glove of skin made from a corpse’s hand in order to leave the deceased’s fingerprints at the crime scene to throw the police off track. On a similar note, Canonne sees parallels between the black body-suited figures in Magritte’s The Female Thief and The Man from the Sea (both 1927) and that of actress Musidora in Feuillade’s The Vampires (1915–16).²⁶ Interestingly, the latter Magritte painting has the same title as a 1920 film by Marcel L’Herbier.²⁷ Evidently, as late as 1952, Magritte mentioned how watching Tay Garnett’s film The Racket (1951) reminded him of Feuillade’s serials.²⁸

Finally, some critics have discussed a brief period in the 1950s and 1960s when Magritte made 8 mm home movies with his wife, Georgette; fellow artists; and friends—antic comedies that often transferred the images of his paintings onto the screen. As Peter Wollen notes, Old music hall routines like the exchange of bowler hats re-surface [from his paintings] in Magritte’s films. . . . Bowler hats, umbrellas, tubas and pipes are all repeated elements in his film farces—he mimics his paintings by putting a bowler hat on a shrouded head, he puts a series of hats on a bust, he uses the shadow silhouette of a bowler hat.²⁹ These works (rediscovered in the 1970s) were made only for private screenings. As Canonne remarks, they were recreational rather than creative in the higher sense of that term, and Magritte himself claimed that he did not make cinema, but rather movies, crafted casually in the good old way.³⁰ Thus, he remained faithful to the cinema of his youth, [and] subsequently rooted his experience as a ‘filmmaker’ in the burlesque mode.³¹ According to his friend and fellow Surrealist, Louis Scutenaire (who appeared in some of these films): When Magritte painted he was calm, often bored . . . and welcomed people bursting in on him. Quite the contrary, when he put on the guise of a filmmaker, he became agitated and acerbic yet all the same infinitely amused. He was, perhaps, never so happy as when he held the camera in his hand.³²

Aside from these biographical observations, there are numerous occasions in which a critic writing about a film finds some intimation of the work of Magritte. Such remarks are generally made in passing without any thorough analysis. Not surprisingly, articles about Surrealist cinema often refer to Magritte. Thus, Marco Borroni relates the artist’s painting The Human Condition (1933) (see figure 8.1) to Un chien andalou and L’âge d’or.³³ Similarly, Uwe M. Scheede mentions Magritte’s One Night Museum (1927)—with its severed hand—in relation to the 1929 Buñuel film, and Canonne connects the imagery to the painting The Difficult Crossing (1926).³⁴ We do know from Georgette Magritte that he did in fact see Un chien andalou, which is not surprising since Dalí and Magritte were friends and in Paris at the same time.³⁵ In fact, in August 1929 Magritte visited Dalí in Cadaqués, Spain, along with other artists, including Buñuel.³⁶ In the same spirit, Silvano Levy in his book Surrealism: Surrealist Visuality, speaks of Magritte’s broad interest in film: He shared the Surrealists’ approach, seeing cinema at once as a novel and popular medium not yet encumbered with academic and aesthetic paraphernalia, as uniquely competent to undermine common sense and retinal notions of reality, and, by the same token, possessing the power to endow with conviction and substance the wildest flights of the imagination.³⁷ Levy traces some of Magritte’s imagery directly to the movies (of course, noting Fantômas). But he also comments on how Magritte’s strategies for displacement and enigma-making, such as framing, editing and special effects of mise-en-scène, relate to film form.³⁸ Predictably, he also mentions parallels between Magritte’s work and the Dalí/Buñuel film collaborations. Two contributors to Levy’s book find connections between cinema and Magritte. Rob Stone notes parallels to the painter’s work in considering Julio Medem’s Tierra (1996) and Los amantes del Círculo Polar (1998),³⁹ while Barbara Creed locates them in relation to David Cronenberg’s Scanners (1981) where people with telepathic powers remind her of Magritte’s painting The Pleasure Principle (1937).⁴⁰

Raymond Durgnat, in writing about Georges Franju (a director sometimes associated with Surrealism, discussed in chapter 13), remarks on how a scene of