René Magritte Within the Frame of Film History, Theory, and Practice
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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. Wayne State University Press Leonard N. Simons Building 4809 Woodward Avenue Detroit, Michigan 48201- 1309 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 ix Acknowledgments xiii PART 1. BACKSTORY 1. Introduction: “A Trampoline for the Imagination” 3 2. Art Documentaries about Magritte/Magritte’s Home Movies 31 3. Honoring the Artist: Cinematic Tributes to Magritte 49 4. The Belgian Surrealist Cinematic Avant- Garde 66 PART 2. RESONANCES OF MAGRITTE IN FILM HISTORY, THEORY, AND PRACTICE 5. Voyeurism and the Gaze 75 6. Fictional versus Real Persons and Spaces 81 7. Word versus Image 91 8. Pictures and Landscapes 105 9. Empty Frames and X-Ray Vision 112 10. Mindscreens 117 11. Petrification, Horror, and Fantasy 126 12. Animation 142 13. Faces and Masks 153 14. Science Fiction 168 15. Human- Animal Hybrids 176 16. Magic: Dismemberment and Decapitation 183 17. Windows 194 18. Bells and Belle 199 19. Curtains 205 20. Film History, Techniques, Processes, and Modes of Reception 215 21. Concluding Thoughts 247 Notes 249 Magritte Works and Credits 271 Index 277 viii • Contents 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)—t he image of a huge eye—w hich 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—a nother 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)—s urprisingly, 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 pos- sible. As for recent years, I traveled to New York in 2013 to view MoMa’s exhi- bition 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 Sea- son, focused on Magritte’s late work. In between, in 2015, I journeyed to Brus- sels (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 perplex- ing) conceptual, artistic, and philosophical issues. Preface • ix 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 stimu- lating 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 “ordi- nary” 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 will- ing 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—t his 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 sub- ject beyond the mention of certain established facts: Magritte made Surrealist “home movies”; he painted images of Louis Feuillade’s hero, Fantômas, includ- ing 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’ consider- ation of various movies—ra rely any in-dep th 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 x • Preface 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 representa- tion, Magritte makes “realistic” art (like the unadulterated photographic image) while, at the same time, creating myriad visual conundrums that raise intrigu- ing 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. Preface • xi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS IN MANY WAYS completing this book has been one of the most pleasurable and difficult writing experiences of my career—p leasurable 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 organiza- tions 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 Contem- porary 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).