An artist’s portrait of the Belgian surrealist painter René Magritte in a didactic narrative form. Magritte’s works are shown in a series alternating with images of the artist at work or during his daily activities, while his ideas are commented on by a voice-over. As in Magritte’s paintings, parallels are drawn between objects, their representation and their referent words. Pictorial images and film images interact and contradict each other, generating an interplay between the works of art and their staging by the filmmaker.
“Magritte ou La leçon de choses can be situated in this tradition of films showing the artist at work. But in the case of Magritte, ‘work’ acquires a meaning quite different from the exploration and celebration of manual and physical labor evident in the films on Picasso, Pollock, or the COBRA artists. ‘I did not show Magritte as a technician of painting at all because this is senseless,’ de Heusch wrote. For de Heusch, Magritte is not a painter but ‘un imaginier, an image maker.’”
Steven Jacobs
