De Gerlache: Magritte, le jour et la nuit
A museum for René Magritte has opened in Brussels and as the cultural channel of Europe, arte celebrates this important event. But how to make a film about an artist, whose oeuvre was huge, an artist who behaved like a good bourgeois without any scandals attached and without any wish to come up with any easy interpretations. And yet such an influential artist for current filmmakers and designers and other visual artists who claimed or claim to be in line with the surrealist thinking. How?
The director’s answer to these questions was to introduce an actor as the one, who walks around where Magritte was, in his footsteps, watching and talking to people who knew him or his wife Georgette. For biographical documentation and artistic interpretation. It is sometimes made in an elegant way, and sometimes the image manipulations are clumsy. Basically you do not get anything new to know about Magritte, or a better understanding and feeling. It is all very staged with the actor and his trying to make the painter alive, and it helps when small home film material clips with Magritte are shown. All of a sudden you are touched by a playfullness without pretentions in sequences that are for me killed by a wall-to-wall narration in first person delivered by the actor who is said to discover Magritte… I think it could have been done much more fresh and direct.
Belgium/France, 2009, 52 mins.
Watched on arte, June 4 2009. Repeats on 7/6, 17/6 and 22/6
