“Magritte works with titles as a FILMKRITIK critic must write”: Hartmut Bitomsky, Filmkritik, December 1976

Beauty and Terror

by Hartmut Bitomsky

(Review of René Magritte, Die truglosen Bilder. Bioskop und Photographie, introduction and captions by Louis Scutenair, Cologne: Buchhandlung Walther König, 1976; Filmkritik, No. 240, December 1976, pp. 602–603)

Of course, our heads are shaped like a chessboard, which we hold aloft with one hand as if playing a game, while we enjoy our pipe. During police identification procedures, many contorted their faces into a useless grimace to avoid being recognized. Thus he became a giant. Magritte often served as his own model, hence such precautions. He hid himself within the pictures.

Enough with the mystery! I’m talking about images without deceit. This is a book featuring reproductions of photos and stills from 8mm films that Magritte made. Unfortunately, the reproductions aren’t that great, which may be due to the source material. Besides, the book isn’t exactly cheap: 20 marks for 110 images, mostly 10 cm x 7 cm. Published by Buchhandlung König in Cologne.

The format of the photos alone makes the book resemble a family album. It mainly features Magritte, his wife Georgette, and friends, mostly on walks through the city or in the countryside, but sometimes also in their apartment or in the garden.

One must not try to find art in them. They are photos of random people taken by random people—in other words, amateur photos. These amateurs, however, are people who, when they aren’t eating, resting, talking, or going to the park and snapping a few shots of themselves, are otherwise engaged in artistic pursuits. What difference does that make?

This: they can also fool around in front of the camera; they can bridge the gap of time during which we torment ourselves between the tentative posing and the release of the shutter.

Where we try to concentrate with a seriousness as if our lives depended on it, they become exuberant; where we imagine ourselves to be shabby, vain, exposed, visible, and transparent because a picture is being taken of us, they gape in amazement.

We only breathe a sigh of relief once the click of the shutter is heard. And then, once the photo is developed, the anxiety falls away from us, and we throw ourselves at it with undisguised curiosity. Then we have our fun. We simply like to look, but we don’t like to be looked at.

In short, the people Magritte (and others) photographed have crossed the threshold of ambivalent feelings quite well; indeed, it almost seems to me as if the pictures were made precisely as a pure demonstration of how well they can cross that threshold. They are photos of a sport.

René Magritte, La vertu recompensée, 1934

The horizon bisects the image horizontally. Only a few houses, which have strayed into the picture along a road at a moderate distance, rise from the ground above this horizon. They may have stood there forever. But in front of them lies a leveled, stony field, and on the field stands, with his back to us, the man in a bowler hat and coat, looking at something the camera has not captured. He allows this virtue to be rewarded.

For Magritte, painting is a matter-of-fact, monosyllabic production of goods that humans must constantly create, due to their gentle anger at nature, which does not provide for them for free. Yet his photography is like—uh—first allowing oneself to be unreservedly gifted with a wealth that exists in the world anyway, without us. (All things considered, one cannot add much to this wealth; a lifetime’s work leaves no more of a mark on the world than a fleeting frown on the brow: which is why one must work and think so much.)

Magritte has given the photos titles; they are wonderful titles, otherwise they would not be by Magritte. His titles are always a form of appropriation. Incidentally, this is much more exciting here than in his paintings, where title and image are always equally arbitrary. Magritte works with titles as a FILMKRITIK critic must write: an absolute devotion to things that nevertheless resist this cunning appropriation, and he lets that happen.

When you want to say something about Magritte, two things immediately and automatically spring to mind. In his paintings, wrote Humphrey Jennings, beauty and terror converge.

If the impossible is to come together, that can only be a call to violence. For it has now become clear that one can only enter Munich, Bonn, and the Eden Tower here in Berlin (and this has been the case since 1919) with a loaded revolver tucked under one’s arm.

Now for the beauty: four women and a man in their midst, and another to their right—all linked arm in arm—are walking away from us, unhurried, along the unpaved path across the plain. They have no luggage and no provisions. I hope they at least put the ducats in their pockets. In this way, they are already on the road to Kansas before nightfall. Of course, every road leads to Kansas, if one so desires.

(Translation: Tom Holert)