Magritte, la trahison des images

“My paintings are thoughts made visible,” said Magritte. This carefully researched film by Sylvain Bergère examines the mind of a man who, among other things, took up painting. Magritte embarked on his Surrealist adventure in 1923, after seeing a reproduction of Giorgio de Chirico’s Song of Love. For the first time, he felt he was looking at an image that was directly connected to the realm of the spirit. Magritte remained true to this initial realization right up until his final work. At a major retrospective at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in fall 2016, the filmmaker analyzed the Belgian painter’s vast body of work in an attempt to understand how he developed a rich and varied pictorial language based on symbols, some of them very simple.