Gravity. Oscar winning James Cameron calls it the best space film ever done and the movie ive been hungry to see for an awfully long time. Here is the trailer for gravity. Beautiful, dont you think . What . The sun rise. Terrific. screaming no houston, the listen to my voice you need to focus im spinning i cant breathe what do i do . What do i do . No, no, no anybody, please copy. Rose i am pleased to have the director, Alfonso Cuaron and his son and cowriter jonas cuaron at this table. It looks like an easy movie to make. laughter i thought that. Actually, i finished the screenplay, sent it to chih bow our cinematographer and i said listen to this, its a small piece, two characters, it will be the c. G. But well do it in one year. Rose one year . Yes, it was going to be one of those. Rose and how long did it take . Four and a half. Rose why . Because the technology to do it didnt exist. I didnt know that because we were writing and when youre writing you dont think of those things. And then when we start doing the whole thing it was clear that they wouldnt have gone to work rose what was the hardest part. Gravity. laughter rose you mean absence of zero gravity . The current illusion of zero gravity. Because it was very important. It was a cinematic and emotional point so rose i mean, the idea of zero gravity is that just nothing pulls you down, right . Strictly speaking its called microgravity because theyre close you have no the earth that theres still a certain well, i think actuallys not such a thing as not gravity. Because theres so microgravity pulling and attracting some object and stuff. Rose how was it to have your son work with you . It was great in the sense that when were working together were just two writers working together. Rose just like any other good writer, huh . I he came with the concept of not necessarily the story of the space but the concept of doing a film that it was very visual, very that its so relentless that audiences would surrender themselves into an emotional journey. Rose you were working on a small independent film that fell throw sflu yup. That we wrote together. And the reason we started talking about gravity is because when the project fell through i went to london to figure out what to do with that project. Like rewrite it, make it maybe more accessible for financing and he had read this other script that id written that had like a similar concept to gravity and when he read it we started just talking about that concept and its weird, we never planned to, like, professionally sit down and write gravity, we just started talking about one night about the type of movies we wanted to see and that conversation turned into an all night long conversation about that led to the plot of gravity. Rose so how much money has it made already . I mean, like 600 million or something . I dont know that much but, yeah over 500. Rose had to be surprising. You had no idea. In the whole journey has been very surprising. The film took four and a half years, we finished the film two weeks before the Venice Film Festival where it premiered and we had no idea of what was going to happen and suddenly it started to be a great response from festivals and reviewers and you always have well, maybe its the thing thats going connect with festivals and viewers but then it started connecting with audiences as well. Rose then its a home run. Yeah, its kind of happy surprised. Much better than the alternative. laughter rose indeed it is. Why do you think it is, jonas . My theory of why audiences are connecting so strongly with it is that beyond being a space movie its a movie about a universal theme which is adversity. In life we all go through adversity so when you go as an audience to see the film you get so engaged in the writing and suddenly you start imposing your owned a versetys on to that. And thats, i guess, the reason we wanted to do a narrative in this concept which is so straight. Rose if i might say it in another way, its like your two main characters are in danger and youre wondering whether theyre going to make it. Uhhuh. Rose and this is overlaid by the fact that youre seeing space in a different way. You get some sense of what its like to be up there. Well, yes. Part of the beauty, the attraction for audience is that getting immersed in that experience of space for them is to float in space but that has also a thematic function. When we start writing the screenplay we talk about because we started even before we decided it was going to be space we were just talking about the themes. And thematically its about adversities and the possibility of rebirth and when you go through adversities you lose ground, you know . Its all metaphorically, of course. You lose ground. So here you have a character that is going through adversities, loses ground and then it goes into the void and then getting away from human communication, victim of her own inertia and living in her own bubble. So that and i think that in many ways the audiences when you see the film, yeah, theyre connecting to the journey and the roller coaster ride and into space but theres an emotional immediacy that i think is what has been working with audiences. Rose and whats the relationship between ryan, sandra and mat and george . We always saw both characters for us the journey of ryan is a character that has given up on living intellectually and through this journey hes going to get this new desire to live and in a way george is experienced not only whos going to teach her how to move in this environment but also who in a way is going giver that teach her back the desire to live, to enjoy life. The character of matt, this guy who enjoys every moment of life and is going to enjoy every moment until he runs out of oxygen. Live in the present versus the past or the future. Rose thats a good place to be isnt it . The present . The present. laughter lets take a look. This is when the the explorer which is the spaceship that theyre on, gets hit by debris. Mission abort. Repeat, mission aboard. Explorer confirming visual contact with debris. Debris is from a sat. Repeat requesting transport. We have to go. We have to go, go, go. Meteorological conditions are no go. Houston explorer copy. Transport to bay area. Do you cop sni explorer, permission to retreat, dr. Stone . Houston, this is explorer copy . Weve lost houston. Weve lost houston. We need to get the hell out of here. Dont waste time. Man down man down explorers been hit. screaming dr. Stone, detach that arm. Listen to my voice in 30 seconds i wont be able to grab you. Detach i cant see you anymore. Do it now houston, ive lost visual of dr. Stone. Rose you said that you knew you knew that the main character had to be a woman. How did you know . Well, we wanted to make this story since we started talking about the thematics of the story is a character whos given up on life. Kind of has lost all of that like force of fertility, of like life giving and through the journey that life will get rekindled so we just knew we wanted to have this female presence. This presence of life. Its a movie where the backdrop is earth and we always saw earth through this force of life. And also there was it was very organic. We started writing, we started discussing. The first image was this image of an astronaut actually, that one, spinning into the void. And the moment we started talking about it, we talk about it as a woman. And then we start when we start mapping the whole thing, we used to call her we didnt have a name and it was the woman. And we called her the woman and it was not until we started developing the script that we questioned why it was a woman. It was just an instinct. It had to do with this ideas that we have been talking about ideas of rebirth and fertility and having the background of earth as mother earth. And suddenly everything was infuse bid female elements. Rose you have said that sandras performance you compare to a dance routine. Meaning . The approach she had to take. Because in order to achieve all this choreography because its very complicated choreographys sandra had to go into a whole routine which she had to hit very specific marks. She had to hit very specific timing and on top of that under a very sbru gruesome physical conditions. So its not unlike a dancer who perhaps she prepped for five months to do the whole thing so not only like a dancer that goes through a physical preparation and then a going into memorizing very complicated routines. So in the moment which you roll camera, the moment of the performance for a dancer, it just explodes with expression and emotion. Rose and thats what she was doing. It was brilliant to witness that. Rose did you use lots of things that ron howard didnt use in apollo 13 . Well, we did use something that he used brilliantly. Which was the comet, the parabolic flights. The ones that well, scientists and astronauts used to train that is basically a plane that goes very high up and then just goes into a freefall for 20 seconds and then goes up again and then freefalls and when youre freefalling youre inside the plane so you have the sensation that youre floating and its so much fun. laughter we tried it and it was going to be impossible to do all of this film in the vomit comet. Rose lets take a look at another scene that has some of the same ideas where dr. Ryan stone Sandra Bullock and George Clooney, they get detached while theyre flying through outer space. Brake . We cant, the cans empty. Hit hard. Grab ahold of anything you can. What do i do . Who do i do . Grab ahold rose okay, so take a look at this. I want to show you this image. This is a picture of a light box which was one of the new pieces of thooj you use. Whats the light box . The light box is a 9 x 9 cube in which all the inside walls are l. E. D. Lights. Rose l. E. D. Lights . L. E. D. Lights. So theres i dont know how many million individual lights inside the thing. And then what happens is that you can see that image is inside the International Space station and so if the character is inside the image will convey the point of view of the character. Rose oh, i see. And that image was going to leap the character. You know . It works as the reference, the point of view, and they would have a geographical idea but most important is the interaction of the light. Because that light didnt have to match perfectly well with this c. G. Environment that was going to be used. Rose this had to be in 3d . Well, it didnt have to be in 3d because you could do that in 2d but the screenplay from the original title was gravity a space adventure in 3d because we wanted it to be an experience for the audience, a submerseive experience, almost like an interactive experience because our belief is that way you would connect with the themes on the more emotional level. Like your connection to the story and the narrative and the themes would be more direct. More guttural. Rose i bet youre waiting to direct, arent you . Yeah, well, actually script that i showed him that inspired the concept of gravity i had to put aside to develop gravity over the last five years and now im actually preping that movie right now in the spring. Rose was it always inevitable that you would want to do this because of your father . No, i never really thought i was going to go into film. I wanted to tell stories and i thought i wanted to be a writer but then i started experimenting with this medium and i guess since i was bombarded by him my whole life it came natural. Rose its interesting. 2013 we have a whole series of movies that have been called survival movies. At sea all is lost and captain phillips and then the antebellum American South 12 years a slave. Theres kind of a feeling going around. laughter rose survive. Yes. But the thing is its in the air in the sense of i i guess that one explanation is that people are really worried about the time that were living. Rose exactly. And the possibilities by violence and all of those things and pandemics and the rest. And the whole idea in the context in the fall of that of these of this question about who we are in terms of the self. What is this . I mean, are we just these biological forces or plainly one more species that our survival is just biological as the rest of the planet or theres another idea of self. Rose the there a movie in that idea . laughter the way youre talking about it suggests that its a broader theme to explore. Well, that theme is something we were talking about. It was part of the our idea was the whole thing of adversities and rebirth being meaning a new knowledge of yourself and knowledge of own universe around you. But that is inherent of that, you know . In one hand the interesting thing about survival things is just its not in a unique stuff of humans its like nature is striving to survive. Rose exactly. Exactly. All the time. But we humans, we have a consciousness about that struggle but in a way that gets stripped away while youre in a survival situation because these survival stories are interesting because they yes that will to survive comes from. They bring us down to almost an animalistic level where all our back story becomes secondary to just that instinct to survive. Rose and were living in an age in which adversities have being magnified, you know . And its yeah, magnified because of the way things are right now. And also because the information that we all have slopeen hauer said this thing of adversities we tend to think are exceptions. When reality what is exceptional is the moments between adversities. Rose let me take another look. I want to go back to the light box. This is how this is George Clooney in the light box. laughter rose hes in rig from his waist down. That rig will have certain motion. Then hell be there with this suit with all of those things that look like a martian. Those little antennas. Those are trackers for the visual effects crowd. Because all of that suit is going to be converting to a c. G. Suit. Now all of those roles are conveying this environment so that would be his view if he looks around. So what happens is that that environment is using the light on his face that the sun that is being projected from the right side of the frame of the rose as we look at the frame. Exactly. Picture right. Its through the l. E. D. Lights. And then our view is actually view of the camera that he was mounted in a robot that used to build cars. And it was the camera was mounted. Rose take a look at this. And you see that thing, the rig will just move around helping the motion. Because otherwise it is complimenting the movement of the robot, otherwise the robot will have to move super fast. It was kind of a strange environment to shoot and the testament of the actors that actually it was a whole exercise of abstraction. Rose so it called on them to be better than it night a traditional movie . Well, it was almost like stage play, you know . In which the whole thing was to have a thematic and emotional clarity about each single one of the moments. Otherwise all this technology will be in the foreground while the important thing is the story. Rose now, when youre directing clooney and hes a really good director do you call on that skill that he has as well . Do you have collaboration about how we might best shoot something that hes involved in . No, the thing is rose or he acts when hes acting and directs when hes directing . Hes an amazing not only director, hes an amazing writer. So youre working with a guy whos a fullblown filmmaker. But is he going and relaxed . He theres to help you in your film. So if you know, hes just there doing his job as an actor that he really enjoys but at the same time that he understands exactly what youre doing. So you realize that suddenly hes already helping you as an actor to solve what youre trying to do as a filmmaker. Or if you express out like something youre going through he innately puts on the side of his hat, the directors hat and he has a conversation with you as a filmmaker, but never imposing absolutely anything. Rose not trying to tell you how to make your movie. No, he says look i only work with people that i respect and i want to as filmmakers and i admire. So im putting myself in your hands. Were buddies so we can discuss about this. Rose thats a good actor to have, isnt it . Hes fun. Hes relaxing. Hes like the mission of clooney in life is to make people at ease all the time. And for everyone to have a good time. Rose and Sandra Bullock . Sandra, shes great. Sandra and george were great collaborators in the sense that they really gave me the time of day to really work on like fine tuning those dialogues and their scenes and what really surprised me about sandra is is to have a movie where the whole emotional ride was on one characters shoulders and when i saw movie screened in venice i was really surprised that even though i wrote it and i was jaded by the fact that i knew everything that happen misdemeanor the film i really had a strong emotional connection to her character and i realized that its because she gave such a true Human Performance which is surprising because she was inside of those horrible rigs. So suddenly to have seen her do that and then see her on screen just like floating and being really completely human was very surprising. Shes fearless. And thats the thing. Shes fearless and she told me from the getgo that she wants to step out of her comfort zone. You know . She really wanted to explore and go for it and it was really remarkable and the amount of preparation she did and the discipline and the precision. I never worked with an actor whos as precise a as sandra. Rose when you got ready to prepare for this, did you watch other spay movies like 2001 a space odyssey those kinds of films about space even though they were made a long time ago . Well, a bunch of them, yes, because you want to see how they solved certain technological aspects of film making. The only one i didnt come close was 2001. The only way i can exemplify that is that rose to watch it . It would have been like taking a shower next to a porn star before going out with your girlfriend. laughter rose thats what it would be like . Thats what it would be like. I havent seen it. Right now i have to wait for a couple of years before i can watch i can watch 2001 again. You know, its not only the best space movie ever, its one of the best films ever. And the whole rose and what would it have done to you if you watched it other than your metaphor of the porn queen before the girlfriend its just that its so lucid in terms of the rose that you might be copying it . Not copy, just the feeling that what im doing is stealing. Rose oh, oh, i see, you have no inspiration. I would feel that its just why to do this . And so i saw the film that i love but i dont have in the big like 2001. Rose interesting point. Theres actually a very good one, a fritz lang film of the 20s that is women in the moon that is its a film in 1926, i think and he already predicted the twist off rocket rose twist off and boom. Well, he was german so maybe there was something. Rose started early. Yeah. I want you to set this up. This is dr. Stone trying to make contact with someone while floating alone through space. I mean, give me whats beyond what we see whats going on. Is it anything . You want to show what about her in this scene. Anything . Yeah, it was this this idea of her the difficulty of communication. Rose you didnt want anybody steering you . All right, roll tape, here it is. gasping do you copy . Houston, do you copy . Houston, this is Mission Specialist ryan stone. I am off structure and im drifting. Do you copy . Anyone . Up . There was another thing. In terms of story, when it was this whole thing of her attempt to communicate also the whole thing of living in your own bubble. But together with that it was in terms of the directorial approach it was that until that moment were watching this character in an objective way. Rose right. In a third person. And now the camera goes rose shes the narrator. But now the camera goes inside her point of view. The camera switchs into a first person kind of situation and what we wanted to do is that the camera goes out and doesnt go out to become again a third person but it becomes a third astronaut. The audience is now one of partaking with the journey. And the camera starts to follow the same laws of physics of the characters in zero gravity. Rose she had to survive, didnt she . Yeah. Rose laughs actually, that was the whole point. We thought it would be a cheat now when we talk about oh, why at the end when you have one of those uncompromising endings. Because it would be like one of our references a film reference was like it was before he climbed the last wall and they showed him. The her journey through her journey she learns to live again and it would be, i think, very horrible and anticlimateic to give this woman secondary and kill her. Rose this whole experience changed her and she wanted to live you dont want her dead, you want her to live. But its not only what you want its about wanting. But i understand that but he had a deeper sense of life and fearsness about death then its unimportant but the whole point of the whole film is for her to put her feet back on the ground. To do that moment in which finally she is grounded and together with that it was the final metaphor that we are trying to get her back to the ground. And in the theme of rebirth rose oh so its kind of like an evolution chart. You start in the murky waters like a primordial soup and is filled with amphibians and then she comes out of the water, she crawls into the muck and then she has to go on four legs and until finally shes an erect human. But that was the kind of whole thing that has to do with that thing were talking about for bible and the biological or urge that by the way because theres been spiritual interpretations of the whole thing. It falls into the understanding of every person to define how to qualify the film. Which is also where the title gravity came from, like, you know, we were a lot of what we explored in the survival situation is that instinct that keeps pushing you forward and in a sense we viewed gravity as that. Pulling us back down to the ground. Rose well, congratulations. Thank you, charlie. Thank you so much. Rose magritte, the mystery of the ordinary explores the work of the painter from 1926 to 1938. Magritte wanted to defamiliarize the familiar and in the process created some of the most iconic paintings in art history. The show was cocure rated by my three guests. Anne umland is curator of painting and skun which you are at moma. Josef hefl stein is curator in houston and Stephanie Dalessandro is curator of in chicago. Stephanie, let me go with you. How did this come about . I have a lucky role to play in this that after we finished the project with moma a few years ago we got a lovely phone call from anne inviting the Art Institute to be part of a project that josef and anne has been talking about and to be the third partner and at the Art Institute we love magritte, we have a great history of surrealism and it was an easy one word answer, absolutely yes. Well, i guess thats two words. Rose why would you want another partner . Well, i think the case of our partnership here and with stephanie in particular i have to confess i dont know if i ever told her this but we know that we wanted the show to end in 1938 and we knew that the Art Institute of chicago had the picture that we wanted to be the last one everyone saw when they left. Rose i knew there was something there. That always is. You have that Amazing Painting time transfixed and so why three . I think it was the menil collection has the Largest Group of magrittes. Anywhere in the united states. And then just to traverse the country. Rose so how is it traveling . Well, its here until january 12, then it goes houston, opens around valentines day, is that right, joseph . And then well be in chicago for the summer. People people in those respecting cities and programs like this dont really gate sense to experience something you dont ordinarily see. Tell me who magritte was . He was a strange guy. He was a very interesting man, sort of a bourgeois in a way. Sort of the antiartist, almost, a cliche of a nonartist. Me t he behaved like that. So he never had a studio really, he presented himself as a painter with his tie and suit and he kind of disliked this notion of the bohemian painter which was kind of the 19th century romantic image of the artist. He liked dogs, he was never he never had children and when he once came to houston he loved to wear a cowboy hat. So he was a funny character. His boler hat. Although i would say only and weve talked about this a bit that i think for magritte he puts the boler hat on in the late 30s. He early this period i the figure he identified himself with or at least his contemporaries identified him with it was romantic figure of a lost jockey galloping off into the unknown shoals of the avantgarde in paris and that though he certainly did cultivate this aspect of being a bourgeois in the midst of the realists who were so thats from 1938, its a publicity shot. Right, stephanie thats a photograph taken of magritte in 1938 when he went back to london after he went back there for three months and its the first time we see him now with the boler hat on sitting next to this picture. Its this kind of first public persona. I mean, we think of warhol with his wig. This is magritte with his boler hat and we see him a lot in the 60s. So the show ends with his entree on to the world. He was a modern man. The anonymous person who has nod identity or individual kind of identity any more. So theres this picture of a man reduced to a very standardized dress which was part of the film too going on in the 20s. Rose you called it the mystery of the ordinary swchlt. Uhhuh. Yes, because i think both those words are ones that magritte and his contemporaries engaged with. Thought about, used in their writings and there was a quote, in fact, that was my that was the original long winded title that we talked about they that got whittled down because his friend paul nuget who was belgian wrote at one point that to look at magrittes paintings and to turn around and look at the world again was to find the world had been altered, there were no longer any ordinary things and so originally the title we played around with was no more ordinary things. Like down with the ordinary, up with mystery. And it ended up being more interesting to rose magritte 1926 to 1938. Where was he before that . He was in brussels and he was working both as a commercial artist and painting and he was making pictures that were quasifutures abstract. And in 26 he decided to turn to painting objects in all their realizeable detail to turn his back on conventional notions of avantgarde paintings. Does his commercial background show up in his paintings . I think that lot, yeah. Very early on and of course even the flatness in a way in which he paints things. I dont know, envelopes, very artificial. Also, the beginning of an early career its what helps make him an artist, helps make him a Famous Artist in the end because he knows from his Graphic Design advertising work what is an indelible image. And he capitalize on that in his work. I agree. And that sort of queer, bold, instant commune aability. Thats an overly long work i think it has to come out of that early training. The one other person i can think about is man ray who, like magritte, has this fine art and commercial art background and its interesting that they both have a fine arts career and a tremendously suck saysful commercial art career. Rose what was the quote at the end, we end to reduce what is strange to what is familiar. I tend to restore the familiar to the strange. Yeah. Rose thats what he does and what still is almost disturbing when you really get involved into looking at these pictures it iss almost like a trap. This is very a familiar and almost boring and banal but then there are tricks that he uses as a painterenedtoreally defamiliarize what you think you know. I think he does that in a unique way. I guess the flip side of that quote is that isnt it fine to make the familiar strange, the strange familiar. And so everyday becomes haunted. How good were his painting skills . He was a very good painter and we see him flaunt some of that have in the show. Hes so good at techniques to fool the eye. But the thing thats amazing about him. He firsts out in 26, hes making quasifuturist abstract work. He intentionally adopts an academic painting style. There was photographs in the catalog and show of magritte sitting in front of his canvass that are under way and unlike someone especially you think about 1926, matisses painting, picassos painting these are artists who might lay in a sketch but get to the canvas and do their work on the surface. Magritte is laying in an image and then painting sections. Very, very much in detail. Perfect detail and then laying in the next patch like an academic painter would. And this is part of his really wholehearted practice his intentional shunning of one kind of painting style. Not just the way it looks and the illusionistic quality it has but really becoming a different kind of painter as a thwart of so much convention i think. I think it owes a lot to traditional and this kind of suspicional painting, traditional bourgeois and backwards and noncritical so there was a very strong interest from the da da people on to actually kind of undermine painting. The retinal beauty and the cultivated sense of painting. So he has perfectionized that in a very unique way. I agree that there is part of magrittes sproj this removal of self, right . That he is striving to make images that dont have a sense of the hand, that dont speak of an individual, that are deliberately dead pan and neutral in their style but i come back to he in 27 sort of right at the beginning of our moment he said Something Like painting excites our admiration through its ability to convey likenesss of things we do not admire in the original. And i think yes painting as a bourgeois category of art making theres no question that that was under the tack by the surrealists but there is still i believe this is purely subjective in this moment that we look at that this thrill on magrittes part of what paint can do that nothing else can in terms of image making. Which doesnt contradict what youre saying. Rose lets look at some of the paintings in the exhibition. Let me see the first image, please. Well, there she is. laughs thats a very disturbing piece. That is so directly aggressive because usually its a very kind of understated form of aggression or violence thats in his work. But here thats a whole surreal topic of glorifying the child, the creativity of the child but here the child becomes kind of a demon, a very dangerous being. Rose the next one is the menace of essen . Thats a great work. The painted for his first one person show in 1927. It was the largest picture hed ever made up to that point and its also just one of the many things one can say about it is its one of the first time that the boler hat in men went on to magrittes pictorial stage. The third is the treachery of images. Yes. Instantly recognizable. Its very interesting. Why is this the most thing and funny. And profound the next is its kind of interesting, too though, the pipe that is the first time that the language or implaj if theres just a confusing creativity moment. Rose and the next someone the interpretation of dreams. This is his ripest this is the one thats done in english uniquely. He made this picture for a show at the julian levy gallery in new york city so were so thrilled they have to in the show. The chrex of an artist, very wonderful. It shows the importance of his legacy. Living artists have always been fascinated in magritte. Including andy warhol. Rose the next is the lovers. Yeah. Mysterious and strange. Discomforting. Discomforting. Theres a lot of stereotypes about this one. For example, that, you know, magrittes mother committed suicide and was found after she drowned herself with her night dress over her head and so theres this myth which is probably not true that this is imagery comes from that memory. Or it could be true. I think for me that was the story that began to be told until the 1940s about and this image in particular. And i always raise a finger and say but theres more because if you say this is about the mothers suicide its kind of like, oh, we solved the picture. And marguerite was totally against it. The next is the titanic phase . This is one of those pictures which i think you cant appreciate the power of it until you have it in person. Its the physical presence of it. This really strong outline of this woman fighting against this man who seems to be overtaking her except her bodily form has kind of already overtaken him. The way that its painted, that really strong, beautiful shadow on the side of it. Its just got the physical presence of fighting flatness and volume at the same time and the violence of it. Its really its a picture you have to see in person. Rose whats the size of it . Its about four and a half feet tall. Its big. Its an imposing picture. And that forward arm of hers with that mull is yeah. Rose the next one is clairvoyance. Oh, if i always think this is like his demonstration picture. Like this is magritte practicing his own particular method of image making. Right . Because he famously well, it interesting to look at this. He draws our attention to the egg which is on this when you begin to look at it peculiarly uptilted table. If you follow his gaze its not looking at the egg and but even more significantly its not looking at his canvas so his brush almost unbiden conjures up this bird. Rose its also a picture of magritte. When we do we already see him taking things so the time period of this picture coinciding with him writing about his process i also see it as kind of a manifesto. Its too strident a worth but theres an announcement of himself and his practice as seeing something and seeing something familiar related to it thats mysterious and strange and showing us him actually creating that right in front of us. Rose the next one is not to be reproduced. Isnt that like a great one . So wonderful. The play of mirrors in this work is so remarkable and its so beautifully painted, too. Nominally its a portrait of edward james, right . His great patron. But magritte referred to it as a failed portrait but one that denies you what you expect. Rose and last is time transfixed. Well, so what do you think, stephanie . Its a work that i look at all the time. Except in the past couple of months and its one that still haunts me when i walk into the gallery. Rose haunts you because because i think its a perfect example of the familiar and this you look at it and you can easily say i oh its a fireplace hearth and its a pipe. Then you can say its not a pipe its a train and the smoke from the pipe is the smoke of the train and theres an ybtd the motion of this train and then the stop of train on the clock. Theres candlesticks that arent doing anything. Its a picture that you can walk by and think of as so familiar and im very familiar with that and yet it still haunts me. Its sofa nil war that its not familiar. Tell me what happened to him after 1938. Well, 1939 as we all know the war breaks out. Belgium is occupied, magritte lives out the war in occupied belgium. He doesnt make a lot of pictures. He was kind of worried about being there was a moment that hes afraid to be put in the mental asylum because the nazis obviously didnt like his art and so theres that. Rose when he did this lecture what was it called . It was called lifeline. So hi in wonderful surrealist fashion narrate it had development of his life and art as a surrealist painter and talked about influences and inspirations and childhood moments. Did he go back to commercial start after paris he did, he was forced to. It was in in 1929 at the end of 29 the wall street crash happened and the whole economy collapsed and no one sold and he went back to brussels because he couldnt make a living anymore. He was supposed to have a one person show in march of 1930 two weeks before his gallery went bankrupt and the girlfriend of his dealer ran off with another man and marguerite and his wife george jet were left in paris without a means of sport. Jor jet. So his bri brar, basically, his library to maintain. Then he made a great sale. He sold some of his most important paintings. Then he went back to brussels and opened up a commercial art studio. Rose that in 1966, one year before his death i dont want to belong to my own time or for that matter to any other. He believed that . Well, maybe in the way yeah, i think art is timeless. Theres something very confusing and the mystery of the ordinary is really true. You like to believe you know it and have seen it many, many times. Pop artists thought they were his tradition. And that statement, in fact, in 66 was made at a time when he was being compared frequently to the pop artists so he said that i dont want to belong to my own time or any other to almost distinguish himself from these warhol or oldenberg or liechtenstein who were embracing commercial contemporary culture and magritte wanted to say im more enduring. Going back to the title of this exhibition, he said pop artists painted reality as it was while he sufficient fused it with a sense of mystery. Or the its the poetic potential of everyday. Thats what i think magritte does that only he does and that when you think about all the different artists that come after you that he gives permissions to. And you can think of johnson and rauchenberg going beyond abstract expressions. I could go on, right. You can go on right up until the present moment. Rose go see it at moma and then it goes next to houston and then comes to the Art Institute. Thank you very much. Thank you, charlie. Thank you very much. Rose thank you for joining us. See you next time. Captioning sponsored by Rose Communications captioned by Media Access Group at wgbh access. Wgbh. Org every single bite needed to be tasted. Wow. Its like a great big hug. My parents put chili powder in my baby food. Everywhere all over the table. My stomach is g