Homage to Magritte, 1974

"For me reality is not easily attained," the Surrealist painter René Magritte said in a 1969 interview with Paul Waldo Schwartz. Anita Thacher's enigmatic short film "Homage to Magritte" (1974) comprises five vignettes inspired by the painter's disarming sensibility, in which the eye's assumptions are tested, troubled, and subtly refuted. Frames are nested within frames; mirrors behave irresponsibly. A woman arranges flowers, standing before a massive window open to the cosmos. An egg yolk lands on the water's surface and remains eerily intact. A speedboat zips across the horizon in reverse before the horizon line is disrupted altogether. Playful and inventive, this film is one remarkable artist's ode to another—not through mimicry but a channeling of the spirit. Courtesy of the Anita Thacher Estate and Microscope Gallery.