This Is not a Film
The Cinema of Marcel Broodthaers
This series shows the films of Marcel Broodthaers as a sum of contradictions from which to understand his work as a whole, and develops the reasons for the medium’s privileged place, its investigation and filmic imaginary in contemporary art after 1970. The series, concludes the retrospective on the artist, takes place in the screening theatre and comprises an extensive program that shows in a single session different approaches to cinema as text, poetry, object and theater space.
There is a negative strand running through the entirety of Marcel Broodthaers’ body of work, from the time he leaves poetry for the visual arts to the ongoing rebuttal of the artwork’s and museum’s status as a privileged place where the object takes on value and meaning. Film condenses this sum of contradictions and paradoxes within his oeuvre; a medium Broodthaers would continue to systematically explore over a number of decades precisely to reaffirm its brittle and post-media nature, trapped inside the margins between writing and image, film and poetry, stuck between two times: the time of the exhibition and that other time in the screening room. Equally, for Broodthaers cinema was an art form from the present which served to rekindle fragments of nineteenth-century spectral and allegorical culture, in which the cinematographer is born and escapes simultaneously. Finally, film was conceived as one more section of the fictitious museum founded by the artist, while this same museum and some of its public presentations were devised as a mere stage set for certain films. In essence, the films of Marcel Broodthaers play a central role in defining his work, and for this very same reason they point to an undefined element in flight which at once resembles cinema but also ceases to do so, much in the same way that the artist, and the title of this film series, paraphrases the image of Magritte’s pipe in numerous works to represent the convention of the sign whilst moving away from the reality of the object. Ultimately, is it about cinema as yet another object from the Musée d´Art Moderne, as an artefact from a bygone time?
Program
Figures of Wax (Jeremy Bentham) (1974, 15’, 16 mm)
La Clef de l’horloge. Poème cinématographique en l’honneur de Kurt Schwitters (1957, 7’30’’, 16 mm)
La Pipe (René Magritte) (1969, 3’, 35 mm)
Eau de Cologne (1974, 2’, 35 mm)
La Lune (1970, 3’, 35 mm)
Monsieur Teste. (1974, 2’, 35 mm)
Projet pour un Poisson (Projet pour un Film) (1971, 9’, 35 mm)
Crime à Cologne (1971, 1’30’’, 35 mm)
La Pipe Satire (1969, 3’, 35 mm)
Une Seconde d’éternité (D’après une idée de Charles Baudelaire) (1970, 1’’, 35 mm)
A Film by Charles Baudelaire (2nd version) (1970, 6’30’’, 35 mm)
Berlin oder ein Traum mit Sahne (1974, 10’, 35 mm)
Un jardin d’hiver (ABC) (1974, 6’, 35 mm)
Exercise (Musée d’Art Moderne) (1971, 4’, 35 mm)
A Film by Charles Baudelaire (1st version) (1970, 6’30’’, 35 mm)