Marcel Broodthaers

  • Marcel Broodthaers – La clef de l’Horloge (Un poème cinématographique en l’honneur de Kurt Schwitters) (1957)

    1951-1960ExperimentalFranceMarcel BroodthaersShort Film

    Summary:
    Broodthaers’s first film, Clef d’Horloge was made using a borrowed camera and some film stock that he had been given. It was shot at the Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, in 1956, during an exhibition of works by Kurt Schwitters. The film is made in negative and positive and is based on several works that were on display. It premiered on 23 April 1958 at ‘Filmexprmntlfilm’, an experimental film convention in Brussels.

    La Clef de l’Horloge, a so-called documentary about the poet, painter and uber-bricoleur Schwitters, is ‘rounded off’ by adding a love poem. The film shows close-ups of Das Sternenbild [The Constellations]. Starry skies and other similar constellations often reappear in later works and also recur in his films.Read More »

  • Marcel Broodthaers – A Voyage on the North Sea (1974)

    1971-1980BelgiumExperimentalMarcel BroodthaersVideo Art

    Quote:
    Between 1957 and his death in 1976, Marcel Broodthaers made approximately fifty films. The exact number is difficult to determine: Several no longer exist; some are multipart “programs” assembled from groups of short films (many appropriated from industrial or otherwise “authorless” sources); and others are subtle variations on previous works. A recent exhibition at pioneering curator and collector Thomas Solomon’s new gallery, Solo Projects, paired a 16-mm silent film, Un Voyage en Mer du Nord (A Voyage on the North Sea), 1973-74, with a thirty-eight-page, French-bound book that shares its title and ostensible subject matter: the pairing of a late-nineteenth-century amateur painting of an archetypal European ship and a twentieth-century photograph of a pleasure boat against a modern urban backdrop. The roughly four-minute film is projected on a retractable home-movie screen–a Broodthaers motif–and the book displayed on a simple wooden shelf, lit by a single spotlight.Read More »

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