Marcel Broodthaers

Animation of Marcel B.'s signature

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.

The film purports to be the second version of a (fictional) film made by Baudelaire in 1850 in memory of his (actual) voyage across the Pacific. It was shot using a world map mounted on black board, filmed in its entirety and in extreme close-up.

A documentation of Marcel Broodthaers's exhibition Le Corbeau et le Renard at the Wide White Space Gallery, Antwerp.

The film shows Marcel Broodthaers trying to write while the rain constantly washes away the ink. In the final scene, during which the artist gives up and drops his pen, the inscription “Projet pour un texte” (Project for a text) appears.

Rendez-vous...includes La pipe (1968), La pluie (1969), and Un film de Charles Baudelaire (1970) in its compilation, among others...

Marcel Broodthaers’ film and book, both titled A Voyage on the North Sea which were distributed together as part and parcel of the same publishing plot. The ostensibly related subject of both book and film consists mutually of 19th and 20th century nautical images including: 1. photographic reproductions and details of an amateur’s 19th century painting of a fleet of fishing ships and 2. photographs of a contemporary sailboat.

The main part of this film was created by the process of superimposition: Broodthaers’s ink drawings of fish, scales, words and signs were transferred to film stock, which was used in negative to create the final work. In contrast, the title sequence, added in 1971, shows Broodthaers’s drawn storyboards filmed with a moving camera. The film was shown for the first time at the Galerie Michael Werner in Cologne in 1971, and a second film Le Poisson est Tenace, was created partly from its out-takes.