Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaers (1924-1976) is rarely seen as a filmmaker although he was a prolific one with a filmography containing at least 50 titles. Furthermore, his entire (non-filmic) oeuvre and his writings include many references to cinema, its (pre-)history, technology, and paraphernalia. Often presented as the ultimate artist of the “post-medium condition,” constantly merging artistic media, technologies, and methods of display, Broodthaers strikingly made several films dealing with still images such as inscriptions, newspaper clippings, postcards, maps, drawings, prints, and paintings.
Focusing on La Clef de l’horloge (1957-58) and A Voyage on the North Sea (1973-74), this lecture deals with Broodthaers’s cinematic exploration of paintings…