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.

240MB | 8m 05s | 720×480 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/4E8AAB97FAA7407/La_Clef_de_L’horloge_1957_NTSC_DVD_DD2.0_x264-CepHeuS.mkv
https://nitro.download/view/36E3B7BA65D72BE/La_Clef_de_l’Horloge.srt

Language(s):French
Subtitles:English

The post Marcel Broodthaers – La clef de l’Horloge (Un poème cinématographique en l’honneur de Kurt Schwitters) (1957) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

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.

Un Voyage’s almost obsolete format and pedagogical presentation gave the show the feeling of a historical document. In each work, Broodthaers “cuts” into the painting and the photograph by focusing on small details. The artist is said to have dated the painting to around 1900, and initially it seems that Un Voyage is delivering a rigorous structural analysis based on formal and historical oppositions marking the divide between the nineteenth century and the twentieth: novel versus cinema; painting versus photography; shipping as commerce versus sailing as leisure. But the work does more than this. By using splicing, binding, and repetition to join these apparent opposites, it performs a complex overlapping of materiality and history. Punctuated by intertitles that demarcate fifteen “pages,” the film insinuates a relationship to contemporaneous structuralist cinema–think of the wall-mounted seascape photograph that is central to (and literally at the center of) Michael Snow’s forty-five-minute zoom in Wavelength, 1967. But again the comparison unravels as the film in Un Voyage undermines its own apparent logic, repeating “page” five twice, for example, or inserting a brief closeup of cotton weave where one would expect a shot of the painted canvas.

The film and book represent Broodthaers’s interest in reproducible media, though the relatively small edition–just one hundred examples of the pair were produced–also suggests that the artist was not aiming for a mass audience. The evidence indicates that Broodthaers was interested in complicating the status of these objects by subverting any notion of an “original” or definitive version. It should be noted that Un Voyage follows directly from several 1973 works not included in the exhibition, among them two 16-mm films–Analyse d’une peinture and Une peinture d’amateur decouverte dans une boutiquede curiosities–and a slide projection, Bateau Tableau. Un Voyage itself in many ways resembles a slide show: Testing the limits of the cinematic, Broodthaers injects a dose of humor by assembling a deliberately inert motion picture from still images.

While Broodthaers’s practice is often defined within the limited framework of institutional critique, the breadth and sheer unruliness of his project suggests that one might just as easily place him alongside an artist such as Bruce Conner, with whom he shared both a penchant for found footage and a somewhat after-the-fact Surrealist sense of humor. A 1971 film program by Broodthaers, in which he appropriated the 20th Century Fox logo, also aligns him with Ed Ruscha, who used the same image in 1962, and presages Jack Goldstein’s use of the MGM Lion. Solomon’s presentation of Un Voyage at this particular moment raises subtle questions about the mediation and proliferation of images, allowing Broodthaers’s interrogation of pictures from the past to implicate our digital present.

https://nitro.download/view/AAF21E324491102/A_Voyage_on_the_North_Sea.rar

DVD Source: DVD5
DVD Format: NTSC
Program: DVD Decrypter
Menus: None
Video: Untouched
Audio: Untouched
DVD extras: None
Runtime: 6 minutes
Language:None

The post Marcel Broodthaers – A Voyage on the North Sea (1974) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
Marcel Broodthaers (January 28, 1924 – January 28, 1976) was a Belgian poet, filmmaker and artist with a highly literate and often witty approach to creating art works.

He was born in Brussels, Belgium, where he was associated with the Groupe Surréaliste-revolutionaire from 1945 and dabbled in journalism, film, and poetry. After spending 20 years in poverty as a struggling poet[1], he performed the symbolic act of embedding fifty unsold copies of his book of poems Pense-Bête in plaster, creating his first art object. That same year, 1964, for his first exhibition, he wrote a famous preface for the exhibition catalogue;

\”I, too, wondered whether I could not sell something and succeed in life. For some time I had been no good at anything. I am forty years old… Finally the idea of inventing something insincere finally crossed my mind and I set to work straightaway. At the end of three months I showed what I had produced to Philippe Edouard Toussaint, the owner of the Galerie St Laurent. \’But it is art\’ he said \’and I will willingly exhibit all of it.\’ \’Agreed\’ I replied. If I sell something, he takes 30%. It seems these are the usual conditions, some galleries take 75%. What is it? In fact it is objects.\” Broodthaers, 1964[2]

He worked principally with assemblies of found objects and collage, often containing written texts. His most noted work was an installation in his Brussels house which he called Musée d\’Art Moderne, Départment des Aigles (1968). This installation was followed by a further eleven manifestations of the \’museum\’, including at the Düsseldorf Kunsthalle for an exhibition in 1970 and at documenta 5 in Kassel in 1972. For such works he is associated with the late 20th century global spread of both installation art, as well as \”institutional critique,\” in which interrelationships between artworks, the artist, and the museum are a focus.

Broodthaers died in Cologne, Germany on his 52nd birthday.

http://www.nitroflare.com/view/6D8399FF05C5992/Le_renard_et_le_corbeau.avi

Language:Silent

The post Marcel Broodthaers – Le corbeau et le renard (1967) first appeared on Cinema of the World.