The Happy Failure

Abstract

Among the most interesting and humorous artists that Marcel Duchamp has inspired, Christophe Viart proposes considering another of Marcel’s incursions into film. Marcel Broodthaers was a Belgian contemporary artist whose range of activities also covered poetry and (post-)cinema. A single film can have considerable theoretical power. This is the case with La pluie (Projet pour un texte) [The Rain (Project for a Text)], a 1969 two-minute 16mm black-and-white film, which presents Broodthaers attempting to write on paper in the rain. Is it a film? Is it cinema? This may be the material of a regular film, but not the spirit. We are definitely in the post-art era…