“The Word Film?” Marcel Broodthaers and cinema

Marcel Broodthaers (1924–1976) is considered Belgium’s most important postwar artist. While his work is internationally recognized for its ingenious use and combination of various media, for instance poetry, books, objects, and films, Broodthaers’s endeavors within the medium of cinema have so far remained relatively underexplored. This dissertation aims to address this gap by approaching the artist’s oeuvre through his engagement with film. What meaning did Broodthaers assign to cinema, and how does this resonate within other domains of his artistic practice? For Broodthaers, cinema was by no means limited to its conventional materials or modes of presentation, even though the artist created around fifty films on 16 and 35mm. This dissertation highlights the forms in which Broodthaers “materialized” his expanded understanding of cinema and the ways in which this approach (implicitly) critiques both traditional cinema and mass media as well as contemporary experimental film. Contrary to the radical and progressive aspirations of the avant-garde, many of Broodthaers’s films exude a distinctly melancholic atmosphere, rooted in archaic or eccentric ideas, objects, or figures from the past. In this way, the cultural critique of Broodthaers’s own time is put into a historical perspective. In essence, cinema presented itself to the artist as a means through which different eras and media could be dialectically engaged. Ultimately, Broodthaers’s films and cinematic endeavors aimed to destabilize consolidated views and enable the imagination of an “other world.” This critical strategy, rooted in the practices of (Belgian) Surrealism and later further developed under the influence of Neo-Marxism, represents a central thread running through Broodthaers’s (film) practice and in the various case studies addressed in this dissertation.