Notícias

Open Class with Steven Jacobs | 'Marcel Broodthaers: Films on Painting'

21st May 2025, at 5:30pm | Auditorium, in Praça Coronel Pacheco, 15 - Porto

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, particularly a Kurt Schwitters relief in the first film and an anonymous seascape created around 1900 in the latter. Both films employ completely different strategies in their encounter with artworks. While La Clef de l’horloge, with its restless light effects, hectic camera movements, and rhythmic montage embraces the dynamic potential of cinema, A Voyage on the North Sea is marked by a static camera and a slow editing rhythm, rather emphasizing than neglecting or transforming the static qualities of the source image. In particular, this paper will discuss Broodthaers’s cinematic investigations of artworks against the background of the somewhat understudied mid-century development of highly experimental and lyrical art documentaries, which was particularly important in Belgium. From the late 1930s to the early 1960s, Belgian filmmakers such as André Cauvin, Henri Storck, Paul Haesaerts, and Luc de Heusch among others self-consciously presented their films on art as art films, investigating the tensions between movement and stasis, the two- and three-dimensional, and the real and the artificial. These ambitions resonate in Broodthaers’s films dealing with paintings, which are marked by a preoccupation with transmedial encounters, duration, the tensions between stasis and movement, the transformative and ekphrastic potentialities of cinema, and the logics of mechanical reproduction.

This event is integrated in Meeting #0 Upside Down (see PROGRAMME - full version)

Organised by Doctoral Programme in Fine Arts [FBAUP]

BIO

Steven Jacobs is an art historian specialized in the interactions between film and the visual arts. His publications include The Wrong House: The Architecture of Alfred Hitchcock (2007), Framing Pictures: Film and the Visual Arts (2011), The Dark Galleries: A Museum Guide to Painted Portraits in Film Noir (2013), Screening Statues: Sculpture and Cinema (2016), The City Symphony Phenomenon: Cinema, Art, and Urban Modernity Between the Wars (2018), and Art in the Cinema: The Mid-Century Art Documentary (2020). Recently, with Raf Wollaert, he edited Marcel Broodthaers and Film: A Second of Eternity (2024). He teaches at Ghent University and the University of Antwerp.