MARCEL BROODTHAERS AND CINEMA: FILMIC POEMS, MOVING SCRIPTS
SYMPOSIUM AND FILM PROGRAM

Considered Belgium’s most influential postwar artist, Marcel Broodthaers’ work (1924-1976) has also been considered as a paradigm of what Rosalind Krauss called a “post-medium condition.” As opposed to his iconic objects and allegorical installations, his involvements in cinema are still understudied, despite film’s crucial place in his oeuvre and his many references to its history, technology, and paraphernalia. Art critics and art historians often seem to struggle to analyze and conceptualize Broodthaers’s films that also seem to have no direct relation with contemporaneous practices in the field of so-called experimental film or video art. As a result, Broodthaers is hardly discussed in studies on avant-garde or underground films, while the specific stylistic features establishing his cinematic authorship have generally been overlooked.

This symposium aims to gather an array of perspectives on Broodthaers’s cinema. We invite scholars in film, art, and literature to submit a paper analyzing a specific film or a particular para-cinematic intervention, as well as accounts examining his (para-)cinematic oeuvre from a historical, media archaeological, comparative, or stylistic point of view.

As this symposium coincides with the closing weekend of the WIELS exhibition Industrial Poems, Open Letters, which focuses on the artist’s plastic plaques bearing enigmatic visual poems, submissions on the poetic/literary character of Broodthaers’s films, and the role the material sign plays in them, are particularly welcome.

Confirmed keynote speakers are Eric C.H. de Bruyn (Freie Universität Berlin), Bruce Jenkins (School of the Art Institute Chicago), and Jennifer Wild (University of Chicago).

This symposium, which will be combined with screenings of various Broodthaers’ films, is organized by Steven Jacobs, who teaches film history at the University Antwerp and art history at Ghent University, and Raf Wollaert who is currently working on a PhD addressing Broodthaers’s film practice at the University of Antwerp.

This initiative is supported by the University of Antwerp; WIELS Brussels; Cinematek, the Royal Film Archive of Belgium; and Cinea. It is part of a research project funded by the Research Foundation Flanders, FWO.

Submissions including a 250-words abstract and a short bio can be sent in either English or French to Raf.Wollaertuantwerpen no later than 30 September 2021