16. The Happy Failure*

LA PLUIE (PROJET POUR UN TEXTE) by Marcel Broodthaers, 1969

*Christophe Viart*

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...

Keywords: Avant-garde, poetry, post-art

"I'm not a filmmaker," warned Marcel Broodthaers ([1968] 1998c, 58) regarding the misunderstanding that the production of his fifty or so short films sometimes elicited, within a disparate body of work also comprising poems, books, images, paintings, objects, installations, and a modern art museum. And Broodthaers responded to the question of what cinema

<footnote>* The expression is borrowed from the title of Herman Melville's short story, *The Happy Failure* ([1924] 2009). In the edition of the fourth volume of Melville's works published by La Pléiade (2010), Philippe Jaworski adopts the expression of "the happy failure" for this story that takes place on the water, with a project that doesn't work out (in French "tombe à l'eau" - literally "falls in the water" - and its use here is both figurative and literal). The conclusion of this apologue concurs with one of Melville's major themes, combining absurdity and fiasco, as in *Moby Dick* and *Pierre; or, the Ambiguities*: "He who has never failed somewhere, that man cannot be great. Failure is the true test of greatness," we find in "Hawthorne and His Mosses" (1850) (qtd. in Melville 2010, 1132) as well as in *Bartleby, the Scrivener; Billy Bud*, and other novels.</footnote>
therefore represented with: “Film for me is the extension of language. I started with poetry, then art, and finally cinema, which brings together several elements of art” (58). It will be recalled that Marcel Broodthaers, who was born in 1924 in Brussels and died in Cologne in 1976, created poetry, art criticism, journalistic reporting, and documentary photography in equal measure, before becoming an artist in 1964 at the time when he uttered the mocking and oft-repeated phrase addressed to the holier-than-thou: “*Moi aussi, je me suis demandé si je ne pouvais pas vendre quelque chose et réussir dans la vie*” (“I, too, wondered whether I could not sell something and succeed in life”).<fnref n="1" />

Despite the important role that cinema plays in his work, his films constitute a relatively understudied facet compared with his production of objects crossbred between pop art and conceptual art and combining eggshells, saucepans with mussels, heaps of coal, and jam jars. No less related to his art, they nevertheless anticipate the notion of an exhibition cinema no longer shown in an isolated room, but in a specific environment among the artworks presented. Taking the role of the spectator into account in a different way, they thwart any kind of contemplative position while obstructing their reappropriation in commodity form. The attention that they demand calls less for a hedonistic identification than for a critical relationship, within which the spectator is guided into becoming a reader.

It is in a manner akin to a Buster Keaton gag that LA PLUIE (PROJET POUR UN TEXTE) [THE RAIN (PROJECT FOR A TEXT)], shot on 16mm black-and-white film, presents Broodthaers attempting to write in pelting rain only to be forced to give up as a last resort. A film about the artist at work, LA PLUIE arose out of the failure of the story that he was staging. For two minutes, he therefore lives out a paradox, of being at once a film on creation and the expression of its vanity, its ruin. Countering the heroic self-portraits of painters or tormented figures of writers seen in films, the image of Broodthaers drenched to the bone invites us to consider the difference between the arts – film, poetry, and the fine arts – in the less glorious and far more tragicomic light of the mute artist grappling with his thought.

<footnote n="1">¹ Marcel Broodthaers, invitation card for the exhibition at the Saint-Laurent Gallery, Brussels, April 10-25, 1964 (Broodthaers 1998, 39). In the follow-up to the text printed in recto-verso on magazine double-page spreads, Broodthaers wrote: “I’ve been good for nothing for a while now. I’m forty years old ... The idea of finally inventing something insincere crossed my mind and I set to work immediately. Three months later, I showed my production to Ph. Édouard Toussaint the owner of the Saint-Laurent Gallery. ‘But, that’s Art,’ he said, ‘and I’d be happy to exhibit all that.’ ‘Okay,’ I answered. If I sell something he’ll take 30%. Apparently those are the normal conditions, some galleries take 75%. What is it? Objects, in fact.”</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_1.png" /><figcaption>Marcel Broodhaerts, LA PLUIE (PROJET POUR UN TEXTE), 1969</figcaption></figure>

## Comic Movement That Animates 24 Images per Second

The scene unfolds before our eyes. A fast pan shows the situation from a high angle just as Broodthaers begins writing a text, sagely installed in a garden and sitting on a folding chair in front of a crate serving as a table. Just like a sketch, the performance makes the spectator – whether real or imaginary – its main accomplice. It cannot take place without the presence of a third party. For that, there is no need for the insistent gaze of the joker inviting the adherence of his audience, as in certain painted self-portraits that refer the spectator to the representational space while it is being created. At no time does Broodthaers look at the camera.

The film is shot outside his home, 30 Rue de la Pépinière in Brussels, at the address where, in 1968, his famous fictional museum of modern art was
inaugurated, the Musée d'Art Moderne. Département des Aigles. Section XIXe siècle. The inscription “Département des Aigles” (Eagles Department) painted in capital letters on a whitewashed brick wall appears behind his back at the start of the film. The detail is not as irrelevant as it might appear if we relate it to the closure of the Nineteenth-Century Section of the Eagles Department, announced on September 27, 1969, one year to the day after its inauguration, when Broodthaers whitewashed this very inscription, following an action analogous to the one portrayed in LA PLUIE.

Writing outside rather than inside is not the only remarkable displacement of a film that presents a man of letters in place of an artist, who we would instead expect to see in a workshop rather than in a curatorial role. The opposition between the horizontality of the writing and the verticality of the downpour, coupled with the opposition between the lively movement of the quill and his position, fixed to the spot, contribute to the contradictions that LA PLUIE emphasizes by associating work and chaos, impassivity and surprise, sense and nonsense. Would it be possible to avoid thinking of Buster Keaton when the rain starts to fall in a discontinuous deluge? Following the swimming pool episode in THE CAMERAMAN, shot by Edward Sedgwick in 1928, Luke Shannon was distanced from Sally by his rival and relegated to the back seat behind the roof of his convertible just as a torrential downpour was on the brink of falling. Common sense and propriety do not easily adapt to the elements, which urge the amorous suitor to bail out the water from his seat using his hat before putting it back on his head for a final cold shower. Reminiscent of L'AROSEUR ARROSÉ [THE SPRINKLER SPRINKLED, 1985] by the Lumière brothers, the spurt of water manipulated by Picabia himself in ENTR'ACTE abruptly ends the chess match between Duchamp and Man Ray on the rooftop of the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. Picabia entrusted the production of the film to René Clair in 1924 with the intention of inserting it into the middle of the dadaist ballet RELÂCHE [RELEASE, 1924] to cause "the audience to leave the room" (qtd. in De Haas 1996, 102).

Adding to the manifest humiliation denoted by the spurt of water is the disillusionment that undermines the narrative. The watering can that soaks Broodthaers shares the same function as Picabia's hose, by amplifying the devastating effects of the shower based on a cliché of burlesque cinema. It is not so much a matter of breaking away from our suspension of disbelief, but of updating the manufacture of fiction. We immediately observe that the gush of water mainly strikes the page and Broodthaers's head. The exhibition *Film als Objekt-Objekt als Film* that the Mönchengladbach Museum devoted to his cinematographic work in autumn 1971 included certain accessories that had been used to shoot his films, such as the chair and watering can used in
LA PLUIE. The title of this exhibition attests to the inversion that it intends to apply to things, on the one hand associating the film with the gravity of reification and on the other, raising the object to the status of a candidate for aesthetic appreciation. In Broodthaers's view, here, everything comes down to placing "the idea before its materialization" (Broodthaers [1965] 1998b, 46). In 1948, he published a poem under the title "Projet pour un film" in the sole issue of the magazine *Surréalisme révolutionnaire* (Broodthaers [1948] 1997c, 17). The primacy accorded to the idea is indicated again when he passes from the poem to the film and substitutes the terms by writing "project for a text" to give LA PLUIE its title. It is on the tenth and final shot of the film that the phrase "projet pour un texte" is superimposed on the image at the moment when the hand stops writing and sets down the quill in conclusion. Unlike the downstrokes and upstrokes so highly prized by Broodthaers, according to the old-fashioned image that he presents of the writer dipping his quill into the inkwell to write his thoughts, the title is typed out using the traditional characters of the typewriter. Here, the author has not yet reached the mechanical era and assiduously and dispassionately continues his task of scribe. Questioning the means of adopting new techniques in vogue at the time, such as laser, he confesses in a poem of the same name, "Projet pour un texte," inserted within another film from 1970-1971:

> You must first be born into a technological world in order to use this kind of method successfully. And here I am cruelly torn between something immobile that has already been written and the comic movement that animates 24 images per second." (1997c, 91)<fnref n="2" />

Although we may think of Jean-Luc Godard's HISTOIRE(S) DU CINÉMA, in which he is glued to his electric typewriter, the character change Broodthaers suggests, as an artist and not a filmmaker, by playing the role of a man of letters, reveals all of the importance of the creative process at the expense of the completed artwork. In the 1960s, Godard already spoke of his hesitation between the novel and the essay to define his approach: "I consider myself to be an essayist, I write essays in the form of novels or novels in the form of essays: only, I film them instead of writing them" ([1962] 1985a, 205).<fnref n="3" /> The essay

<footnote n="2">² And pp. 184-186 for the reproduction of the text inserted into the film PROJET POUR UN POISSON (PROJET POUR UN FILM), 1970-1971, 35mm, black and white, 9 min, silent.</footnote>

<footnote n="3">³ See also, while *Histoire(s) du cinéma* was still a "work in progress" in 1997, Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote: "For me, the reason why I was not so commercial was that it wasn't very clear to me whether I was writing a novel or writing an essay. I like both of them, but now, in *Histoire(s) du cinéma*, I'm sure it's an essay. It's easier for me and it's better that way" (1997).</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_2.png" /><figcaption>Marcel Broodhaerts, LA PLUIE (PROJET POUR UN TEXTE), 1969</figcaption></figure>

presented by LA PLUIE does not aim to reactivate the comparison between the arts but to highlight the mental labor that interconnects them. Shot without sound, the action is reduced to an on-the-spot movement as though endlessly returning to an obsession. For Godard, “writers have always had the ambition of making films on a blank page: to have all the elements available and allow thought to circulate from one to the other” ([1965] 1985b, 280). The quill captured on the spot leaves no legible trace in its wake. It remains dumbfounded, as is said of a voiceless person, paralyzed in amazement; condemned to silence under the downpour. The eye follows its absurd movement while producing no meaning, nor bringing any ideas into being. It is as if it were running after his phrases without being able to pin them down, just as powerless to stem the flow falling down in buckets. Like the figure of Broodthaers washed out and defeated, the “projet pour un texte” is a wash.

## Take a Closer Look

In LA PLUIE, writing and erasing proceed by proximity. The film juxtaposes the order of conventional signs of language and their dissolution under the comic development of an impromptu shower. The absurdity of wishing to resist the
unexpected, rather than protecting oneself from bad weather, exemplifies the end of an artwork heading for its own ruin under the assault of ice-cold water. Incessantly washed away by the torrents, the ink escapes from the quill in ephemeral stains while also overflowing its recipient in tempestuous waves. Two static shots, the fifth and eighth, linger for a moment on the submerged inkwell, streaming out and flooding in turn the writing space in a dark, liquid gush. The words are effaced, giving way to haphazard painting that is neither narrative nor representative. Just as Broodthaers stripped himself of his tawdry poet's rags before becoming an artist, we might say to paraphrase Baudelaire in *Les Bons Chiens* that the writer here dons the painter's vest ([1865] 1973, 155). A powerless spectator, he witnesses the blind destruction of his work.

"Bring your dark glasses and something to block your ears with" recommended Picabia for *ENTR'ACTE* (qtd. in De Haas 1996, 101). Associated with the theme of erasure and obscuring, the notion of a blind gaze – or deaf listening – refers to the reconciliation of contrasts that underpins the invitation to observe the visible in a different way and develop a reflexive attention. A sequence from BERLIN ODER EIN TRAUM MIT SAHNE, shot in 1974, shows Broodthaers, his face impassive, striving to read a newspaper through glasses covered with cream. The corollary of deprivation of sight is the discrediting of the visible in favor of a life of the mind. It was on the occasion of the screening of his first film, LA CLEF DE L'HORLOGE [THE CLOCK KEY], in 1957, that he was to later repeat an anecdote about his father who was going blind, facing the screen and protesting that this film was all black and he couldn't see a thing. This seven-minute short film, which could be catalogued among art films, was created based on Kurt Schwitters's artworks exhibited at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels during the winter of 1956. The film was shot outside of opening hours using borrowed equipment and on film stock past its expiry date. While it was selected at the Experimental Film Festival of Knokke-le-Zoute in 1958 (*EXPRMNTL*), Broodthaers recalls that at the time of its release, "people mocked me" with respect to this *Poème cinématographique en l'honneur de Kurt Schwitters*. In 1971, he wrote in a catalogue dedicated to the Dada artist: "Nighttime is incomprehensible. Daytime is black as Africa ... It is a poem or a thick volume of prose that resolved me to create this film whose naivety today no longer surprises me. It is the consequence of a fatal logic inherent to the maintaining of the image of the self in the artworks of others" ([1971] 1997a, 25). He continues with his father's inability to understand the cinematic approach that he had adopted earlier for the collages created by the inventor of *Merz*:

> My father and I both shared a love of Schwitters, but the figures we drew in 1957 were in opposition. The first represented certainty, balance, and
security, but by downplaying visual characteristics in favor of a poetic
system, the second represented instability, fragility, and threats. Now
more than thirteen years later, these figures have been obscured and
replaced by other versions in keeping with the object's new situations. In
today's world, the object has disappeared. It is no longer the object that
integrates the concept, but the reverse. The object is the very inverse of
spoken, written, or filmed languages. ([1971] 1997a, 25)

For Broodthaers, the body is blind when confronted with figures. It is not
that there is nothing to see, but that we see nothing. It is therefore significant
that he embraces cinema not as a way of recording what takes shape, like
the “change mummified”<fnref n="4" /> evoked by André Bazin, but rather of revealing
that which evades materiality as well as duration. As we read the few rare
lines that Paul Valéry wrote on cinema, we should perhaps not judge the
father’s reaction too rapidly, as he fulminates in the darkness. His reaction
reveals the impression of inconsistency that the author of *Monsieur Teste*
notices in film’s evasion: to him everything appears “without duration” and
“without material” before becoming aware that “it won’t remain fixed more
in one’s mind than on the screen” (Valéry 1957, 1791). The incoherence of the
situation that LA PLUIE stages stems as much from the occultation of material
as from the dissolution of the illusion. It validates Valéry’s criticism of the
artificial movement of images combining “real landscapes” with “insincere
decors.” The rain shower clearly does not come from the sky but falls from
a watering can, as a kind of rudimentary special effect. The scant allure of
Broodthaers, destined to failure, does not aim for compassion but pertains
to a parody of the artist at work, which he interprets stoically; because if
we are willing to accept it, the fiasco that he enjoys acting out is no less
ridiculous than the role an actor would have us believe by pretending to
be a writer at work. It is equally mocking of the stance that certain artists
take while being filmed at work.

As an explicit reference to the silent world of slapstick, LA PLUIE can be
read as a compendium of quotations borrowed on one hand from the painting
of René Magritte, and on the other, from the poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé.
Troubled by the contradiction between words and objects in Magritte's
art, Broodthaers saw Mallarmé as a different “source of contemporary art”
(Magritte 2006, 103), one at the root of the celebration of white in an artwork
and of the poet's silence.

<footnote n="4">4 “Now, for the first time, the image of things is likewise the image of their duration, change mummified as it were” (Bazin 1985, 14).</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_3.png" /><figcaption>Buster Keaton, ONE WEEK, 1920</figcaption></figure>

Speaking of Buster Keaton, this reminds us of the scene in ONE WEEK (1920) where an imperturbable Keaton opens a large umbrella to shelter from the cascade of water flooding his new house. Here, the *Witz* defies all logic. It is based on a marriage between contradictory relations, similar to the oxymoron that Magritte paints in *Hegel's Holiday*; that is, a glass of water balancing on an open umbrella, suspended in the air, against a monochrome salmon-colored background in a school-book style, clearly drawn and without any show of affectation, specific to Magritte. He wrote in a letter to Maurice Rapin on May 22, 1958: "I [...] thought that Hegel [...] would have been very sensitive to this object which has two opposing functions: at the same time not to admit any water (repelling it) and to admit it (containing it). He would have been delighted, I think, or amused (as on a vacation)" (Mallarmé [1894] 1970b, 651).

Between opaque and diaphanous, stable and liquid, the dialectic entails holding together the opposing elements in order for full and empty to be in agreement. Similarly contentious, in LA PLUIE, the association between water and ink renders the act of writing a text with a quill meaningless. Nor can we see how Broodthaers will be able to smoke a cigarette from the packet of Gitanes placed in front of him. This final detail is vital for understanding the way in which he intends to present his situation, by assimilating it with
that of the poet within society, who, according to Mallarmé, “does not fail to uncover some difficulty, or something comic” (Pierre-Henry Frangne in Mallarmé 2010, 153). He is engaged in a conflict that does not claim to express ideas about art, but, more importantly, attempts “to produce them (through what the Greeks called *poiesis*), to try them out, and to embody them in a concrete movement that allows to experience them oneself and to make them live” for the viewer (Mallarmé [1887] 1970a, 310). He demonstrates how by ending up with a white page, he inexorably returns to his place of origin.

This is, in effect, the consequence of the rain (albeit entirely artificial); it creates an obstacle to writing and therefore renders words illegible, removes all trace of them, and ultimately reproduces an immaculate subjectile, just like a “ghost, white as a yet unwritten page” (Mallarmé [1895] 1970c, 387). It is a matter of fulfilling the Mallarméan wish so that “unfailingly the blank returns, gratuitous earlier but certain now, concluding that there is nothing beyond it and authenticating the silence” (Broodthaers [1974] 1998a, 117). For Broodthaers, LA PLUIE accomplishes what he had begun some years earlier, in 1964, when he left literature behind in order to move toward the visual arts. This choice takes the form of a sculpture made up of a bundle of copies of his collection of poems *Pense-Bête*, held against a globe in a shapeless plaster base. The texts from the book had initially been concealed by pieces of colored paper before the last fifty unsold copies were used for the eponymous work presented at his first exhibition in the Galerie Saint-Laurent in Brussels. By making them impossible to read “without destroying their visual aspect,” Broodthaers added to his notion of the void, which he invites us to reflect on in LA PLUIE ([1970] 1991, 139). He did give, however, an account of the viewers of *Pense-Bête*: “Not one of them was curious about the text, unsure whether it referred to the burial of prose, poetry, sadness, or pleasure. Not one of them was moved by the interdiction” (1998d, 117).<fnref n="5" />

## The Melancholy Silence

The third approach, connected to the loss of materiality and the impediment to writing, refers to the breakdown in sound. In LA PLUIE, these three approaches respectively assert the elimination of meaning, the collapse of the artwork, and, finally, the suspension of the intellectual and artistic

<footnote n="5">5 “Mallarmé is the source of contemporary art ... He unintentionally created the modern space. [...] A throw of the dice. It will be a treatise on art” (Broodthaers [1970] 1991, 139).</footnote>
activity typical of a melancholy state. By reflecting on silence, this final part reveals how the amputation of language and the quelling of noise relate to the staging of the artist at work, subjected to the invisible aspect of his mind.

The issue at stake here is the self-portrait, as well as the difficulty a film about art has in recording thought while its own imperceptible activity is at work. How do we grasp what cannot be grasped at the very moment when thought expresses itself in secret? How do we authenticate a presence that becomes absent in a film? How do we reveal the inside of a mind in the grips of that which submerges it? How “to explain oneself in front of a camera,” as Jean-Paul Sartre, for example, tried to do for the first time by speaking about himself in front of Alexandre Astruc and Michel Contat in 1972.<fnref n="6" /> For Broodthaers, there is no continuous solution between the mind absorbed in its speculations and the body inundated with torrents of rain. The physical body crushed under masses of water must not be opposed to mental faculties but to the splendor of indelible works and to the steadfast glory of their authors. The distraught face responds to the overwhelmed body in the same way that feeling does not override the idea of thinking. Instead, they both agree to exhibit their deficiencies, in comparison with the academic stances displayed by painters in front of their easel and philosophers writing at their desk. Far from comparing himself with typical models such as Saint Luke painting the Virgin or Saint Paul seated and writing the Gospel, the solemnity that Broodthaers adopts is less likely to be dressed in an intellectual dignity than to discredit him and reduce him to the state of a dripping mop. But although the effigy of the thinker draped in a himation does not correspond with an ideal, the image he gives of himself, simply dressed in a dark jersey and light trousers, contrasts even more with the disheveled garb of the original artist or cynical philosopher refining their provocative appearance.

The striking idea that LA PLUIE exploits is related to Bergman's liminal definition of laughter. Henri Bergson evokes, in his famous book on the meaning of comedy, various anecdotes borrowed from everyday life to draw a comparison between the victim of a joke and the unlucky passer-by that stumbles unintentionally in the street:

> Now take the case of a person who attends to the petty occupations of his everyday life with mathematical precision. The objects around him, however, have all been tampered with by a mischievous wag, the

<footnote n="6">6 Filmed in 1972 by Alexandre Astruc and Michel Contat, SARTRE PAR LUI-MÊME, was finally released in 1976. See the full script of the film in Sartre 1977.</footnote>
result being that when he dips his pen into the inkstand he draws it
out all covered with mud, when he fancies he is sitting down on a solid
chair he finds himself sprawling on the floor, in a word his actions are
all topsy-turvy or mere beating the air, while in every case the effect is
invariably one of momentum. (Bergson 2005, 5)

What is comic in LA PLUIE owes a debt to this “mechanical rigidity” that the stance of an aphasic Broodthaers emphasizes when the situation demands an entirely different reaction. The man who persists in writing is not waiting for inspiration; he does not suffer from fear of the blank page, even though he is not able to cover over it. He demonstrates that the result cannot be reduced down to the effort expended nor to the time spent, and that, quite the opposite, just as it is possible to write by erasing text, an active action can erase a completed production, as incoherent as that may seem.

Practically omnipresent in the film's ten shots, Broodthaers's hands, one
holding his dip pen and the other fastened to the sheet of paper (when they
are not abandoning their task), speak for themselves in this story without
words. Four close-up shots thus place their vain activity, shaken about
by turbulence, under the viewers' eyes. Portraits of thoughts in action,
humorous in themselves, they accomplish their sterile duty with unthinking
scrupulousness, calmly at first then hastily as the droplets begin to gain
force. Puppets in a silent play, they perform a final act before leaving the
stage in the last shot, after having vigorously crossed out lines, like signed
initials, on the wet paper covered in stains. The rain then stops at the very
moment the film ends, on the image of the abandoned dip pen. The story
recounted is that of pantomime's legacy<fnref n="7" /> at the time of early silent burlesque
film. For Jean-Louis Schefer, this period is not devoid of meaning, but on
the contrary, “we are able to hear something, because there is a link that
is at once mysterious, inseparable, and obvious between the body and the
word: bodies represent the word. They are speaking bodies” (2006, 62).

We can reflect once again on Keaton’s “calm hypnotism” (Benayoun
1987, 158) that refrains from smiling or crying, always busy but indifferent
to external tribulations. We see him in THE NAVIGATOR (1924), fitted out
in an enormous diving suit so he can seal a hole in the boat’s hull; Rollo
washes his greasy hands in water, in a bucket he had carefully filled, before

<footnote n="7">⁷ See Charlie Chaplin [Cinéa, July 15, 1929]: "The talkies? You can tell 'em I loathe them! They are spoiling the oldest art in the world – the art of pantomime. They are ruining the great beauty of silence" (qtd. in Mongin 2002, 26).</footnote>
tipping it out and drying them with a rag. Jean-Louis Schefer notes that bodies in silent films are designed to be “hieroglyphs” and appear as “bodies of writing” (2006, 62).<fnref n="8" /> The body occupied by Broodthaers asks nothing less than to be deciphered alongside the logograms he leaves on his paper. The obstinacy of his mechanical gestures do not, however, assimilate him with the frenzy of the English Pierrot, whom Baudelaire described as a paragon of the “comique absolu.” The frivolity and neutrality that generally typify the mime do not prevent the overflowing of impetuosity to which the English Pierrot is continually subject. If he should walk past a woman cleaning her windows (to use Baudelaire’s example): “after having rifled her pockets, he tries to push into his own her sponge, her broom, her pail and even the water” (Schefer 2006, 258). Broodthaers, however, does not act to the detriment of others but works alone as a consenting victim doomed to yield to lassitude and boredom; after having resisted for nothing, he has to interrupt his *Projet pour un texte*. His attitude integrates the artist’s conventional representations of melancholy; without necessarily imitating the typical position of the hand holding up the head, the film shows him several times at rest, as if suspended, legs apart, the right hand motionless and the other resting on his knee. As the rain falls, washing away all traces, it is no longer the ink that inscribes, but the body that is silently transformed into text, making way for inaction and opening up to thought (Baudelaire 1990, 257ff).

The crate used as a table, at which Broodthaers is seated, is empty. It is a crate specifically designed for the transport of works of art. But in his fictional museum, no original work will ever find a place in this accessory. Writing on this makeshift surface, drenched in rain, is not only to resist the fetishization of work but also to do away with the need for explanations. In the same way, filming the pathetic result of a collapse is a way of avoiding the commercialization of the object. It demonstrates the power of poetry in action at the expense of the result. Paul Valéry wrote: “For a poet, it is never a matter of saying *it is raining*. It is a matter of ... making rain” (1971, 403).

The silence through which Broodthaers transforms himself into an apostle (Broodthaers 1965) is no less eloquent than the embarrassed monologues of the artist forced to speak of his work while carrying it out. It belongs equally to the project for an erased text, to the two minutes of a silent film in 16mm, and to the viewer of *LA PLUIE*. Left hanging, it does not come to a close; it is like an eternal conversation where words are exchanged in turn,

<footnote n="8">8 “The body in silent film is a body of writing. And fundamentally, once the body is gifted with the word, it is no longer itself writing” (Schefer 2006, 6).</footnote>
interrupted, and then taken up again, and so on. "This is not cinematographic art," objects Broodthaers, challenging the use of certain terms applied to his work, such as "essential complements to his artistic body of work" and "experimental films." His work, he adds, is "no more and as much an object for discussion, just as a painting by Meissonnier or Mondrian could be, they are films ..." ([1972] 1997b, 210).

*Translated by Anna Knight*

**References and Further Reading**

Baudelaire, Charles. (1865) 1973. *Les Bons Chiens. Petits poèmes en prose (Le spleen de Paris)*. Paris: Gallimard, Poésie.

—. 1990. "De l'essence du rire et généralement du comique dans les arts plastiques" [1855]. In *Curiosité esthétiques. L'art romantique*. Paris: Bordas, Classiques Garnier.

Bazin, André. 1985. "Ontologie de l'image photographique" [1945]. In *Qu'est-ce que le cinéma?* Paris: Cerf.

Benayoun, Robert. (1982) 1987. *Le regard de Buster Keaton*. Paris: Ramsay, Poche cinéma.

Bergson, Henri. (1899) 2005. *Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic*. Translated by Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell [1911]. New York: Dover Publications.

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## About the Author

Christophe Viart is an artist and Professor at the Sorbonne Arts School of the Panthéon-Sorbonne University, Paris 1. His research focuses on the notions of fiction, dialogue and humor. Within the ACTE Institute, he directs a research program dedicated to “Artists’ Sayings and Writings: Theories and Fictions.” On this last subject, he has notably edited a collective work on *Les mots de la pratique. Dits et écrits d'artistes* (2018). He has published a book conceived as a research project, combining texts by theorists and artists with specially designed works: *La peinture sans titre* (2019).