Marcel Broodthaers and the Cinematic Poems in the 60s and 70s. International Symposium: Marcel Broodthaers & Cinema: Cinematic Poems, Moving Scripts. Cinematek, Brussels. June 17-18, 2022.

In 1972, the experimental poetry magazine Geiger (1967-1979) directed by Adriano, Maurizio and Tiziano Spatola, published an image of Marcel Broodthaers' multimedia work Le Corbeau et le Renard (1967). For the first time, a masterpiece by Broodthaers was presented in the context of an Italian anthology of neo-avant-garde visual poetry featuring verbal-collages, picture-poems and typographical text-compositions made by international visual poets such as Timm Ulrichs, Giulia Niccolai, Jochen Gerz, Mirella Bentivoglio and Gerrit Jan de Rook. Under the method “Eagle Pipe Urinal” (Oppitz, 1972) and deeply convinced that “there are no Primary Structures apart from the language that defines them” (M.B., 1968), Broodthaers creates thermoformed texts, realizes cinematographic poems in honor of the MERZ Art and filmed written objects “guilty in the sense as language and innocent in the sense of language as art” (M.B., 1974) by performing a meta-art that was “enriched by the transference of linguistic figures into visual art and by the use of visual images in a way that suggested they could be analysed in the terms in which we analyse verbal systems” (Compton, 1982). Without losing sight of the theories and movements of the international artistic neo-avant-garde (from Fluxus to Conceptual Art, from Institutional Critique to Art & Language), the speech aims at reconstructing and analysing the verbovisual and cinematic poetics envisioned by Belgian poet and artist Marcel Broodthaers (1924-1976) in his book-film Le Corbeau et le Renard (1967), one of the most complex intermedia artworks of the neo-avant-garde referring to the La Fontaine fable. A rare example of “extra-cinéma” (M.B., 1967) which redefine the critical, aesthetic and conceptual possibilities of poetry in association with ground-breaking forms of intermediality including painting, photography, cinema, typographical impressions and artists' publications. An in-depth analysis of Le Corbeau et le Renard will bring to light some on the main reflections at the core of Broodthaers' interart poetics (Lagerroth; Lund; Hedling, 1997): the strong intersection between verbal and figurative arts and the way they are exhibited, circulated and perceived; the pursuit of an extensive body of new visual forms in poetry; and the possibility to conceived literary paintings, visual poems and poetic objects as manifestations of a single and interartistic thought.