The museum of attractions: Marcel Broodthaers and the section cinéma
Eric de Bruyn

For Marcel Broodthaers, film functioned as strange tool for writing and deleting simultaneously. Broodthaers' own film work is in a state of permanent contradiction between the still and the moving image. It presents a text that is in the process of being written and at the same time has already been written. A text that keeps the present moving and yet at the same time records itself as part of the past. A film theater designed by Broodthaers himself is to be examined in order to understand the unique temporal quality of this cinematic method: the »Section Cinéma«, the seventh department in his famous fictitious museum, the »Musée d'Art Moderne, Département des Aigles«. In a literal sense, the »Section Cinéma« fulfilled a multiple function as storeroom, place of assembly, production studio, film theater and gallery. The »Section Cinéma« can be described in relation to film history as a stage of the non-uniform public space of the early cinema: it repeated the original conflict between a performative and a reproductive mode of film that preceded the rise of the studio system and its industrial organization of public space. [more]

1. «Section Cinéma»—The Silent Gesture of the Artist 2. The Pipe – Magritte und Foucault 3. The Simulacrum 4. «Silence« 5. The Museum of Attractions