Cinéma modèle

Two months before the opening of Section Cinéma in the basement at Burgplatz 12 in Düsseldorf, Broodthaers used the space to show Cinéma modèle, or "model cinema"— a program of five of his films, each inspired by a different artist or writer that he considered important: artist Kurt Schwitters, poet La Fontaine, Belgian artist René Magritte, and French symbolist poets Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane Mallarmé.

Broodthaers insisted that he was not a filmmaker. For him, film, like other media, was an "extension of language," a new form of life for poetic structures, which he unlocked and transferred into other media. For example, his first film The Key to the Clock, devoted to Kurt Schwitters, featured a sequence of often surprising details of Schwitters’s works. Filmed during the German artist’s retrospective in Brussels in 1956, the film took one year to edit: Broodthaers was very meticulous about the order of shots and the pace of cuts. Instead of compositions in space or on the wall, he filmed their parts: ropes, wheels, bits of wood and metal—and reassembled them like a watch. Like in a poetic text, he looked for a rhythm in separate elements and found meaning in the gaps and spaces. Film became the medium that allowed him to open up these intermediate spaces of ambiguity, obscurity and unclear recognition, of complex images and signs.