The Rain (Project for a Text)

At the same time, his films are ironic, often in a special way that in literature would be described as romantic irony. In European romantic literature of the early nineteenth century, protagonists, opposed to the world that surrounds them, are often seen as ridiculous and funny by a society of philistines who cannot comprehend their true motives, which are beyond common logic. Romantic irony might be what we see in the film The Rain (Project for a Text), dedicated to Stéphane Mallarmé. Broodthaers is sitting by a very low table with a brick wall behind him. He tries to write a text despite the unrealistically heavy rain, which would certainly make any kind of text or writing impossible. Thus declaring the impossibility, the fleeting nature and unreliability of written text or any verbalization of ideas, he seems mistrustful of literature, just like Mallarmé, who was the first author to give poetry a visual form and take it beyond pure literature.