re·bus: Issue 1 (Spring 2008) Allegorial Impulses, edited Iris Balija, Matthew Bowman, Lucy Bradnock and Beth Williamson Melancholy and Allegory in Marcel Broodthaers' La Pluie (projet pour un texte), 2 Iris Balija Allegorical Impulses and the Body in Painting, 21 Matthew Bowman Prophet or witness? subverting the allegorical gaze in Francisco Goya's Truth 47 Rescued by Time, Mercedes Cerón The Other Side of the Gaze: Ethnographic Allegory in the Early Films of Maya 73 Deren, John Fox Resisting the Allegorical: Pieter Bruegal's Magpie on the Gallows, 86 Stephanie Porras Allegory and the Critique of the Aesthetic Ideology in Paul de Man, 101 Jeremy Spencer Allegorical Interruptions: Ruined Representation and the work of Ken Jacobs, 123 Francis Summers Contact details School of Philosophy and Art History University of Essex, Wivenhoe Park, Colchester, Essex CO4 3SQ, UK
[email protected] © Iris Balija, 2008 Melancholy and Allegory in Marcel Broodthaers’ La Pluie (projet pour un texte) Iris Balija Abstract Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s notion of the two interpretations of interpretation in Writing and Difference, this paper proposes an allegorical or ‘poetical’ reading of Marcel Broodthaers’ two-minute film of 1969, La Pluie (projet pour un texte). Using the respective examples of Erwin Panofsky and Walter Benjamin’s interpretations of Albrecht Dürer’s 1514 engraving Melencolia I, I argue that although both approaches serve to illuminate Broodthaers’ film, the ambiguity and richness of signification found in the work are best captured by Benjamin’s allegorical method. More than cinema, the new techniques of the image (laser?) offer the way to a solution that is, I fear, momentous, if certainly interesting.