Writing as a plastic object Marcel Broodthaers and the impossibility of the word

La Pluie (The Rain) was filmed in the garden of the rue de la Pépinière in Brussels during the Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles, Section XIXe siècle period. The backdrop is a brick wall on which the words DEPARTEMENT DES AIGLES are written in whitewash. This was one of the three films Broodthaers made in the same location. The film shows Marcel Broodthaers trying to write while the rain constantly washes away the ink. In the final scene, during which the artist gives up and drops his pen, the inscription “Projet pour un texte” (Project for a text) appears. In the facsimile of the text by Marcel Broodthaers dedicated to La Pluie (Projet pour un texte), he wrote: “I hate movements that displace the lines. If I make a film, for a genre still defined as the discipline of movement, I have to repeat Baudelaire’s verse, unless… I don’t make the film and at the same time accept the value of the unused film, the filmmaker’s blank page, and pray that someone else makes it.”