A Denounced Tautology: On Une Seconde d’éternité (D’après une idée de Charles Baudelaire) (1970)

Book chapter for a collection on Marcel Broodthaers's films on a one-second film by the artist, Une Seconde d’éternité, which animates the signing of the artist’s initials. Une Seconde d’éternité is shown to reflect ideas from two nineteenth century French poets - Charles Baudelaire’s notion of the 'double composition' of beauty, and Stéphane Mallarmé’s endeavour to create poems as ‘constellations’ in which mobility and stasis are combined. The chapter discusses Une Seconde d’éternité in the context of Broodthaer’s films and slide projections, as well as other works that take his initials as their motif, concluding with an interpretation of Broodthaers's description of the latter as ‘a denounced tautology’.