Marcel Broodthaers began as a poet and came to visual art only in his forties, famously declaring that his first sculpture, made from unsold copies of his own poems embedded in plaster, marked the moment he gave up trying to “sell something and succeed in life.” La Pluie returns directly to that rupture. Filmed in his own garden, with the words Département des Aigles visible on the wall behind him, a reference to the fictitious museum Broodthaers had founded the previous year, the artist sits beneath artificial rain, pen in hand, trying to write on paper that the water instantly ruins. Like Sisyphus, he persists anyway, dipping his pen again and again as the ink lifts and pools, until he finally sets the pen down in what reads as resignation. A final inscription appears: Projet pour un texte, “project for a text.”

The film is less a document of failure than a quiet joke about it. Writing, Broodthaers suggests, has become structurally impossible, worn away as soon as it’s attempted, yet the artist keeps at it, producing not a text but the record of its own erasure. The piece both expresses the precarity, if not the impossibility, of writing and alludes ironically to the position of the contemporary artist, freed from the need to deliver any message.