Beaubourg Boogie Woogie

‘Edited to the rhythm of a boogie-woogie piano score, Beaubourg Boogie-Woogie takes the viewer on a whirlwind tour of a gallery in the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Works by Picasso, Leger, Matisse, Magritte, Duchamp, and others are ‘collaged’ in rapid rhythms and camera movements which allow only fragmentary glimpses of the pieces. The film is transgressive in its disrespect for the conventions of contemplation demanded by wall art. The jazz soundtrack, however, evokes the dynamics of folk art that inspired much of the art in question, and its repetitions, along with the fast-paced editing, also reanimate the machine aesthetic of the period. The film may appear to subordinate high modernism to the popular cultural musical form that governs the film, and yet it shares a great deal with the work that it photographs in the tendency towards abstraction and its reflexivity. It ends with a long contemplative shot fixed on the sky framed by Beaubourg district buildings, a very filmic image, offering a sigh of relief outside the gallery.’ – D.R.