“Le Mouvement des Images”

The justifications for—and the merits of—thematic reinstallations of museum collections are disputable. Yet Centre Pompidou film curator Philippe-Alain Michaud has managed a remarkable feat with the current display, which takes the movement of images and their reproducibility as its point of departure. One enters the show through a long hallway studded with over a dozen screens playing such modernist classics as Léger’s Ballet Mécanique (Mechanical Ballet, 1923–24), and Moholy-Nagy’s Ein Lichtspiel Schwarz-wiess-grau (A Lightplay Black-white-gray, 1930), and more recent experiments like Joseph Cornell’s Gnir Rednow (1955), Richard Serra’s Hand Catching Lead (1968), and Rose Lowder’s Bouquet 1 to 10 (1994–95). When taken as a whole, this compendium of moving images, different temporalities, and chromatic shifts appears as a visually stunning summary of decades of experimental film history. Fortunately, cleverly designed and well-placed benches with high backs allow you to stand and lean or sit and watch the films individually.

The hallway splits the space in two, and the galleries are divided into subthemes: Narrative, Unwinding, Montage, and Projection. Some connections between works are a bit literal: Marcel Broodthaers’s film Rain. Project for a Text (1969), which shows the artist writing in the rain as it washes away his ink, is in the Narrative section. Other connections, like the one between “Projection” and Jackson Pollock’s painting Number 26 A, Black and White, 1948, are more tenuous. (That said, in the previous hang the Pollock was included in the Chaos section.) In the end, whether you breeze through the show or really take the time the “Movement of Images” requires, the fascinating interactions between images and objects, many of them underpresented gems, far outweigh any minor quibbles one might have.