My article, “The Anemic Cinemas of Marcel Duchamp,” was published in March 2017 issue of The Art Bulletin. You can find the full article here.
Marcel Duchamp was among the first artists in the transatlantic avant-garde to acquire his own movie camera in 1920 but would produce only a single complete film, Anemic Cinema (1926), over the course of his decades-long career. Scrutiny of written sources and other archival materials reveals significant experimentation with the moving image in other formats and media, particularly after his relocation to the United States in the 1940s. Avoiding standard filmmaking, the artist interrogated period conceptions of the cinematic medium and spectatorship through a series of filmic and nonfilmic works, including Discs (ca. 1945–47), Please Touch (1947), and Étant donnés … (1946–66).
