Voyage on the North Sea comprises a book and a short silent film projecting simplistic yet contrasting depictions of 19th and 20th century nautical images. According to the contemporary video artist Rosalind Nashashibi, Broodthaers’ work “insists that you look repeatedly at the same cliched images until they lose their ordinariness. The film is so simple, and yet it holds on to its mystery”; a mystery that is compounded by the confusing, disjointed narrative between 19th century amateur paintings of fishing ships, and contemporary photographs of modern sailboats. The film and the book reverse aesthetic roles, with the film reflecting the structure of a novel with fifteen paginated titles sporadically inserted amongst the static images of boats, whilst the book is laid out in a grid form, echoing the movement of a film strip or slide show. Broodthaers explores the impact of the age of mechanical reproduction on the aesthetic condition with a complex dialogue of rhetoric through the media of book and film.

Having made over 50 films since 1967, Broodthaer’s book-film duality is reminiscent of a reading lesson, which is introduced by the book’s preface: “It is up to the attentive reader to find out what devilish motive inspired this book’s publication.”