Artaud: The Screaming Body: Film, Drawings, Recordings 1924-1948

by Stephen Barber

  In all of his scenarios before The Butcher’s Revolt, Artaud had conveyed an adamant opposition to the introduction of sound into his film work. This was the moment of heated debate throughout Europe about whether the new technology of sound in cinema should be resisted or welcomed. In a lecture which he had delivered on 29 June 1929 at a cinema specializing in experimental work, the Studio 28 in Montmartre, Artaud declared: “There is no possible identification between sound and image. The image presents itself only in one dimension – it’s the translation, the transposition of the real; sound, on the contrary, is unique and true, it bursts out into the room, and acts by consequence with much more intensity than the image, which becomes only a kind of illusion of sound.”[5] Sound, for Artaud, would have to be separated from the image, in order for the image to maintain its own, autonomous resonances and impact. But the following year, with The Butcher’s Revolt, Artaud attempted to come to terms with the growing inter-relationship of sound and image in cinema; he now viewed the element of mutual destructiveness which he perceived within this relationship as potentially valuable to his aims. He allowed a number of isolated and obsessive phrases (such as: “I’ve had enough of cutting up meat without eating it”) into his scenario, typographically emphasizing them and enclosing them in black-bordered boxes. The words served as a way of imparting an abrupt emphasis to the visual imagery, which would, he believed, rebound from the image/sound collision with greater ferocity. The tense interaction of image, word and sound extended to Artaud’s presentation of the scenario’s content and its implications for spectatorship. In a note preceding the publication in June 1930 of his scenario in the literary periodical La Nouvelle Revue Française, Artaud summarised the content of the imagery: “eroticism, cruelty, the taste for blood, the search for violence, obsession with the horrible, dissolution of moral values, social hypocrisy, lies, false witness, sadism, perversity…” – all of this would be made explicitly visible for the spectator with “the maximum readability”.[6] The vision of horror would itself become a visceral but disciplined language.

  Artaud’s strategy for sound in The Butcher’s Revolt prefigures that used in his recording for radio, To Have Done With The Judgement Of God, eighteen years later. There, the sound effects – screams and rhythmic, percussive beatings – became inserted into Artaud’s recited language of expulsion and refusal, with an immediate incision. In the recording, the violent physical gesture of the scream cuts across the escalating rush of the language’s imagery in the way that, in Artaud’s plan for The Butcher’s Revolt, noise would have vitally lacerated the flow of the visual images. Similarly, in Artaud’s notebook drawings of the mid-1940s, the entangled arrangements of texts and images are often seared by a sudden gesture of obliteration – a pencil stroke that abruptly makes its trajectory across the page, simultaneously reinforcing the powerful visual emanation of language and image as it cancels them.

  In The Butcher’s Revolt, the primacy accorded by Artaud to the image and its spatial presence broke with the predominant film style of the time, which consisted of a kind of filmed theatre that emphasized psychological dialogue and the passage of time. In his note about The Butcher’s Revolt, Artaud stressed the spatial quality of the reinforced sound which he would employ: “The voices are in space, like objects.”[7] Space is a crucial element in Artaud’s conception of film. There is a constant preoccupation with expanding and manipulating the spatial dimension while erasing or reducing time. The passage from film frame to frame is an especial danger in Artaud’s perception; each image must be emphasised to such intensity that the intervening passage of time between the images can be suppressed to its maximum degree. In his “Theatre of Cruelty” of the early 1930s, there is a parallel concern with spatial movement: the actor’s gesture must burn itself out into space with unique immediacy and impact, and must not be repeated in time. The very first of Artaud’s film scenarios, Eighteen Seconds, from 1924, evokes the thoughts of an actor during the period of eighteen seconds between the moment at which he looks at his watch and the moment at which he shoots himself in the street. A complex sequence of images and spatial mutations is arranged into a condensed period of time, which would then have to be expanded to an hour or two of cinematic duration. Since the process of representation operates for Artaud on a temporal level, on which sound and image are repeated and disseminated, his determination to introduce a spatial rather than temporal element into film sound signalled a denial of the movement towards diminishment and repetition which any completed, represented art object makes. In Artaud’s conception of cinema, the presence of the human body in which the film has its axis must be immediate and dense. It is likely that Artaud was aware of a precedent to this aspect of his theory, in the form of the Italian Futurist film manifesto of November 1916, which had demanded “polyexpressiveness” and proposed “filmed unreal reconstructions of the human body”.[8] With a scenario such as The Butcher’s Revolt that projected the amalgamation of diverse, volatile physical elements into a spatially flexible and eruptive structure, Artaud was envisaging a cinema which – like all of his subsequent visual and aural work – was acutely resistant to representation.

  Despite prolonged efforts, Artaud failed to find the money to finance the planned production of The Butcher’s Revolt. He abandoned writing scenarios and his theoretical work on the cinema tailed off at the same time, while, for the next five years, he was forced to continue acting in films – an occupation which he viewed as menial and humiliating. His film-acting career had started well, with his part in the director Claude Autant-Lara’s experimental first film Fait Divers[9], produced in 1924, the same year as Artaud also wrote his own first film scenario. For a time in the second half of the 1920s, Artaud was well on his way to becoming a film star.[10] He made twenty-two film-acting appearances in all, from 1924 to 1935.

  Among the most successful of these were his startling presences in Jean Painlevé’s Mathusalem, in Abel Gance’s Napoleon (he appeared both in the silent version of 1926 and the sound version of 1935), in Carl Dreyer’s 1927 film The Passion Of Joan Of Arc – the film whose shooting had coincided with that of The Seashell And The Clergyman – and in Fritz Lang’s only French film, Liliom, from 1933. His unusual acting in all of these films oscillates with gestural control between paroxysmal facial seizures and a kind of broken emotional grandeur. Artaud also travelled to Berlin three times (twice in 1930 and once in 1932) to act in films for the German cinema industry. He had a small role in G. W. Pabst’s film of Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera, a film which Artaud despised for what he called its “vulgarity and its complete disorientation”.[11] In fact, almost all of these films – with the exception of his work for Dreyer – constituted painfully degrading work for Artaud, most especially Raymond Bernard’s abysmal epic of patriotic fervour, The Wooden Crosses, from 1931, in which Artaud plays an enthusiastic French soldier in the First World War who leaps over the edge of the trench towards the Germans, yelling: “I shit on you, you bastards!” (Artaud had also appeared in Bernard’s Tarakanova of 1929). This “abominable work”[12], as he called it, contributed to the exhaustion of Artaud’s engagement with cinema of every kind, and in 1932 he would conclude: “I am ever more convinced that the cinema is and will remain the art of the past. You cannot work in it without feeling ashamed.”[13]

  An innovative and extreme theory of cinema emerges from the short series of texts which Artaud produced at the same time as writing his scenarios. Artaud’s theory of cinema is a theory of fragments. It is an oblique, tangential theory with an impulse towards self-cancellation. To some extent, Artaud’s theory of cinema serves directly to disassemble and negate the practical attempts which he was making simultaneously to create film works.

  Artaud’s theoretical film writing, like all of his work, exists in a state of constant flux, with points of abandonment followed by points of resurgence. Artaud writes with the greatest degree of vision and theoretical acuity about film projects which he has already
definitively abandoned. His proposals for the cinema are often best seized, in their ephemerality, on the margin of overlap between his theoretical texts and the letters he wrote about his theories, to figures such as the magazine editor Jean Paulhan. The form of the letter was always a privileged site for Artaud in the dissemination of his theoretical work – a form in which polemical exhortation could be allied to direct address. For Artaud, the letter had the effect of imparting confidential or urgent information in the form of a kind of written contract; once the addressee had received the letter, they were involuntarily and compulsorily bound into Artaud’s project as a supporter. In Artaud’s acutely heterogeneous “letters of theory”, as they might be called, the content oscillates wildly between individual obsession and an objective interrogation of wider subject matters, such as the origins and processes of dreaming. In exploring the potential of Artaud’s theory of cinema, then, what needs to be pinpointed is the space of intersection between his avowedly theoretical fragments, his letters of theory, and the scenarios that sought visually to form a counterpart – simultaneously interlinked and deeply divisive – to his linguistic preoccupations with the cinema. A final element in this conglomeration of material is Dulac’s The Seashell And The Clergyman, with its superficial but loyal attachment to Artaud’s images.

  In Artaud’s theory of cinema, representation is perceived as an abyss. From his earliest writings, such as his correspondence with Jacques Rivière on the nature of poetry, Artaud had spoken of a dual trap, within which all of his attempts to create language fell apart. Firstly, he was faced with the dispersal of his language through inarticulation – the intractable slippages which his mental images suffered as they were brought into a textual form. And secondly, on the occasions when he was finally able to assemble a text, he was immediately faced with its loss into representation, which he perceived as the stealing-away of the unique or original relevance which his language had possessed to his physical presence. In Artaud’s work, the body is everything: to transform or transmit the body is the intention of all his work.

  His incessant hostility towards the process of representation – as the power which assimilates and sabotages this intention – endured throughout his work, and would become most angrily forceful in his approach to his drawings and recordings of 1946–48. By the time he came to work on his final project, To Have Done With The Judgement Of God, Artaud would conceive of representation as being inextricably and maliciously linked to social and religious institutions, writing in 1947: “there is nothing I abominate and execrate so much as this idea… of representation,/that is, of virtuality, of non-reality… attached to all that is produced and shown, as if it were intended in that way to socialize and at the same time paralyse monsters, to make the possibilities of explosive deflagration which are too dangerous for life pass instead by the channel of the stage, screen or microphone, and so turn them away from life.”[14] Artaud’s theory of cinema is one of the primary points of origin for this unique rage against representation, since the essential focus of his rage at this time is the gap of representation between language and image. That gap is what impairs the transmission of his imageries of the human body. For Artaud, the arena of cinema is made up of intangible plays of light, of temporal delays and spatial wastelands, all of which constitute the dead zone of representation.[15] Representation works to deny his conception of a filmic work in direct contact with the human body; the image is always stripped of its imminence. But, at the time of his film work (in contrast to his later work in drawings and recordings), Artaud still recognized that the element of mediation is inescapable in the cinema, and that it had to be both ambushed and worked with. His film theory, then, formulates a confrontation with representation, with the aim of tearing the image away from representation, to transplant it directly into the film spectator’s ocular nerves and sensations.

  Artaud aimed to make his film images dense – and so resistant to the temporal process of representation – by emphasizing their existence in space and their sense of perpetual movement. Around these images of the body, all of the other elements in his scenarios are articulated only to the extent that they are then immediately suppressed, destroyed or subtracted from his filmic world. His film language becomes one of dissolution, with an arrhythmic narrative, and with images pounded down to compact visual sensation. He wrote: “search for a film with purely visual sensations in which the force would emerge from a collision exacted on the eyes”.[16] (The constant emphasis on an ocular attack upon the spectator in Artaud’s film work necessarily recalls the literal eye-slitting, with its own implications for spectatorship, which is staged at the opening of Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou – a film that, as noted earlier, the director was preparing at the time he saw The Seashell And The Clergyman.) For Artaud, the concentrated impact which his film would exert on its spectator’s perception would result from the disjunctive but accumulating force of his images, amassing to produce a dynamic and essentially spatial inscription of his concerns. With a project such as The Butcher’s Revolt, the imagery’s sensory charge would be accentuated still further by its juxtaposition with elements of noise and with verbal outbursts.

  Artaud’s conception of cinema moves away from the dominant film fiction of the time – with its attempt to invisibly integrate the new sound technology with the image – towards a more jarring interaction of elements of control and chance. In inviting a disruptive element of chance into his otherwise rigorously formulated work, Artaud was engaging to some degree with the documentary film form, in which directorial intention was ostensibly always subject to being overruled by the random emanation and perverse occurrences of reality itself.[17] All of Artaud’s scenarios project an atmosphere of darkness, blood and shock at the boundary between intention and chance. This is the point where opposites meet and collide – divisions between reality and fiction, and between the individual and an engulfing society. Artaud’s film theory delineates a conflict staged upon borderlines, spatially charting the trajectories of what he calls “the simple impact of objects, forms, repulsions, attractions”.[18]

  The borders of image and language inhabited by Artaud’s film work are the sites of these multiple collisions, most notably between the subjective and social realities which he would later interrogate in his recorded work. His obstinate traversal of textual and visual borders always implies a negative push: the image stays in the domain of the image, or else risks annihilation. In this relentless collapsing of borders, Artaud’s film theory moves towards a fall into catastrophe – in fact, towards a zone in which the filmic counterpart to the theory is desired but impossible. And in this theory, the image aimed for and the spectator aimed at would be in a dangerous state of interaction.

  Artaud’s film theory intends to force its spectators into a position of subjugation to its imageries, with its visual flood of disintegration and disaster; but, at the same time, the theory espouses a violent unleashing of the spectators’ senses – those spectators remain alertly grounded in the tactile world, aware both of what the film is subjecting them to, and also incited to react, in simultaneously physical and revolutionary ways.

  Artaud’s theoretical writings and his scenarios possess and maintain their own relentlessly self-annihilating logic which is never transgressed, and moves toward the act of demonstrating images of the insurgent human body at their most stripped-away and condensed – and thereby, in Artaud’s conception, at their most resistant to the process of representation. His scenarios are expelled under great internal pressure from his obsessions, and are pitched to explode in the spectator’s eyes – directly conveying “the convulsions and jumps of a reality which seems to destroy itself with an irony where you can hear the extremities of the mind screaming.”[19]

  For Artaud, the cinema was literally a stimulant or narcotic, acting directly and materially on the eyes and the senses. He called his film projects “raw cinema”[20], and though they were designed initially to investigate the mechanisms of dreamin
g, they came to demand a more immediately physical contact between the cinematic image and the spectator. Like Artaud’s “Theatre of Cruelty” of the mid-1930s, this was a language of film that could work only once – taking the form of one unique film and, in theory, one sole and unrepeatable screening and one set of spectators. It avoided to its extreme limit the process of signification and representation, using instead an imagery compacted together from control, chance and the body’s projection.

  Artaud’s project for the cinema is, in historical terms, lost. It aimed to divert the future course of cinema (and to cancel out cinema’s pre-existing course) at a moment of great transformation – that of the coming of sound – when it appeared possible that film could be sent into an unknown direction with the potential for a new relationship between the film and its audience. Many other extraordinary experiments and theories of cinema were being formulated at the same time as Artaud’s plans. In the Soviet Union, Dziga Vertov’s polemics about spectatorship and revolution were, in their way, as visionary and radical as Artaud’s. But, where Vertov was able to direct his film The Man With The Movie Camera, Artaud produced nothing. Artaud’s vision of cinema, not least because of its integral self-cancellation, cannot stand on the strength of its celluloid imagery (which goes no further than the first, directionless step of The Seashell And The Clergyman). Where Buñuel’s films gained an aura of enigma through the consistent theoretical reticence of their maker, Artaud’s cinema is all theory and written images, and no films.