Like his drawings of the mid-1940s, it is in raging flux between imagery and commentary. As the history of cinema transpired, the meshing together of sound and image which Artaud had protested against in 1929 also effectively terminated the first headlong rush of Buñuel’s cinema, and brought to an end the great experimental decade of European cinema.
Artaud’s cinema has only one direct successor: the Lettrist cinema of the early 1950s created by Isidore Isou and Maurice Lemaître, with its emphasis on negation and its violent approach to spectatorship.[21] A scattering of other films have taken on elements of Artaud’s project for cinema. Georges Franju’s 1949 hybrid amalgam of documentary and hallucination, The Blood Of The Beasts – set in the Parisian slaughterhouses, and shot in the face of palpable hostility and invective towards the film-maker from the slaughterhouse workers as they slit multiple throats with insouciance – absorbs both Artaud’s concern with the documentary form, and the blood-saturated atmosphere of The Butcher’s Revolt. The ritual films of the legendary Vienna Action Group of artists – particularly those by Otto Muehl and Hermann Nitsch, who were both strongly preoccupied with Artaud’s work in the mid-1960s, when they were documenting their performances through film works – also approach the rigorous collision of blood, slaughter and chance which Artaud had envisaged for film.[22]
Artaud desired a cinema that could confront the fragmentation and the horror of representation that ran throughout his work. The spectator of his proposed cinema is placed at the very extremes of visual experience, physically exposed to a multiple criss-crossing of expulsive forces which necessitate a transformation of the conditions and nature of visual perception, and impel a resistance towards society and towards cinema itself.
NOTES
The most valuable documents on Artaud’s work in cinema are those accompanying the film retrospectives held in Paris at the Centre Georges Pompidou in 1987, edited by Jean-Paul Morel, and in London at the National Film Theatre in 1993, edited by Stephen Barber and Jane Giles. All of Artaud’s film scenarios and his essays on cinema – usually formulated in short, fragmentary texts of two or three pages – are included in Volume III (1978) of the Oeuvres Complètes ( Collected Works), 1956–1994, published by Éditions Gallimard in Paris and edited anonymously by Paule Thévenin.
(1) The Seashell And The Clergyman was distributed in this version by the American company Glenn Photo Supply, which distributed 16mm film copies to Britain. It took until the early 1980s before an American film historian, Sandy Flitterman-Lewis (who was writing a book on the work of the film’s director, Germaine Dulac), noticed that the reels were in the wrong order. This discovery appears not to have reached the film’s distributors, unless they were oblivious to it, since they continue to use the mis-edited version.
(2) This account is drawn from a consultation of a series of manuscript letters between Artaud and Germaine Dulac, held in the library collection of the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal in Paris, together with an archive of newspaper accounts of the Ursulines screening and statements made by Artaud and Dulac to the press about the film.
(3) The original manuscript of the scenario of The Seashell And The Clergyman, and Dulac’s shooting script in its various stages, are in the library collection of the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal.
(4) Antonin Artaud, Cinéma Et Réalité (1927), collected in Oeuvres Complètes, Volume III, Éditions Gallimard, Paris, 1978, page 19.
(5) Antonin Artaud, extract from lecture (1929), Oeuvres Complètes, Volume III, page 377.
(6) Antonin Artaud, untitled note (1930) accompanying La Révolte Du Boucher, in Oeuvres Complètes, Volume III, page 54.
(7) ibid, page 54.
(8) Film manifesto entitled “The Futurist Cinema”, originally published in the journal L’Italia Futurista, Rome, issue 9, 11 November 1916, and reproduced in part in the catalogue Film As Film, Hayward Gallery, London, 1979, pages 79–80. Almost every one of the films made by the Italian Futurist movement in the 1910s has been lost.
(9) In Fait Divers, Artaud plays a suave, lipstick-wearing adulterer with sperm-stained trousers who is strangled to death by his lover’s irate husband. Claude Autant-Lara was only twenty-three years old when he directed Fait Divers. The film’s aura of compulsion and obsession, together with its intricate superimpositions and slow-motion sequences, all prefigure those in Germaine Dulac’s The Seashell And The Clergyman (particularly the erotic scene of Artaud’s slow-motion strangulation, which parallels the throttling of the lecherous military officer in Dulac’s film). Autant-Lara went on to become a successful mainstream film director, but the attacks of the French “New Wave” critics on what they saw as his “archaic, bourgeois melodramas” contributed to the premature end of his film-directing career at the beginning of the 1960s; however, he began a prominent new career at the end of the 1980s, aged almost ninety, as an extreme right-wing Member of the European Parliament.
(10) When Artaud died in March 1948, long after his film-acting career was over, affectionate obituaries of him appeared in numerous French film-fan magazines.
(11) Antonin Artaud, letter to Jean Paulhan, 22 January 1932, Oeuvres Complètes, Volume III, page 261.
(12) Antonin Artaud, letter to Yvonne Allendy, 2 June 1931, Oeuvres Complètes, Volume III, page 207.
(13) Antonin Artaud, letter to Louis Jouvet, 20 May 1932, Oeuvres Complètes, Volume III, page 283.
(14) Antonin Artaud, working notes (November 1947) towards Pour En Finir Avec Le Jugement De Dieu, in Oeuvres Complètes, Volume XIII, 1974, pages 258–259.
(15) By way of a contrast, the celebrated French film director Robert Bresson’s approach to representation is exactly the inverse of Artaud’s in formulation, but is strangely similar in intention and result. Where Artaud wants to refuse representation but project everything (that is, the body), Bresson declared that his sparse, condensed kind of cinema is “the art, with images, of representing nothing”. Robert Bresson, Notes Sur Le Cinématographie, Éditions Gallimard, 1975, page 20.
(16) Cinéma Et Réalité, page 19.
(17) There are notable exceptions to this. In Luis Buñuel’s documentary, Land Without Bread, for example, the film’s voice-over describes how things are so bad and backward in the poverty-stricken Spanish village which is the subject of the film that the villagers’ livestock voluntarily commit suicide by jumping over a cliff. The film shows the animals doing this. But when the image is studied closely, it’s just possible to see the film crew pushing the animals over the cliff.
(18) Cinéma Et Réalité, page 20.
(19) ibid, page 20.
(20) Antonin Artaud, Sorcellerie Et Cinéma (1927), Oeuvres Complètes, Volume III, page 66.
(21) The Lettrists were the last, most redundant, and least known, of the great twentieth-century Parisian art movements. The Situationist movement – which played a key part in the May 1968 riots in Paris – emerged in the early 1950s as a dissident offshoot of the Lettrists, whose leader, Isidore Isou (born in Rumania in 1925), was a crazed autocrat in the mould of André Breton; many of the young writers and artists who had been associated with the group, such as Guy Debord and François Dufrêne, made an early departure from Isou’s tyrannical but dishevelled movement. The best-known works of the Lettrist cinema are Isou’s film Tract Of Drool And Eternity (Traité De Bave Et D’Eternité) and Maurice Lemaître’s film Has The Film Already Started? (Le Film Est Déjà Commencé?), both from 1951. The Lettrist group knew Artaud’s work well and they had come into personal contact with him during the last year of his life – they would often go up to Artaud and harangue him (to Artaud’s total indifference) as he sat writing in cafés. Isou’s two-hour-long film aims to negate both itself and the entire history of cinema up to that point. The sound and image of the film are set in confrontation with one another: Isou strategically resists the cohering and assimilating nature of film sound, as Artaud had in 1929, and subjects the spectator to a hallucinatory accumulation of damaged images (the celluloid itself is
scratched and obliterated). For Isou, the attacked spectator’s sensory upheaval is in itself revolutionary. The film was a seminal influence on the work of the American experimental film-maker Stan Brakhage. Lemaître’s film uses the same strategies as Isou’s, but with greater ferocity. Accounts of the events surrounding the first screening of Lemaître’s one-hour-long hand-coloured film particularly recall the self-destruction integral to Artaud’s own film work and its corrosive approach to spectatorship. Before the film’s screening, Lemaître threw rubbish at the people queuing to be admitted to the cinema. He also offered money to couples in the queue, suggesting they should use it to pay for a hotel room to have sex rather than wasting their time watching his film. During the projection of the film, Lemaître threw buckets of water at his spectators and fired off a gun; finally, he called the police and the projection ended in a riot. His strategy of negation continued even after the film’s few screenings. Lemaître left the original negative of the film for over forty years in a damp corner, hoping that it would deteriorate to the point where it could no longer be projected. Finally though, in 1993, he decided that his film was now a historical document and restored it – newly hand-colouring the negative – before it was released in video format by Light Cone Video, Paris, in 1995.
(22) The Vienna Action Group’s crucial work took place in the mid-1960s when the young artists Günter Brus, Hermann Nitsch and Otto Muehl, all of whom allied their work closely with that of Artaud, staged performances which explored the vulnerability of the human body to obliteration. Their obsession took the form of highly disciplined rituals of sacrifice and horror, performed in public, in which they would cut open the carcasses of animals over the naked bodies of the performers, so that the spilled organs of the animals became indistinguishable from the human sexual organs. The performance space was drenched in blood. The performances were documented by handheld 8mm and 16mm film cameras; the volatile, out-of-control quality of the resulting black-and-white films was generated by the inability of the wildly moving cameras to document more than chance elements of the spectacles, which possess a vertiginous impact of carnage on film. The work of the other major participant of the Action Group, Rudolph Schwarzkogler, was privately documented by photography rather than film, and inhabited a zone of acute exposure and isolation; his performers had razor blades attached to their penises while their hands were bandaged, and their mouths gagged and stuffed with wire. The work of the Action Group was driven by their derision for the fascism which they viewed as being still tangible in the everyday life of their city – the Austrian social bureaucracy, active in the Nazis’ management of wartime genocide and oppression, had survived and needed to be attacked. The Action Group was also intent on producing images of human existence under the impact of a meticulously created violence, which would erupt in performance in virulent sprays and gestures of blood. Their performances proved acutely provocative, even within the context of the 1960s; the artists were incessantly arrested and Schwarzkogler, after abandoning his performance work in dejection, committed suicide in 1969 by throwing himself from the window of his apartment. Both Nitsch and Muehl attempted to create oppositional communities to negate the society they despised. Nitsch bought the derelict Prinzendorf castle in rural Austria and established a commune of artists (still in existence) who staged and filmed Artaud-inspired ritual performances of bloodshed, meat and screams with cathartic aims. Muehl’s community was more corrosive and extreme than that of Nitsch, whose work became lauded even by the Austrian government in the 1990s. Muehl founded his nihilistic, sexually-charged “AA Kommune” in which the idea of ownership was outlawed, but his experiment ended in calamity when the commune perversely evolved from its original aim of revolutionary equality into total dictatorship (with Muehl in the position of abusive power); Muehl spent much of the 1990s in prison after being convicted for having sex with children in the commune. Films of the Vienna Action Group can be viewed, along with films by artists associated with them (notably Kurt Kren and Ernst Schmidt), at events such as exhibitions of work by Nitsch. (Interviews with Hermann Nitsch and Ursula Krinzinger, Vienna, February 1992.) For further information, see The Art Of Destruction: The Films of The Vienna Action Group by Stephen Barber (Creation Books, 2004/Elektron Ebooks, 2013).
2 : A New Anatomy: Artaud’s Drawings 1937–48
Artaud’s drawing work is among the most astonishing explorations of an imagery of the human figure. It is work executed with an unprecedented obsessionality, using a degree of reinvention of the body that has parallels with only one or two figures within European art: figures such as Francis Bacon and Edvard Munch, whose ultimate obsession, like Artaud’s, was to make an image of the body alive and screaming. Artaud would declare himself at the end of his life to be someone entirely without progenitors, without successors – his work radically sealed within his own body, though always ready to explode out. For the first forty years after his death, his drawings did possess such a unique, insular status, since they were almost unseen and unknown. On the day of Artaud’s death, 4 March 1948, his young friend and literary executor, Paule Thévenin, had collected the drawings from the pavilion in the southern suburbs of Paris where Artaud had been living.
A small number of drawings were already in private collections, but Artaud had held onto the vast majority of them. Thévenin kept the drawings on the walls of her large three-storey apartment (part of an old factory complex) in the Reuilly district of Paris. Only her guests ever saw the drawings, hung alongside photographs of Artaud and of her other close friends, such as Jean Genet. She would tell her guests that the drawings were fragile – executed with cheap, basic materials on deteriorating, low-grade paper – and could not travel to exhibitions. And she pointed out that her reluctance about publicly showing them matched that of Artaud himself, who, she believed, felt at the end of his life that exhibiting his drawings before a large audience would impair their power and make them vulnerable to manipulation (he had asserted the same things about van Gogh’s work).[1] It was only in 1986 that Paule Thévenin decided that she would agree to a full-scale exhibition of the drawings, in the aftermath of the publication in France and Germany of a catalogue of the drawings which she had compiled. A full-scale exhibition of almost all of Artaud’s drawings opened at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris on 30 June 1987. In the sixteen years since that time, Artaud’s drawings have acquired an extraordinary new life.
It was only during the last three years of Artaud’s own life that his preoccupation with physical transformation led him to what is undoubtedly the most enduring visual manifestation of his work: his drawings. The years between Artaud’s abandonment of his cinema projects and the subsequent collapse of his film-acting career, in 1935, and the start of the essential phase of his drawing work, ten years later, had been a time of expulsion, torture and incarceration.
Artaud’s attempts to incorporate his theories of performance within a sequence of spectacles in the Parisian theatre of the mid-1930s – the project which he called the “Theatre of Cruelty” – had been painful failures, and had left few material traces. (It would only be in the late 1950s that the sequence of essays which he had written to support his experiments in theatre, The Theatre And Its Double, would begin to achieve their legendary status.) The “Theatre of Cruelty” was based around ideas of an unrepeatable, ferociously gestural event, which would combust itself in its act of realization. But, in the event, the ephemerality of Artaud’s theatrical performances was due more to the ridicule and neglect which they met in the Parisian theatrical milieu, rather than to their own intention to survive only in the lacerated consciousness of their spectators.
Artaud left Paris abruptly in January 1936, shortly after making his final two appearances as a film actor, in Abel Gance’s Lucrecia Borgia and Maurice Tourneur’s Koenigsmark. Like almost all of his film roles, Artaud had experienced these last appearances as humiliations (in the inane Koenigsmark, a lumbering costume drama, he had a small part as an ecce
ntric chemist). That previous year had also seen the disastrous run of his final “Theatre of Cruelty” spectacle, The Cenci. Artaud travelled first to the mountains of northern Mexico, where he participated in the peyote drug rituals of the Tarahumara Indians, hoping to find a revolutionary culture of fire and dance which would supplant his terminally jaded experience of European culture. After a brief period back in France, during which he became enthralled by apocalyptic ideas of an imminent global catastrophe, Artaud set out again for the remote Aran islands of western Ireland, from where he intended to watch the end of what he saw as a corrupt and compromised world. He had written a text giving precise dates for the different stages of the cataclysm, and had published it in Paris in the form of an anonymous booklet entitled The New Revelations Of Being. In Ireland, he spent weeks in a state of destitution, and wrote innumerable letters to friends and associates in Paris, covering the paper in vividly coloured signs and fetish symbols, and burning holes into the ripped and stained surface with cigarette ends. The content of the letters dealt with his apocalyptic prophecies, and with his own part in the aftermath of the devastation; he expected to survive and to assume a position of great power over a re-emerging new world. But, as the days went on and no signs of an impending cataclysm appeared, the letters took on a tone of furious frustration.
Artaud: The Screaming Body: Film, Drawings, Recordings 1924-1948 Page 3