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

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  ARTAUD: THE SCREAMING BODY

  BY STEPHEN BARBER

  AN EBOOK

  ISBN 978-1-908694-91-1

  PUBLISHED BY ELEKTRON EBOOKS

  COPYRIGHT 2013 ELEKTRON EBOOKS/STEPHEN BARBER

  www.elektron-ebooks.com

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a database or retrieval system, posted on any internet site, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright holders. Any such copyright infringement of this publication may result in civil prosecution

  INTRODUCTION

  The impact of the work of Antonin Artaud in the fields of art, writing and performance has been colossal, expanding and multiplying its potential as time sifts through its repercussions and ricochets, and as previously unknown work has been made available. Artaud’s acutely lucid investigations into the nature of language and representation, of society and madness, and of the human body and gesture, have all proved extraordinarily seminal, especially in French theoretical work from the mid-1960s to the present, in the writings of such figures as Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze and Julia Kristeva.

  In the 1960s, it was Artaud’s theatrical work – the theory and imagery of the “Theatre of Cruelty” – which proved a huge source of world-wide inspiration for experiments in theatrical form and staging. But in more recent years, it has been Artaud’s non-theatrical work which has provoked the most intense attention. Exhibitions of his drawings have been held in Paris, at the Centre Georges Pompidou, in 1987 and 1994; in Marseilles, at the Musée Cantini, in 1995; in New York, at the Museum of Modern Art, in 1996; and in Vienna, at the Museum Moderner Kunst, in 2002. Retrospectives of Artaud’s work in cinema have been held in Paris, at the Centre Georges Pompidou, in 1987, and in London, at the National Film Theatre, in 1993. And Artaud’s recorded work for radio – notably his incendiary final project of screams and protests, To Have Done With The Judgement Of God, which was completed only six weeks before his death and whose transmission was prohibited – has been issued in its entirety on compact disc in France, in 1995. All of these manifestations of Artaud’s previously hidden or inaccessible work have accentuated the need constantly to re-assess and interrogate his language and images as new, intersecting constellations.

  This book solely concerns Artaud’s non-theatrical work. It explores his work in cinema in the 1920s and early 1930s and his attempts to find filmic forms for his theories of cinema, which directly prefigure his subsequent work in the areas of drawings and recordings. The book investigates the intricate trajectory of Artaud’s drawings – from intentionally decimated magic “spells”, to fragmented imageries of the human body executed in a lunatic asylum, and ultimately to facial portraits conceived as raw excavations of human identity. Finally, the book examines Artaud’s recorded work of the end of his life as the most intensive realization of his plan to anatomize and recast the entire conception of the human body. This is one of the most astonishing, extreme and radical projects in the culture of the twentieth century. All of Artaud’s visual work is multi-dimensional, both ferocious in its anti-social polemic and densely nuanced in its visual texture. Even Artaud’s scream, as this book will show, is visual in intent: a visualization of the human body as Artaud projected it, in his uniquely ambitious and challenging final work.

  1 : Extremities of the Mind: Artaud’s Film Projects 1924–35

  Artaud devoted a great deal of his time to cinema projects in the years between 1924 and 1935, from the ages of twenty-eight to thirty-nine. He wrote fifteen film scenarios in all, and was the only one of the writers associated with the French Surrealist movement to produce a body of theoretical work about the potential of cinema. But despite his expansive engagement with cinema, it is the crucial area of his production which has remained most closed to investigation. To some extent, this is the result of the fragmentary and scattered nature of Artaud’s theoretical writings on the cinema, and of the relentless calamities he faced in attempting to make films that could embody his revolutionary theories for cinema.

  One particular factor in this occlusion has been that Artaud is known as having written the scenario for one of the three great examples of Surrealist cinema, The Seashell And The Clergyman (the other two being Luis Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou and L’Age d’Or), but this is a film which has acquired an ambiguous and contradictory reputation. In contrast to Buñuel’s two films, it is very rarely seen. The film baffled most viewers whenever it was screened in Britain and the United States, largely due to the intervention of a disruptive element of chance which would certainly have pleased the Surrealists, if not Artaud himself. When the reels of the film were first sent from France to the United States for distribution, they were reassembled by error in completely the wrong order. The version of the film which resulted is the one which has been most prominently distributed in the United States and Britain from the late 1920s to the present. The incoherence of the work certainly contributed to the censorship initially imposed upon the film by the British Board of Film Censors, which used the justification: “The film is so cryptic as to be meaningless. If there is a meaning, it is doubtless objectionable.”[1]

  A further factor in the reputed distancing of The Seashell And The Clergyman from Artaud’s own intentions lay in the dispute over the gap between text and image that flared up between Artaud and the film’s director, Germaine Dulac. The film acquired the reputation in the late 1920s of having been steered away from its original conception by Dulac, to the detriment of the project. Artaud had originally intended to direct his scenario himself, but failed to find the funding to do so. As a result, he deposited the manuscript of the scenario, which he had written in April 1927, at an institute where film producers could look at scenarios with a view to acquiring the rights to film them. Dulac found the scenario there, and decided both to produce and direct the film herself. Dulac was already a legendary figure within experimental film circles – a prolific member of the group of French film-makers known as the Impressionists, which included Abel Gance, and the only female film-maker working in France at the time. Although Artaud had been expelled from the Surrealist movement by its leader André Breton in November of the previous year, his association with what remained at the time an extremely fashionable movement convinced Dulac of the objective challenge to be faced in attempting, for the first time, to make a “surrealist” film work.

  When The Seashell And The Clergyman went into production in the summer of 1927, Artaud began to write to Dulac, making insistent demands on her that he should be allowed to collaborate fully on the project, and to edit the film himself. He also wanted to act the part of the clergyman in the production. He was making his living as a cinema actor at the time, appearing in both mainstream and experimental productions, and currently had a role in the Danish director Carl Dreyer’s film The Passion Of Joan Of Arc, which was being shot in Paris. He persuaded Dreyer to release him from work for the period from 8 to 20 July, in the hope that he could prevail upon Dulac to let him act during those days in The Seashell And The Clergyman. Dulac, who clearly had no intention of allowing her directorial independence to be sabotaged by sharing her decisions with Artaud, then delayed the shooting of the film and the editing sessions until August and September 1927, when Artaud was once again fully occupied with his work for Dreyer. Artaud grew increasingly angry, and when the film was screened for the first time, at the Ursulines cinema in Paris on 9 February 1928, he announced that his scenario had suffered unacceptable d
istortion by Dulac, who, he claimed, had “butchered” it. Despite his forcible severance from the Surrealist movement, Artaud managed to gain the alliance of a number of Surrealists (and fellow expelled Surrealists) in his protests against Dulac; the Surrealists viewed Dulac as an opportunistic interloper on their preoccupations. The Ursulines screening descended into a cultural riot of the kind which the Surrealists habitually staged throughout the 1920s. At the screening, the writer Robert Desnos initiated a volley of invective and screams directed at Germaine Dulac, and the film projection was abandoned in chaos. Two newspaper accounts gave contradictory accounts of Artaud’s own participation in the brawl: in one, Artaud ran wild and shattered the cinema’s hall mirrors, crying “Goulou! Goulou!”; in the other version, he was sitting quietly in the cinema with his mother, and uttered only one word during the glossolaliac uproar: “Enough”.[2]

  Although Artaud claimed that a manipulative disparity had been opened up by Dulac between the language of his scenario and the imagery of her film, it can be established that Dulac attempted to follow Artaud’s scenario with great fidelity.[3] Her changes to the scenario are limited to practical, technical measures that enable the explicit representation of often semi-abstract images. In Artaud’s original scenario, a clergyman undertakes a sequence of violent and obsessive actions. The fragmented narrative propels the clergyman through a perpetually shifting space of long corridors, crystalline landscapes and narrow city streets. He is sexually tormented in a confessional box by a beautiful woman with white hair, and vents his fury upon the figure of a lecherous military officer. The clergyman’s identity collides with that of the officer, and he is constantly surrounded by shattering glass and flowing liquids. His multiple confrontations with the beautiful woman end with her suffering grotesque physical and facial distortions, her tongue “stretching out to infinity”.

  Dulac filmed the images of the scenario with scrupulousness, but, for Artaud, neutralized their virulence by treating them as being simply the representation of a dream. At the beginning of the film, she used the title: The Seashell And The Clergyman: A Dream, and gave press interviews in which she announced that she was attempting to find a filmic equivalent for a dream. This infuriated Artaud, who had an intricate theoretical concern with the workings of dream images. He objected also to the way in which the film had sutured together the raw and disjunctive images of his scenario, so that the film flowed easily for the spectator, despite the illogicality of its narrative. Dulac, who was – for that period – a technologically highly advanced director able to execute complex superimpositions of image over image, had used every technical means at her disposal to find cinematic equivalents for Artaud’s written images in his scenario, which often gave no indication of the ways in which they should be transposed into cinematic images. It was this very slavishness of Dulac’s in following his work which ultimately exasperated Artaud – by duplicating his work, she had distorted and betrayed it – coupled with his anger at being excluded from the film-making process.

  As a result of the riot at its première, The Seashell And The Clergyman was abruptly taken off the Ursulines programme. The following year, 1929, the film’s fragile reputation was entirely overshadowed by Buñuel’s celebrated collaboration with Salvador Dali, Un Chien Andalou, which gained the prestige of being the seminal Surrealist film. Buñuel had attended the screening of The Seashell And The Clergyman while preparing his own film, and Artaud would claim, three years later, that Un Chien Andalou, along with Jean Cocteau’s 1930 film The Blood Of A Poet, had stolen elements of the hallucinatory imagery, and the strategy of using sudden transitions of time and space, from the film whose scenario he had written. By that time, 1932, Artaud had largely reversed his negative attitude towards The Seashell And The Clergyman, claiming it to be a precursor of Buñuel and Cocteau’s films. But despite this belated recuperation of the film on Artaud’s part, and the objective resemblance between Artaud’s written evocation of acts and images in his scenario and their transposition by Dulac into corresponding filmic images, a theoretical abyss separates the scenario and the film.

  This abyss took the form of Artaud’s project for a cinema with far-reaching aims and conception. It was a cinema backed by a theory intended both to exact a radical obliteration of all cinematic history up until that point, and to create a reinvention of spectatorship, by negating the basis of film in the rapport between illusory and pacifying patterns of light and their incorporated, enmeshed spectator.

  With the exception of Artaud’s ideas, no theory of cinema whatsoever existed among the writers associated with the Surrealist movement at the time. There was, however, a great engagement with cinema in the Surrealist movement, and an enthusiasm for attending numerous film screenings in rapid succession in order to induce a kind of visual delirium or overload in the spectator. With the encouragement of their leader, André Breton, a number of the Surrealists were preoccupied with film as a fertile terrain of psychological investigation; Breton himself envisaged the eventual creation of a world-wide Surrealist cinema with the potential to metamorphose all perception of reality. Several Surrealists, notably Robert Desnos and Benjamin Péret, had written unfilmed scenarios in the form of descriptions of their dreams.

  But, in direct opposition to such descriptive work, Artaud was proposing an investigation of the systems of dreaming, with the aim of discovering their mechanisms and their collapsing structures (for Artaud, a dream always collapsed into violence and fragmentation). In this way, he intended to formulate films which would reconstitute the violent power of dreaming as a process directly projected into cinematic imagery. This would overrule interpretation or explanation: his stated aim was to “realize this idea of visual cinema where psychology itself is devoured by the acts”.[4] Artaud had drawn the images for The Seashell And The Clergyman not from one of his own dreams, but from the transcription of a dream written down by his friend Yvonne Allendy; he viewed this distance as imperative for him to launch his attempt to seize what he saw as the visceral emanation of the process of dreaming.

  Among the Surrealists, only Buñuel was able to find the finance for a sequence of films (he borrowed money from his mother and, for a time, had a wealthy patron). Artaud negatively associated Buñuel’s work with the Surrealist practice of automatic writing, which he detested as creatively passive and antithetical to his own concerns with intentionality and a revolutionary struggle that was to be essentially waged around the human body. But, like Artaud (who was envisaging projects that would document cataclysmic human and natural events), Buñuel was drawn by the documentary form, and included a documentary sequence in L’Age d’Or. Before the financial constraints of the new sound cinema at the beginning of the 1930s terminated his film-making activities for nearly twenty years, Buñuel would make the sardonic documentary Land Without Bread (1932), about what he perceived to be the ignorantly self-inflicted poverty of an isolated Spanish community who threw away food and medicines because they failed to understand their uses. But Buñuel’s cinema was avowedly non-theoretical: it engaged to some extent with issues of psychoanalysis, but took its own creativity as enforcing a wilful blindness towards any system of thought, however revolutionary or deviant that system might be.

  Artaud developed his theory of cinema around the many other scenarios which he was writing at the time of The Seashell And The Clergyman. His theory of cinema appears at the intersection between the images of the scenarios and the preoccupations in language which impelled them. And to some extent, his theory of cinema emerges in direct tension with many of these scenarios. The subject matters of Artaud’s scenarios – some of which were clearly written at great speed – vary very widely, and in style they range from oblique chains of unconnected images to highly accessible and cogent plot descriptions of characters engaged in physical struggles. One reason for this latter quality of accessibility in some of Artaud’s scenarios was that he was always extremely short of money in the 1920s and 1930s; his theoretical concerns often c
lash incongruously with the need for his ideas about cinema to help to generate an income for him. For example, one of his scenarios, entitled Flights, was an entirely commercial project intended to connect into the increasing popular interest of the time in long-distance aviation, reflected in extensive media coverage. The plot revolves around two competing attempts to accomplish a long and difficult journey, with the protagonists affiliated to the mutually exclusive qualities of “romance” and “villainy” that prevailed in the commercial cinema of the time; after numerous trials, Artaud’s romantic heroes win the aviation race in triumph. Artaud was also prepared with his scenarios to plagiarize cinema genres without compunction, and he attempted to interest the German Expressionist cinema and its offshoots in Hollywood with a horror film scenario he had written, The 32, which closely resembled work on the theme of the mass-murdering vampire by directors such as F. W. Murnau. As with Flights, The 32 has an upbeat ending, with the vampire redeemed and society saved from further destruction. Artaud sent another of his horror film projects, The Monk, to the founder of the Italian Futurist art movement, F. T. Marinetti, who by this time had become an official poet of Mussolini’s fascist régime and an influential figure in mainstream Italian cinema. (Artaud’s project, and his request to be employed to direct films in Italy, were ignored by Marinetti.) Many of Artaud’s commercial scenarios of the second half of the 1920s give the impression of a futile attempt to ingratiate himself with the formulaic mainstream film culture of the time, though each of them also contains an intermittently startling imagery of the body in extreme crisis.

  The Seashell And The Clergyman was the third of Artaud’s scenarios, which number fifteen in all. By far the most extraordinary of all of the scenarios is the very last one, The Butcher’s Revolt, which Artaud again intended to direct himself and for which he drew up an intricate – though, in its mathematical calculations, completely inaccurate – budget. The Butcher’s Revolt was written early in 1930, at the crucial point of crossover between the end of silent cinema and the innovation of sound cinema. The scenario possesses a far more cohesive narrative than The Seashell And The Clergyman; it even takes place in a specific location, around the Place de l’Alma in Paris. The principal figure in the scenario, introduced with irony by Artaud as “the madman”, is in a dangerously obsessive state. While waiting to meet a woman in the street, he watches a carcass of meat fall from a speeding butcher’s truck and becomes fascinated by the rapport between the texture of the meat and that of human flesh. He immediately provokes a brawl in a nearby café, and then takes part in a sequence of headlong chases (recalling those from Hollywood silent comedy films) which culminate in his arrival at a slaughterhouse and his humiliation there at the hands of the police. As with The Seashell And The Clergyman, the identity of the protagonist is volatile, and he experiences extremes of sensation, from joy to paralysing despair. The action of the scenario is powered by sudden transformations of space, punctuated by occasional outbursts of words, screams and noises.