Film-Philosophy
Journal | Salon | Portal (ISSN 1466-4615)
Vol. 6 No. 25, September 2002
Jake Kennedy
Avant-Garde Meat
Stephen Barber _Artaud: The Screaming
Body_ London: Creation
Books,
1999 ISBN 1840680091 126 pp. If Antonin Artaud has come
to represent a kind of grand locus for discussions of
avant-garde modernity -- the spectacular collision-point of
the modern and its burgeoning post-; the at once beautiful
and ravaged *face* mapping the vicissitudes of
twentieth-century history -- this has come at the expense of
an even grander irony. For Artaud's multi-genre aesthetics
depend crucially on his private war with representation, his
virulent disgust with the inevitable gap between the body
and its loss once translated into aesthetic form. In this
way, Artaud is (and perhaps always was) his own best
example: his reduced, compromised, manipulated,
electrocuted, *liminal* body constitutes the ultimate proof
of the brutal reductions of the signifier. He's become
theoretical meat. Stephen Barber's recent
work, _Artaud: The Screaming Body_, is part biographical
tour and part conceptual documentary that sympathetically,
and provocatively, addresses this herding of Artaud.
Concerning himself almost exclusively with Artaud's
non-theatrical work, Barber charts Artaud's war of the body,
especially as it becomes subsumed by the realm of modern
psychiatry. Barber argues for a chaining-together of
Artaud's cinema projects, his drawings, and his fascinating
voice-work for radio, suggesting that all of Artaud's
non-theatrical expressions (from film scenarios to primal
screams) seek to apprehend, or visualize, the human body
(6). That there is no escape from the body is, for Artaud,
the impetus for, and the crux of, his battle with art (it is
as close to the body as he can get -- and yet still that
'art' betrays the body) and perhaps, finally, the cause for
much of his notorious, gruelling bouts with
insanity. Barber's concise chapter on
Artaud and cinema, 'The Extremities of the Mind: Artaud's
Film Projects, 1924-1935', persuasively establishes Artaud
as one of the first significant avant-garde film theorists.
Setting up Artaud's film scenario _The Seashell And the
Clergyman_ (eventually directed by Germaine Dulac), for
example, alongside Luis Bunuel's _Un Chien Andalou_ and
_L'Age d'Or_, Barber places Artaud in the forefront of
revolutionary surrealist cinema. Artaud's original scenario
for _The Seashell And the Clergyman_ narrated the sexual and
psychical torment of a clergyman as he shifts through
surreal, fragmented landscapes. Yet Artaud, as Barber
documents, was seriously unhappy with Dulac's final
realisation: '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 . . . 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' (12). Artaud desired not merely a
filmic equivalence to dreaming, something that would
approximate oneiric sensations, but a living cinema of
images that would possess all the violent force of actual
reverie. At the heart of Artaud's theories about the
avant-garde cinema then is a concerted effort to make
supreme fictions by utterly demolishing passive
spectatorship. In this way, Artaud anticipates much
post-structural film theory and in particular Laura Mulvey's
call for an attack on the 'satisfaction and reinforcement of
the ego that represent the high point of film history . . .
to make way for a total negation of the ease and plenitude
of the narrative fiction film'. [1] Moreover, what
Barber suggests is that Artaud's dissatisfaction with
Dulac's film lay not so much in the specifics of her
realisation (which were, in fact, rather faithfully
attentive to his original ideas) but more generally in the
theoretical abyss that separates the film scenario from the
film proper. The gap, the chasm, stretching between the
conception and the production, is not only always
theoretically present in Artaud, it *is* Artaud. Barber makes abundantly
clear in this first chapter that Artaud's relationship to
cinema was one that vacillated between significant extremes:
on the one hand Artaud glimpsed the very real revolutionary
potential of moving images to radically challenge visual
passivity, and on the other hand he understood the cinema as
a constant (or at least potential) source of shame and
aesthetic despair. As an actor, especially, Artaud had
experienced the humiliating demands of commercial realist
cinema, citing his role as the monk Massieu in Carl Dreyer's
stunning _Joan of Arc_ as the only professional moment in
which he felt above the ignominy of popular filmmaking.
Significantly, in Artaud's own theorizings about the cinema
there is a pathological corporalizing, so to speak, of the
filmic process. In his essay 'Cinema and Reality' he writes:
'The human skin of things, the epidermis of reality: this is
the primary raw material of cinema. Cinema exalts matter and
reveals it to us in its profound spirituality, in its
relations with the spirit from which it has emerged'.
[2] The cinema, for Artaud, *could* be another
dynamic body, a transubstantiating corpus for the display of
the profundity of the flesh. Despite Artaud's (wholly
fitting) reputation as both psychically and literally
tortured artist, an artist so often disgusted with the
compromises and basenesses of conventional narrative film,
his writings on cinema actually suggest that he was an early
aficionado of Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, and Marx
Brothers films. Indeed, a 'sense of humour' seems key to
Artaud's at times mystic conception of cinematic power. He
concludes his essay on cinema and its relation to the real
in this way: '[the cinema] does
not detach itself from life but rediscovers the original
order of things. The films that are most successful in this
sense are those dominated by a certain kind of humour, like
the early Buster Keatons or the less human Chaplins. A
cinema which is studded with dreams, and which gives you the
physical sensation of pure life, finds its triumph in the
most excessive sort of humour. A certain excitement of
objects, forms, and expressions can only be translated into
the convulsions and surprises of a reality that seems to
destroy itself with an irony in which you can hear a scream
from the extremities of the mind'. [3] Only Artaud could trace the
passage of Keatonesque/Chaplinesque humour back to the
extremity of the scream -- but this connection seems
absolutely correct as it reveals the relationship between
the radically funny and the radically terrifying. Barber suggests that of
Artaud's 15 film scenarios, his final scenario, _The
Butcher's Revolt_, is by far the most extraordinary and the
most powerfully prophetic. The scenario, written in 1930,
involves a tormented 'madman' at the Place de l'Alma who is
waiting to meet a woman. While waiting on the street he
notices a butcher's truck racing by and then watches a
carcass of meat fall from the van. Barber writes, '[the
madman] becomes fascinated by the rapport between the
texture of the meat and that of human flesh. He immediately
provokes a brawl in a nearby cafe, 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' (17). As Barber points out, Artaud's final scenario
is uniquely affecting because it was written at the vital
moment when silent cinema was waning and sound cinema was
beginning to develop in terms of popularity and technical
innovations. In all of Artaud's previous scenarios he had
maintained a strict adherence to silence in his filmmaking
ideas, seeing very little connection between the sound and
image -- in fact, he understood sound as just finally too
powerful, too overwhelmingly *real* in comparison with the
flash of the image. In _The Butcher's Revolt_ Artaud for the
first time embellishes his scenario with numerous outbursts
and screams, even the odd, enigmatic sentence, such as 'I've
had enough of cutting up meat without eating it'. Barber
reveals that Artaud desired his film-voices to possess the
physical quality of objects: he wanted *seeable* cries, and
*tangible* noises to take up a literal space. _The Butcher's
Revolt_ is important because of its fascination not simply
with the body, but with the modern, urban body reduced to
meat. Artaud's scenario invokes the miserable scene of a
suffering madman, but the protagonist is of course also the
suffering modern, industrialized subject. The 'madman's'
obsession with the visual resemblance between meat and his
own humanity is an unforgettable (and again prophetic)
scene. It seems to encapsulate an aesthetic-filmic
revelation while hinting at the brutality of modern
'bureaucracy', and specifically psychiatry: as if the madman
is here staring into the medical-societal
perception/degradation of his own attenuated body. This
jettisoned hunk of meat can also perhaps be seen as the
visual equivalent of the scream itself. Barber reminds us that
Artaud's cinema 'is all theory and written images, and no
films' (30). This lack of visual product is however
strangely appropriate, if only because Artaud's cinema must
then be hallucinated -- one of the very few ways of escaping
the Artaudian horror of direct mediation/representation. To
bridge the unbridgeable gap, that excruciating,
body-breaking dilemma for Artaud, is perhaps only possible
as this impossibility: imagining the unimaginable film, or
dreaming the make-believe body, is the only real, complete
*thing* there is. But as Barber's fascinating book
continues, exploring Artaud's asylum-drawings and his final
radio-work _To Have Done With the Judgment of God_, it
becomes obvious that Artaud's physical body was both
beautifully and miserably *inescapable*. His rage against
representation was necessarily a rage against the facts of
the untranslatableness of bone and nerve -- so that Artaud's
very body, especially his face, becomes, *has* become, the
art-work proper. It is a gruesome, but not
altogether surprising, development then that the
experimental Artaud should collide head-first with another
form of experimental modernity -- 'avant-garde' psychiatry.
Part of the power and finesse of Barber's work is how it
blends Artaud's biographical detail with intricate
theoretical-aesthetic problems. Barber traces Artaud's
descent from artist to artist-patient with impressive
sensitivity, on both a life-writing and art-critical level.
We learn that during the last years of Artaud's life he came
under the care of Dr Gaston Ferdiere, a psychiatrist, who
was also, Barber tells us, 'a Surrealist poet who had
self-published several volumes of his sexually-oriented
work. He was intensely interested in pornography and drug
addiction as well as in innovations in psychiatric
treatment' (41-2). Barber documents that within a half-year
period Ferdiere and his assistant administered over
fifty-one sessions of electroshock to Artaud. It is a
chilling, ironic fact that the treatment had been invented
but five years earlier when an Italian doctor had observed
the pacifying effect of electric shocks applied to the
skulls of pigs awaiting processing in a slaughterhouse. As
Barber reveals, the electroshock process was considered
innovative and thrilling psychiatry. Artaud had met not only
his own prophecy of the modern body attenuated as meat but
he had become meat at the hands, or electrotrodes, of
another 'radical' form of art. McMaster
University Hamilton, Ontario,
Canada Footnotes 1. Laura Mulvey, _Visual and
Other Pleasures_ (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana
University Press, 1989), p. 16. 2. Antonin
Artaud, 'Cinema and
Reality', trans. Helen Weaver, in _Antonin Artaud: Selected
Writings_ (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976), p.
152. 3. Ibid. Copyright ©
_Film-Philosophy_ 2002 Jake Kennedy, 'Avant-Garde
Meat', _Film-Philosophy_, vol. 6 no. 25, September 2002
<http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol6-2002/n25kennedy>.
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