Introduction
Angelos Koutsourakis
Our illnesses are mostly political illnesses. When our breathing stops, when the blood clots in the veins, the heart fails, then our weariness has settled in the organism, and we react with our whole person as a unit, as a natural process, react definitively to a situation that can no longer be dealt with rationally.
-Peter Weiss Antonin Artaud is an intellectual figure whose work exceeds the limits of the theatre, on which he mainly wrote. In the theatre world, some of the most celebrated practitioners of the twentieth century have drawn on his call for a theatre that produces a sense of urgency by employing cruelty as an aesthetic strategy of protest against a historical reality principle founded on violence, and against institutionalised forms of representa-tions deriving from ideas of cultural refinement. Peter Weiss, Peter Brook, The Living Theatre, Heiner Müller, Robert Wilson, Sarah Kane, and Romeo Castellucci are some of the celebrated practitioners and playwrights influenced by Artaud’s plea for a theatre that would not simply appeal to the audience’s mind, but also to their bodies by employing a “language somewhere between gesture and thought” (Artaud 1989, 112). Artaud affirmed that individuals think primarily with their senses and argued in favour of a certain kind of represen-tational excess that could, as Heiner Müller puts it, not reconfirm but “threaten reality” (Müller 2002, xx). Thus, the idea of cruelty stands for the production of a collective experience that aspires to make the audience think about the ways pain and suffering are part and parcel of our historical experience. As Julian Beck, one of the co-founders of the Living Theatre, explains, Artaud’s idea of cruelty can be understood as a means of sensitising the spectators to the everyday violence hidden behind the façade of civilisation. According to Beck:
The ghost of Artaud became our mentor and the problem that we faced as we began our work on Fourteenth Street was how to create that spectacle, that Aztec, convulsive, plague-ridden panorama that would so shake people up, so move them, so cause feeling to be felt, there in the body, that the steel world of law and order which civilization had forged to protect itself from barbarism would melt. Why? Because the steel world of law and order did more than just protect us from barbarism; it also cut us off from real feeling…Artaud believed that if we could only be made to feel, really feel anything, then we might find all this suffering intolerable, the pain too great to bear, we might put an end to it, and then, being able to feel, we might truly feel the joy, the joy of everything else, of loving, of creating, of being at peace, and of being ourselves (Beck 1965, 25).
Beck’s reading of Artaud corresponds with the well-known critique of the Enlightenment project posed by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer and this can make us re-evaluate his passion and interest in
non-Wes-tern theatrical traditions as well as his desire to bring theatre back to its roots in rites and rituals. Artaud pas-sionately argued for a “theatre that wakes up heart and nerves” (Artaud 1989, 120) and he thought that this can be achieved by recovering its collective character. In this context, cruelty functions as a metaphor for a collective experience of revelation. This is strongly put forward by Artaud when he compares the theatre with the plague arguing that their similarity lies in their capacity to make things visible and “see ourselves as we are” (Ibid, 131).
In a way, Artaud’s concept of cruelty is a vehicle of reconciling art with life, something that characterised the history of the twentieth century avant-garde’s reaction to aestheticism (see Bürger 1984, 22). For Artaud’s critique of psychological theatre was precisely that it failed to involve its audience in a collective revelatory delirium, and promoted instead the innocuous idea of “detached art” and “art for art’s shake” (Artaud 1988, 254). The pivot of his argument was that the reduction of art to a harmless leisure activity propagated ideas of individualism and cultural snobbery. “Enough, once and for all, of these manifestations of a closed, ego-tistical, and personal art. Our anarchy, our mental confusion is a function of the anarchy of everything else-or rather, everything else is a function of this anarchy” (Ibid, 256). In a way, Artaud’s overriding concern was to reinstate art’s social function by returning to its roots in collective rituals and practices. Susan Sontag rightly explains that his critique of the institution of art is made clear in his persistence to construct something new by negating the old, producing “art that is at the same anti-art” and refusing to make a distinction “between art and thought, between poetry and truth” (Sontag 1988, xxv). Cruelty is thus a strategy that intends to use art so as to alter our perception of the world, but also of art’s purpose as well and, as Edward Scheer convincingly suggests, “cruelty (emphasis in the original) is Artaud’s name for an encounter which leaves no category secure” (Scheer 2004, 7). Not surprisingly, the ultimate aim of such a grand project was to create a represen-tational rupture that would challenge artistic and social preconceptions. The concept of cruelty may point to images of suffering and pain, but the ultimate aim of Artaud’s project is not a mere provocation that can be easily co-opted; it is rather a desire to ensure that art produces sensual and intellectual effects (after all he did not distinguish between mind and body); one should never leave the theatre or the cinema unchanged.
But as stated earlier, Artaud’s impact ranges further than theatre. The French philosopher, Alain Badiou, has gone for instance so far as to suggest that cruelty was a key strategy in twentieth century literature; for Badiou cruelty is an important aesthetic question in modernist and avant-garde literature that points to the persistence of violence and terror within the troubled historical reality of the twentieth century (Badiou 2007, 115). Cruelty designates the avant-gardist interest in violently exposing the gap between “the real and its semblance” and indicates “the rawness of the real” (Ibid, 50, 53). Artaud wanted to produce similar effects by means of transgressive representational practices that would expose this particular gap between our civiliza-tion and the cruelty that is dependent on. But how are we to understand Badiou’s use of the term “real” here? Robert Buch eloquently explains that:
The real stands for the will to engage in conflict and confrontation, not just in the twentieth century but also at the beginning of the new millennium, when the lessons and legacy of the avant-garde and of modernism, to which The Century pays belated tribute, have fallen into oblivion. Badiou’s intervention itself is spurred by this passion, taking to task the malaise and lack of fervor that in his
It bears noting that this desire for reanimating conflict is at the centre of Artaud’s view of art as therapy, which intends to express discontent at the state of the world, but also to provide a remedy through a transgres-sive experience. And indeed this form of affirmative negation permeates the work of numerous contemporary filmmakers who push representation to its limits such as Michael Haneke, Claire Denis, Philippe Grandrieux, Lars von Trier, Ulrich Seidl and Gaspar Noé amongst others. It would not be a stretch to say that these film-makers are similarly interested in revitalising what Badiou calls “the passion of the real” and this passion is the outcome of a violent confrontation that intends to force us see the world afresh.
Within the discipline of film studies there have been numerous studies dedicated to the analysis of such a sensual cinema committed to an aesthetics of negation (see Beugnet 2007; Horeck, Kendall 2010; Grønstad 2011; Lübecker 2015; del Río 2016) and its ethical and political implications. Many of the filmmakers dis-cussed within these studies, pose anew many of the questions raised by Artaud. The contradiction is that some of them revive many modernist practices, which were long considered obsolete (see Grønstad 2011, 160), but they operate within a historical period where this revival of old tropes is not accompanied by a commitment to tangible political alternatives. Yet, the idea of art as a revelatory transgressive experience is still applicable and this makes Artaud’s writings on cruelty and his view of art as revelatory aggression still relevant.
Yet besides a few exceptions in many of the recent studies on “sensual” or “extreme” cinema Artaud comes as an afterthought – Martine Beugnet’s book Cinema and Sensation: French Film and the Art of Transgression is a notable exception. Thus, in this special issue we seek to go back to Artaud’s writings and probe some of the questions he raises and their relevance to the present. As mentioned already, Artaud’s work goes beyond the confines of the theatre and he could be seen in light of what Julian Murphet calls “multimedia modernism” (Murphet 2009), since, as Ros Murray also points out in her essay in this issue, he refused to draw distinct boundaries between different media; additionally, his envisaged gestural theatre had strong influences from the non-psychological visual dramaturgy of the early cinema, whereas his film scripts were not unrelated to his conception of a theatre of cruelty that produces a representational crisis. Commenting on his script, La Coquille et le Clergyman (The Seashell and the Clergyman) he clarified his commitment to a transgressive aesthetics stating that his aim was to challenge the institution of cinema “to present the problem of expression (emphasis in the original) in every domain and to its full extent” (Artaud 1989, 60).
In the opening essay, Ros Murray looks at Artaud’s unfinished scenarios focusing on the ways the “time of cruelty” manifests itself. Murray invites us to consider how Artaudian cruelty utilises a chaotic temporality that facilitates the medium’s capacity to produce thinking. She concludes by considering the ways that Ar-taud’s refusal to distinguish between media connects with questions raised by Media Archaeology’s critique of a linear media history.
Nikolaj Lübecker takes as his starting point Artaud’s critique of psychology and brings it into dialogue with contemporary non-anthropocentric theory. Discussing Artaud’s book, Heliogabalus; or, the Crowned Anar-chist, he suggests that his writings connect to the non-anthropocentric trend in the humanities as evidenced in writings in contemporary affect theory, as well as in studies concerned with questions of the anthropocene. For Lübecker, Artaud’s project foreshadows recent developments in affect theory and new materialisms, which have recently been very influential in the field of film and media studies.
The following two essays focus on two contemporary filmmakers whose formal and philosophical ques-tions can be illuminated through Artaud. Adrian Martin identifies Artaudian echoes in Philippe Grandrieux’s cinema. He expounds this thesis with reference to Grandrieux’s aesthetic of “emotional intensity” and the filmmaker’s acknowledged engagement with Artaud’s writings. Elena del Río in the next essay builds upon some of the arguments raised in her analysis of negative affects in her recent book The Grace of Destruction:
A Vital Ethology of Extreme Cinemas; del Río discusses Lars von Trier’s Nymph()maniac (2013) as an instance of Artaudian cruelty on account of its philosophical complexity that refuses to delineate a clear-cut moral uni-verse. It is this aspect of the film that resonates with Artaud’s call for representation as revelatory confrontation that enables us to rethink and revaluate - in a Nietzschean fashion - our ethical certainties.
The last two essays engage with broader questions regarding Artaud and cinema. Angelos Koutsourakis proposes that theatricality is the key to understanding the concept of cruelty. He supports his argument with reference to films by Sergei Eisenstein and Abel Gance, and urges the reader to rethink longstanding distinc-tions between theatricality and cinematic specificity. The last essay by Martine Beugnet and Kriss Ravet-to-Biagioli compares Artaud’s writings on theatre and the plague with recent forms of “parasitical cinema” a type of cinema that relies on the recycling and re-appropriation of moving images from the past and the present. Rather than replicating debates on the end of cinema, Beugnet and Ravetto-Biagioli explore the ways that new technologies of mediation pose new challenges that disorganise the cinematic experience. Beugnet’s and Ravetto-Biagioli’s case study is Atom Egoyan’s Artaud Double Bill (2007), a film that does not simply recycle Artaud’s monumental performance in Carl Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (The Passion of Joan of Arc, 1928), but whose very reliance on “pirated” images shares a kinship with the Artaudian desire to undo representation and construct something anew by means of a “contagious delirium.” Our ambition is that the Artaud that emerges from these essays is a writer, whose writings are far from being passé and keep on posing questions that provide fecund material for addressing issues related to the ethics and politics of representation, non-anthropocentric theory, authorship, intermediality, and new media technologies.
References
Artaud, Antonin. 1989. Artaud on Theatre, ed. Claude Schumacher and Brian Singleton. London: Methuen. Artaud, Antonin. 1988. Antonin Artaud Selected Writings, ed. Susan Sontag, trans. Helen Weaver. Berkeley,
Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Badiou, Alain. 2005. The Century trans. Alberto Toscano. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Beck, Julian. 1965. “Storming the Barricades”, in Kenneth Brown The Brig, 1-36. New York: Hill and Wang. Beugnet, Martine. 2007. Cinema and Sensation: French Film and the Art of Transgression. Edinburgh:
Edin-burgh University Press, 2007.
Buch, Robert. 2010. The Pathos of the Real: On the Aesthetics of Violence in the Twentieth Century. Balti-more: The John Hopkins University Press.
Del Río, Elena. 2016. The Grace of Destruction: A Vital Ethology of Extreme Cinemas. New York: Blooms-bury.
Müller, Heiner. 1995. Theatremachine. London: Faber and Faber.
Murphet, Julian. 2009. Multimedia Modernism Literature and the Anglo-American Avant-garde. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sontag, Susan. 1988. “Artaud”, Antonin Artaud Selected Writings, ed. Susan Sontag, trans. Helen Weaver, xvii-lix. Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Horyek Tanya, Kendall, Tina. 2011. The New Extremism in Cinema: From France to Europe. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Lübecker, Nikolaj. 2015. The Feel-Bad Film. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Scheer, Edward. 2004. “Introduction: on Antonin Artaud – a Beginner’s Guide to Cruelty”, Antonin Artaud: A Critical Reader ed. Edward Scheer, 1-8. London, New York: Routledge.
Angelos Koutsourakis is a University Academic Fellow in World Cinema at the Centre for World Cinemas
and Digital Cultures at the University of Leeds. He is the author of Politics as Form in Lars von Trier (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013 and 2015), and the co-editor of The Cinema of Theo Angelopoulos (Edinburgh: Ed-inburgh University Press, 2015).