Toward a Cinema of Cruelty

In a series of eight photographs printed in The Theater and its Doublel, the face of Antonin Artaud resembles a bust of malleable clay, violently transformed for each picture, as if the sculptor in despair of capturing an astonishing range of moods had attacked it with his fists. Quick, darting eyes and sharpness of expression radiate the conflagration of his mind. Hollow cheeks and gaunt furrows evidence an upheaval of excruciating inner pain. Gentleness, warmth, and humanity are visible, almost tangible, in the vulnerability of his protean features. Artaud's personality and experience carved their history on his anguished and angelic face, the living record of a stupendous and bitter drama, preserved for us by the camera. Artaud identified the drama that life was staging on the fragile boards of his sensibility with the condition of modem mankind. suffer from a fearful mental disease, he wrote to Jacques Riviere. My ideas abandon me at every stage.... I am in constant pursuit of my intellectual being.2 In an effort to transcend himself, to raise his tormented spirit above a body that racked him with pain, Artaud resorted to morphine and peyote, and later sang verses in praise of them. In trying to achieve a state of godlike detachment and control, Artaud instead extended the fissure in his psyche that was finally to widen into a chasm. Yet he understood, on another level, that the hallucinations and visions that tortured him were inseparable from life, that he had better acknowledge them (pay life the price it must be paid3), and that the volcanic fury of his unconscious had to be dealt with head-on. Artaud believed that he was one man among men, that we are all mad, desperate, and sick. And I call for us to react.4 In Artaud's opinion, modem theater contributed to this sickness by failing to perform its essential function. In his bold essay, No More Masterpieces, he railed against the contemporary theater: