The Proliferation of Representation in Antonin Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty and Sergei Parajanov's The Colour of Pomegranates

This article argues that Antonin Artaud's theory of the theatre of cruelty, elaborated in The Theatre and Its Double, and the procedures of Sergei Parajanov's The Colour of Pomegranates (1969) bear a crucial affinity. Both offer many enigmatic emblems described as hieroglyphic and involving ritualized gesture. The theatre theorized by Artaud as well as Parajanov's film place representation into question, not by suppressing it, but by causing it to run riot. This runs counter scholars’ assertions that Artaud's theatre of cruelty is a theatre of immediacy, a view illustrated especially by Derrida and Deleuze. Instead, this article contends that linguistic and symbolic mediation are frequently foregrounded in Artaud's theory, as they are in Parajanov's film, and that Artaud's text should be treated as heterogeneous and therefore resistant to conceptual synthesis. The article also offers an alternative to readings of Artaudian cruelty in terms of extreme violence; here, it is principally this symbolic profusion that assaults the audience, burying the narrative beneath sensuous detail. For Parajanov, this profusion reflects the multiplicity of the poet's inner life, but also the nature of legend, which might be defined as an event or events obscured beneath layer upon layer of representation.