'The Dialectics of Cruelty: Rethinking Artaudian Cinema', in Cinema Journal 55:3 (2016), pp.65-89. (original) (raw)
Related papers
Artaud’s “Pure Cinema”: The Manifestation of the Double in the Cinema of Cruelty.
This paper attempts to explore the dynamics between the theatre of cruelty, Artaud’s cinematic oeuvre and surrealism. It deals with Artaud’s popular theatrical concept of the double genitive as expressed in his cinematic philosophy. In this pursuit, I have taken director Germaine Dulac’s The Seashell and the Clergyman (1928) based on a screenplay by Artaud.
Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty and Subversive Strategies in Today's Art
MONITOR, 31/32 VOL. XI / Nº 1-2, 2009 Rivista di antropologia storica, sociale e altre antropologie, 2009
The aim of our paper is to treat some aspects of subversive potential of contemporary live arts, especially in relation to links between notions of madness and artistic creation in theories of Michel Foucault and Antonin Artaud. we will try to question the utopian role of art as an instance that transcends those epistemic structures that determine how we think or even that we think.
'Theatricality as Cruelty', in Image & Narrative 17(5), pp.54-65.
This essay suggests that theatricality is key to understanding Artaudian cruelty. I clarify this with reference to two films by Sergei Eisenstein and Abel Gance. The essay draws attention to the multimedia aspect of Artaud's aesthetic and proposes a pathway that can help us reconsider distinctions between theatricality and cinematic specificity.
Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism
The separation of culture and life in interbellum France The first words of Antonin Artaud's The Theater and its Double, first published in France in 1938, read as follows: Never before, when it is life itself that is in question, has there been so much talk of civilization and culture. And there is a curious parallel between this generalized collapse of life at the root of our present demoralization and our concern for a culture which has never been coincident with life, which in fact has been devised to tyrannize over life. 1 R.D. Crano lives, teaches, makes art, bakes bread, rides a bicycle, and reads books (mostly) in Columbus, Ohio. A Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Comparative Studies in the Humanities at The Ohio State University, he is writing a dissertation on poststructuralist ontologies of vision and visuality, the biopolitics of memory, and the evolution of cinematic and videographic technique and form. His work has appeared previously in Film-Philosophy and Senses of Cinema.
Violence and the wretched: The Cinema of Gillo Pontecorvo
THE ITALIANIST (FILM ISSUE), 2009
The multimodal and dialogic resources of cinema make it a privileged means of experiencing the complex modalities of violent conflict in the modern world. In this sense we can say that the cinema of the Italian director Gillo Pontecorvo offers an invaluable resource: the central role of mediatic depiction in the process of defining political action as legitimate or illegitimate insists we pay close attention to the work of a filmmaker who evinces a consistent and evolving concern with the nature and representation of political violence. (I'm embarrassed about this article now: the auteurist approach seems to me unreflective, and the piece recycles some cliches and errors, since pointed out by other more attentive scholars. But it represents a stage in thinking that achieved better results in my 2019 monograph on the film.)
Drawing on philosophy in film (Deleuze, Carroll), and on emotional engagement theory (Panksepp, Plantinga), this article compares three different sensory landscapes of dictatorship in film: Fritz Lang’s The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933), Guillermo del Toro’s The Devil’s Backbone (2001), and Luis Llosa’s The Feast of the Goat (2005). Although the three films deploy diverse aesthetic modes—Expressionism-Noir (Lang), Psychological-Realism (Llosa), and Gothic (del Toro)—they mutually reveal the existence of an ethics of resistance and insurgency during historical periods of oppressive rule. Tendo como perspectivas de análise a teoria da emoção (Panksepp, Plantinga) e estudos da filosofia no cinema (Deleuze, Carroll), este artigo compara três paisagens fílmicas da ditadura: O Testamento do Dr. Mabuse de Fritz Lang (1933), A Espinha do Diabo de Guillermo del Toro (2001), e A Festa do Bode de Luis Llosa (2005), revelando como através de modos estéticos distintos—Expressionismo Noir (Lang), Realismo Psicológico (Llosa) e Goticismo (del Toro)—os três filmes revelam uma ética semelhante, de resistência e insurgência, aos regimes de opressão a que se reportam.
The Culture of Violence in the New Romanian Cinema: The Influence of Michael Haneke Aesthetics
Balkan Cinema and the Great Wars: Our Story, 2020
The paper offers a review of how film "speaks" and "thinks" with the help of kitchen scenery about a particular social reality and culture and, on a symbolic level in a more symbolic vein, about the human condition. Michael Haneke's influence is perceptible in Cristi Puiu's films: Moartea Domnului Lăzărescu/The Death of Mr Lăzărescu (2005), and Aurora (2010). The characters' POV and the camera's POV mirror each other. Both frame and fragment the victim's body in a violent manner. The cinematographic camera operates on reality violence such as it cannot be apprehended in a global and synthetic manner but only as a heap of bits and pieces to be explored from a psychic distance. The psychic stance of the character is mirrored in the camera perspective that transposes the viewer in the mental state of the psychopath character, Viorel from Aurora. The character acquires self-identity by an act of violence or by "consuming" the other. Incorporating the other eliminates the external reference-frame that serves as a comparison element necessary for the assertion of the difference of the self. As a result the ego is condemned to contemplate the horror of his own existential condition-that is lacking a well-defined social self.