Demystifying Cruelty: Artaudian Intention in Art and Life (original) (raw)

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.

'The Dialectics of Cruelty: Rethinking Artaudian Cinema', in Cinema Journal 55:3 (2016), pp.65-89.

Antonin Artaud’s concept of a theater of cruelty and his scarce writings on cinema have profoundly infl uenced fi lm scholarship, especially in view of the large number of contemporary European fi lms that employ images of extreme violence and utilize an aesthetics of visual unpleasure. But is the politics of the Artaudian aesthetic to be reduced to the reproduction of gory images of revolting violence? This article explores the politics of Artaudian cinema by going back to Artaud’s writings on the medium and comparing them to Brecht’s writings on fi lm. The focus of this article is twofold: the fi rst part goes back to Artaud’s writings and investigates the politics of the cinema of cruelty, while the second uses as case studies Jonas Mekas’s The Brig (1964) and Costas Zapas’s The Rebellion of Red Maria (2011). The fi rst fi lm is a screen adaptation of a performance renowned for reconciling the theater of cruelty with a political context, while the second is a contemporary paradigm of a fi lm that draws on the Artaudian and Brechtian traditions with a view to responding to the political concerns of the present.

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.

Cruelty and Affirmation in the Postmodem Theater: Antonin Artaud and Hanoch Levin

Modern Drama, 1992

The absence of a chapter on theater in several major books on postmodemism suggest that drama's place in the debate regarding the relations between modernism and postmodemism remains open.' This debate, which centers on the question of whether postmodemism represents a complete break with modernism, or is merely a radicalized form of modernist trends, has apparently been taciturn with respect to the theater. And in the relatively few instances where theater is discussed, the tendency is to reassess the canon of modernist drama in light of postmodem theory, rather than to focus on new postmodem dramatic works.' This situation implies that theater either has not produced • major contemporary playwrights to match the fertility and diversity of modernism (Stanislavsky, Strindberg, Pirandello, Brecht, Artaud, Genet, Beckett, lonesco, Diirrenmatt, and many more), or that we have failed to recognize within modernist theater the advent of postmodemism. The common aspect of these two possibilities points to what makes theater. a special case in relation to its own history. In Theater as Problem, Benjamin Bennett suggests that the lack of a coherent, continuous history of drama results from drama's anomalous position: it exists both within literature, as a literary genre, and outside literature, as a genre dependent for its fulfillment on theatrical performance. According to Bennett, this "openness of dramatic form to its own 'outside' " (p. 258), which resists the organic metaphor of literary form and the idea of uniformity of response, creates a paradox: "Drama cannot have a history, yet must have a history, and is therefore obliged to make-in the sense of to stage, to create in the theater-its OW" history" (pp. 256-57). The apparent discontinuity or pattern of radical breaks that characterizes modem theater is, then, the effect of this openness to an "outside." According to Bennett, dependence on the outside makes the modem theater susceptible to self-extinction, and in order to survive, theater "must unfailingly stay in touch with itself over time" (p. 256).