THE POLITICS OF CRUELTY: BRECHT AND ARTAUD

As has already been discussed in Chapter 4, the dominant understanding of Brechtian cinema on the part of film scholarship considers it to be a cinema of aesthetic restraint that resists audiovisual excess and the production of affective intensity. However, a close inspection of the correspondences between the Brechtian and the Artaudian aesthetic, as manifested in films that belong to the broad category of the cinema of cruelty, can provide a counterweight to this conventional view. In this chapter, I identify the common affinities between the Brechtian aesthetics of defamiliarisation and Artaud's vision of an aesthetics of cruelty. In the first part, I discuss the theoretical parallels between Brecht's and Artaud's approaches to representation; in the second section of the chapter, I draw attention to questions of theatricality with reference to two films: Jonas Mekas's The Brig (1964), and Peter Brook's Marat/Sade (1967). Both are adaptations of theatre productions that are well-known for having successfully reconciled the Artaudian model with the Brechtian critique of representation.

The meeting point between Brecht and Artaud is not news for scholars working in the field of theatre studies. We see evidence of this in the work of playwrights and theatre practitioners including Heiner Müller, Peter Weiss, the Living Theatre, Pina Bausch, Peter Brook, as well as in the plays and theatre work of Rainer Werner Fassbinder. This affinity has not been explored in depth in film studies, since, with a few exceptions (see Beugnet 2007; del Río 2008), film scholars tend to ignore the dialectics of Artaudian cruelty, while there is a tendency to consider Artaud's work to be at the antipodes with Brecht's (see Shattuc 1993). An assumption behind many commentators’ arguments is that the excessive representation of film violence is in itself tantamount to an Artaudian understanding of cruelty (see Badley 2011, 146; Brown 2013). This reasoning contradicts Artaud's clarification that ‘it is wrong to make cruelty mean merciless bloodshed, pointless and gratuitous pursuit of physical pain’ (1989: 119).

A more nuanced reading can expose the symbiosis between cruelty and dialectics, evidenced not only in the work of many film practitioners, for example, Fassbinder, Pasolini, Haneke, Seidl, and many more directors, who have successfully merged the Brechtian with the Artaudian tradition, but also in the theatre and film writings of the two cultural theorists.