Film-Philosophy 17.1 (2013)

‘The Epidermis of Reality’: Artaud, the Material Body and Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc Ros Murray1 In Cinema 2: The Time-Image, Gilles Deleuze poses the question: ‘was there in Artaud an affinity with Dreyer?’ (Deleuze 1989, 170). What Deleuze is referring to here, following Maurice Blanchot, is the impossibility of thought, its ‘fundamental powerlessness’ (Deleuze 1989, 168), that difficulty which has often been identified as the essential force at play throughout all of Artaud’s work. Indeed the question of whether or not one can use the word ‘work’ to describe Artaud’s output identifies this very problem: nothing that Artaud produced was ever complete, nor, as he declared in The Nerve-Scales, was it necessarily intended to be: ‘dear friends: what you mistook for my works were merely the waste products of myself, those scrapings of the soul that the normal man does not welcome’ (Artaud 1976, 83). As Susan Sontag writes, Artaud’s work was doomed to failure, but it is precisely this failure that so eloquently expresses the problem at the heart of thought, its very genesis (Sontag 1983, 16). This is what fascinates Deleuze about Artaud, and provides him with inspiration for his own explorations of how different art-forms arouse the thinking process, moving the brain and affecting the body rather than simply reproducing or ‘representing’ the world. In Cinema II: The Time-Image Deleuze questions whether Carl Theodor Dreyer might be seen as ‘an Artaud to whom reason would have been “restored”’ (Deleuze 1989, 170). If Artaud presents us with nothing but the impossibility of thought, this suggests that Dreyer’s films go some way towards responding to this problem. This article proposes that the comparison between Artaud’s theories about what cinema should do and Dreyer’s practice provides a useful approach to thinking about non-normative bodily experience in the cinema. It argues that Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc, Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1928) might be seen as a film that seeks to put into question the distinction between symbolic representation and a more visceral, affective form of expression that is particularly relevant to Artaud. This will entail an examination of Artaud’s own ideas about representation in his theatre and cinema writings, and a discussion of how these can be read in relation to The Passion of Joan of Arc. Finally, the article provides an overview of the various critical interpretations of Dreyer's film alongside the ideological appropriations of Joan of Arc, and it considers how, in true Artaudian style, the material fate of Dreyer's film echoes that of Joan of Arc

1

Queen Mary, University of London: [email protected]

Film-Philosophy ISSN 1466-4615

445

Film-Philosophy 17.1 (2013)

herself, disrupting the boundaries that distance the represented body from its corporeal origins. Artaud’s Theory of Cinema Artaud’s forays into cinema can be divided into three stages: there was his initial excitement, where cinema seemed to be the perfect new technology for exploring the inner workings of the mind; the practical stage, with his acting career, the scenarios, and Germaine Dulac’s interpretation of his scenario The Seashell and The Clergyman (La Coquille et le Clergyman, Germaine Dulac, 1928); and finally the inevitable disappointment, where he was unable to sell his scenarios or to get the roles that he wanted. In the mid-1930s he abandoned the cinema, in part due to his scepticism about the possibilities offered by the introduction of sound, which he saw as leading to the subordination of the image to the text. In his initial enthusiasm for the cinema Artaud describes it as ‘a remarkable excitant’ and writes that ‘it acts directly on the grey matter of the brain’ (Artaud 1970, 74). This was at a time when all his writing explored the painful impossibility of thought, and the problems of expression that this entailed. Artaud identifies this difficulty as a strange illness, which is the subject of three of his early publications: Correspondence with Jacques Rivière (1927), The Nerve-Scales (1925) and The Umbilicus of Limbo (1925). This ‘illness’ results in the inability to express the inner workings of his own thought as a corporeal rather than a purely rational force. The protagonist of his first scenario, The Eighteen Seconds, suffers from the same unidentifiable disease: ‘he has become incapable of reaching his thoughts; he has retained all his lucidity, but no matter what thought occurs to him, he can no longer give it an external form, that is, translate it into appropriate gestures and words’ (Artaud 1976, 115). This man, strikingly similar to Artaud himself, is an actor on the verge of becoming famous, and the spectator is presented with his subjective experience of time, as eighteen seconds are stretched out over two or three hours. The film ends with the protagonist looking at his watch and seeing the discrepancy between his own experience of duration, and the time counted by the second-hand on his watch, at which point he pulls a revolver out of his pocket and shoots himself in the head. These eighteen seconds are filled with images that overwhelm the protagonist, ‘an enormous number of contradictory images, without very much connection from one to the next’ (Artaud 1976, 115). This scenario displays several important aspects of Artaud’s initial approach towards cinema: firstly, the idea that a proliferation of images can overcome the problem of trying to express thought in words, secondly, that films should resist total abstraction but not necessarily follow the chronological or temporal logic of narrative, and thirdly, that they should follow the inner workings of the mind, and involve an investment from the actor that exceeds what might usually be expected of him or her. Artaud was Film-Philosophy ISSN 1466-4615

446

Film-Philosophy 17.1 (2013)

clearly bearing witness to his own experience, as an actor who sought to embody rather than merely play a role, when he wrote this scenario. One of his great disappointments was that he did not secure the role of Usher in The Fall of the House of Usher (La Chute de la maison Usher, Jean Epstein, 1928). In a letter to Abel Gance, who produced the film, requesting the role of Usher Artaud wrote ‘if I don’t have this character under my skin no-one in the world does ’ (Artaud 1976, 167, translation modified). In other words, Artaud felt that this was the role for him because he was the living embodiment of Usher: ‘my life is the life of Usher and of his sinister hovel. I have the plague in the fibre of my nerves and I suffer from it’ (Artaud 1976, 168). Again, when Dulac adapted his scenario The Seashell and the Clergyman, one of the numerous complaints that he directed against her was to do with the casting, partly because she did not grant his wish to play the role of the clergyman, instead choosing (perhaps wisely, considering his attitude towards her adaptation) to film when she knew he would be busy working on The Passion of Joan of Arc. The first point is perhaps the most important for Artaud as cinema seemed, initially, to offer an escape route because it was image-based and had no need for words. Artaud added a text to the beginning of the scenario for The Seashell and the Clergyman, entitled ‘Cinema and Reality’, exploring the relationship between internal reality and its projection on screen: No matter how deeply we dig into the mind, we find at the bottom of every emotion, even an intellectual one, an affective sensation of a nervous order. This sensation involves the recognition, perhaps on an elementary level, but at least on a tangible one, of something substantial, of a certain vibration which always recalls states either known or imagined, that are clothed in one of the myriad forms of real or imagined nature. (Artaud 1976, 150) Cinema provided the perfect medium because it could potentially tap into the multiple possibilities of thought through the use of moving images, which did not rely solely on text in order to create meaning. Words, for Artaud, always presented an insurmountable problem, because they did not directly express states of mind, whereas he believed that images potentially could. This is why he insisted that films should not be based on text, but should directly reach that part of the mind where the thinking process had not yet materialised into concrete thoughts. The purpose of images, he wrote, was to reveal ‘the very essence of language’ and to transport the action to a ‘level where all translation would become useless, and where this action would operate almost intuitively on the brain’ (Artaud 1976, 151). Cinematic images ought to create, therefore, a kind of touching. Images should produce vibrations in the brain that lead not to concrete thoughts but physically move the spectator, having direct contact with his or Film-Philosophy ISSN 1466-4615

447

Film-Philosophy 17.1 (2013)

her nervous system. It is no coincidence that Artaud so frequently uses skin imagery in his writing; not only does he write about skin, but he often treats the surface of the page as if it were a skin, scratching and scraping at it, leaving holes in its surface whilst writing about suffering from severe eczema.2 Again we see these skin images in his texts about cinema as he writes: ‘the human skin of things, the epidermis of reality, that is the primary raw material of cinema’ (Artaud 1976, 151). Inhabiting the skin of the character Usher is perhaps more than just a metaphor. ‘The epidermis of reality’ might be understood both in the sense of the material – the surface of things that we touch – and in terms of affect, in other words, the ability of what we experience to touch us directly without what might otherwise be seen as the distancing mediation of representation. Like the skin, the nervous system occupies an important place in Artaud’s writing. In his theatre writings Artaud writes about communicating physically with the audience, engaging their bodies through the use of new sound and lighting technologies, and at one point he even suggests placing the audience in the middle of the action on revolving chairs. Whilst words are rejected because they present a barrier that separates the audience from the physical space of the stage, Artaud’s aim with the theatre is, through the use of gestures that resemble hieroglyphic signs, to ‘break through language to touch life’ (Artaud 1964, 18). The theatre texts, particularly those such as ‘The Alchemical Theatre’ and ‘The Theatre and the Plague’, as their titles suggest, place emphasis on the physical properties of matter, and the way that this can be radically transformed through the use of wild combinations of corporeal gestures. In the first manifesto for his ‘Theatre of Cruelty’, Artaud writes about ‘the use of man’s nervous magnetism’ (Artaud 1964, 110), and in the second he calls for ‘a certain vibration and a certain material agitation’ (Artaud 1964, 149). Audience members are to be treated like snakes, perceiving through vibration rather than via the intellect: Snakes are long, their bodies touch the ground at almost every point, and the musical vibrations which are communicated to the ground reach their bodies like a very subtle and profound massage; well, I propose that we treat the spectators like snakes that are being charmed. (Artaud 1964, 97) Artaud was unable to finance any of his film projects, and it was largely for this reason that he abandoned the cinema as a medium. He also expressed a marked, and perhaps inevitable, sense of disappointment with the type of cinema that was dominant in France at the time. He divided what he perceived to be the current cinematic trends into two categories, ‘pure or abstract cinema’ and the cinema of ‘psychological situations’ (Artaud 1976, 2

In the notes accompanying his 1947 radio piece To have Done with the Judgement of God, Artaud writes ‘I’ve been incessantly tormented by the terrible itching caused by intolerable eczema’ (Artaud 1974, 112).

Film-Philosophy ISSN 1466-4615

448

Film-Philosophy 17.1 (2013)

150), both of which he rejected. Abstract cinema, he claimed, was made up of pure geometrical forms that could not communicate on a visceral level with the spectator, and psychological dramas simply reproduced the world of the everyday rather than transforming it. He identified Anglo-Saxon filmmakers such as Charlie Chaplin and the Marx Brothers as those who managed to engage with the audience physically, shaking their bodies, but it was only through laughter that Artaud found the realisation of the much wider potential that he envisaged for cinema. Artaud’s ideas about artistic communication, not only those found in the limited number of texts that he wrote about cinema, but more broadly speaking the ideas that pervade throughout all of his work, are in many respects inherently cinematic. The notion that cinema can produce a shock to thought, re-arranging our experience of our own body and deploying a kind of visuality that appeals to our sense of touch is one that has increasingly gained currency in film theory, long after Artaud’s pioneering but until recently largely ignored cinematic writings of the 1920s. Although Artaud’s film theory can be situated clearly in the context of 1920s French theoretical writing on film, some of the ideas circulating at the time, particularly about the affective forces put into play in the cinema, seem especially pertinent to more recent theories concerned with embodied spectatorship. In 1921 Jean Epstein wrote, highlighting the importance of ‘nervous gestures’, that ‘the film is nothing but a relay between the source of nervous energy and the auditorium which breathes its radiance’ (Epstein 1977, 13). The materiality of the medium and the physical experience of cinema spectatorship played an important role in such conceptions. Like Artaud, Epstein saw a direct link between the nervous system and the cinematic image, and thus understood the great potential of cinema to create a new experience of the body. The question becomes, then, what kind of a body is this, and where can it be located? For many of the French theorists and practitioners writing in the 1920s, including Artaud, spectatorship was by definition a collective experience, and the cinema appealed to an audience that they conceived as a crowd, rather than an individual spectator. More recently, scholars writing about early cinema, such as Rae-Beth Gordon (Gordon 2001), have analysed how conceptions of spectatorship at the time were influenced by practices such as hypnotism and magnetism that became popular towards the end of the Nineteenth century. This continues to be relevant throughout the 1920s, and, as we have seen, for Artaud the potential of the cinema lay in its ability to act as a contagious, hypnotic force. This force was conceived as one that would threaten the boundaries of the individual subject, and for Artaud, if we consider his proclaimed desire to destroy man’s existing anatomy and create a ‘body without organs’ (Artaud 1976, 571), the power of the cinema might be conceived not just in its establishment of a collective

Film-Philosophy ISSN 1466-4615

449

Film-Philosophy 17.1 (2013)

audience, but through its awakening of a latent and dangerous transcorporeal entity arising from the affective exchange between bodies. The Affective Body: Artaud, Dreyer and The Passion of Joan of Arc Since the 1990s, much attention has been paid to the materiality of film and its relationship to embodiment. Vivian Sobchack’s work on phenomenological approaches to film experience, for example, has been essential to theories of embodiment in the cinema. We might also think of Stephen Shaviro’s The Cinematic Body, following a more explicitly Deleuzian vein, in which he writes ‘the flesh is intrinsic to the cinematic apparatus, at once its subject, its substance, and its limit’ (Shaviro 1993, 255). Shaviro’s emphasis is on the way that cinema can present a potentially threatening, multiple and transformative bodily experience, as he writes: ‘film theory should be less a theory of fantasy (psychoanalytic or otherwise) than a theory of the affects and transformation of bodies’ (Shaviro 1993, 256). Laura Marks has also argued for a more specific type of moving image that appeals to the audience’s embodied position by evoking memories of touch. Haptic visuality, 'more inclined to graze than to gaze' according to Marks (2000, 162), allows us to experience things that are not representable purely through language. And more recently, Martine Beugnet, in Cinema and Sensation, draws explicitly from Artaud's 'third path' between abstraction and figuration, placing his ideas about cinema at the beginning of the trajectory of affective cinematic thought that she traces through Deleuze, Sobchack, Shaviro and Marks (Beugnet 2007, 22). Yet the problem that we are often faced as readers of Artaud's texts, or viewers of the strange and fragile material objects that he produced, is how to conceive this rejection of representative structures as potentially creative and productive rather than annihilating. Artaud’s corporeal experiments were concerned with disrupting the body as an organic, anatomically-arranged structure in order to create a body that was purely intensive and expressive. This expression of a body, opposed to a representation, is what Deleuze and Guattari call the ‘body without organs’. In A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari specifically address the problem of how to create a positive ‘body without organs’ without simply falling back into a negative, destructive or ‘fascist’ model (Deleuze and Guattari 1980, 202). It is in Deleuze’s notion of the ‘affection-image’ (Deleuze 1986, 61) that a positive use for Artaud’s theories in the cinema can be located. The affection-image is where we might perceive the beginnings of that which exceeds narrative, or that which presents us with a rupture in chronology, and engages our corporeal responses, thus breaking down the distance between the viewer and the object perceived. This is also where we might insert Artaud’s vision of cinema as ‘the epidermis of reality’.

Film-Philosophy ISSN 1466-4615

450

Film-Philosophy 17.1 (2013)

Affection-images are images that trigger an emotional and bodily response. Within the narrative structure that dominates the movement-image, the affection-image is followed by action, whereas affection-images in the cinema of time-image imply an experience of time that serves no narrative purpose. Affect does not have a logical function, but seeks to move the viewer, and the ‘affection-image’ is relevant to Artaud’s desire to make the audience’s bodies vibrate like snakes, appealing to their nervous systems rather than their intellect. Deleuze associates the affection-image with the close-up and with the face, writing: ‘the affection-image is the close-up, and the close-up is the face’ (Deleuze 1986, 87). This close-up is often understood, particularly in 1920s accounts of the cinema, as specifically cinematic, and as the prime example of how cinema enhanced natural vision. Epstein writes that the close-up is the ‘soul of cinema’, and that through it ‘we do not simply watch life, we penetrate it’, defining cinema as a ‘theatre of the skin’ (Epstein 1974, 66). It is through the close-up that we perceive the ‘skin’ of things, the surface of matter that Artaud insisted so heavily upon. Of the many films that Artaud appeared in, The Passion of Joan of Arc is surely the most relevant to his notion that cinema should be an affective medium. Deleuze characterises The Passion of Joan of Arc, a film comprised almost entirely of close-ups of the face, as ‘the affective film par excellence’ (Deleuze 1986, 106). He writes of the relationship between the close-up and the face: ‘there is no close-up of the face, the face is in itself close-up, and the close-up is by itself face, and both are affect, affectionimage’ (Deleuze 1986, 88). Deleuze is certainly not alone in his emphasis on the affective powers of Dreyer’s images. Jean Mitry writes that Dreyer’s use of the facial close-up is unique because rather than interrupting the signifying function of images, which is what he sees as the conventional purpose of the facial close-up, Dreyer’s facial close-up simultaneously signifies and expresses: ‘opposed and juxtaposed in a kind of abstract figuration, the facial close-ups signify as the very sign of what they express’ (Mitry 1987, 81). The power to signify what it is expressing points towards a kind of representation based on presence rather than absence. Mitry suggests that this new form of expression occurs through the way that facial close-ups interchange with each other throughout the film, which he characterises as ‘a confrontation of faces’ (Mitry 1987, 81). In Dreyer’s film the facial close-up does not relate to the presence of one particular body, which is what it conventionally does when it interrupts the narrative, as Mitry argues ‘with the sole purpose of emphasizing the actors talents’ (Mitry 1987, 81), but instead conveys a totality of expression arising from the interaction between faces. Mitry’s approach pre-empts theories of embodied spectatorship such as Sobchack’s, Shaviro’s or Marks’s by criticising semioticians (principally Christian Metz) for understanding cinema as a form to be analysed as if it Film-Philosophy ISSN 1466-4615

451

Film-Philosophy 17.1 (2013)

were a language. He argues that rather than appealing to the intellect, films are first experienced as sensual, and exceed structural or grammatical analysis. He writes: Because nothing in the cinema is intelligible that does not first pass through the senses (as visual perception recalls all sensations, tactile and otherwise, relative to the given object), the main problem with structural semiology [...] is that it only ever understands signification on the level of the intelligible, completely ignoring the senses. (Mitry 1987, 79) It is no coincidence that Mitry reaches this conclusion through a discussion of the close-up, and specifically Dreyer’s use of it. Dreyer himself claimed that he wanted to humanise the tragedy, again emphasising the importance of affect as that which eliminates the distance between the audience and the faces they perceive on screen: ‘my intention whilst filming Joan of Arc was, through the glory of legend, to reveal the human tragedy. I wanted to show that the heroes of History are also human beings’ (Drouzy 1982, 241). The hero/heroine is always an individual, but always unattainable. If Dreyer claims here that he wants to portray the heroine differently, we might suggest that to humanise the heroine is to de-individualise her, and to render the actor a vessel for collective affect. Dreyer also wrote about choosing to portray all the actors in The Passion of Joan of Arc with no make-up, in order to get closer to what he perceived to be their human qualities, as if these were visible on their skin. Indeed, as in Artaud’s work, skin seems to occupy a privileged position for Dreyer. Maurice Drouzy, in his biography Carl Th. Dreyer né Nilsson, draws attention to the fact that Dreyer suffered from debilitating eczema, and describes him as being ‘uneasy in his skin [mal dans sa peau]’ (Drouzy 1982,149). There are perhaps parallels to be drawn here with Artaud, who, as we have seen, also wrote about suffering from eczema, and Dreyer, like Artaud, suffered from a psychological breakdown. Drouzy claims that as a result of his problematic childhood, Dreyer was incapable of affection and always had to maintain a distance from others, writing ‘in opposition to tactile artists, Dreyer is a visual one’ (Drouzy 1982, 139). However, there is undoubtedly a danger in reducing Dreyer’s artistic output to his biographical circumstances. The claim that Dreyer is a purely visual artist, for example, is difficult to maintain, as it seems far more apparent, especially in The Passion of Joan of Arc, that Dreyer’s films seek to eliminate distance, particularly given that he himself emphasised the importance of the affective power of his images. What I want to advance here is not therefore a psychological interpretation, but rather a theory of materiality that takes into account the close relationship between the corporeal body (as opposed to a represented body) and the cinematic image.

Film-Philosophy ISSN 1466-4615

452

Film-Philosophy 17.1 (2013)

André Bazin writes that The Passion of Joan of Arc is an exploration of the interior states of the soul, again emphasising the affective power of Dreyer’s images: The story of Joan, such as Dreyer tells it, is deprived of all anecdotal incidence, it is the pure combat of souls, but this exclusively spiritual tragedy, whose movement is interior, is expressed through the medium of that privileged part of the body, the face (Bazin 1975, 38). This description emphasises proximity and interiority, as if the invisible interior spiritual movement can be accessed, or rendered visible, through the face. Bazin also links this spirituality to the material quality of the negatives, adding ‘there is perhaps no other film in which the material quality of the photography has more importance’ (Bazin 1975, 37). He writes that the close-up undoes the distinction between actor and character, and that the actors’ individual facial characteristics, and the material quality of their skins, evoke their souls: 'seen in such proximity through the extreme closeup, the mask of acting begins to crack. Silvain’s warts, Jean d’Yd’s freckles and Maurice Shutz’s wrinkles coincide with their souls, they signify more than their role' (Bazin 1975, 38, Bazin’s emphasis). Bazin’s emphasis of the verb ‘signify’ here draws attention to signification as more than what is accessible though intellectual interpretation, in other words, he suggests that there is something direct about the way that these facial signs communicate meaning. Artaud too placed great emphasis on the physicality of his actors, suggesting that they should not simply act their characters, but become them, eliminating the distance between reality and its representation, and those writing about Artuad often identify his auratic presence in The Passion of Joan of Arc. Dominique Païni, for example, writes 'no one, except Dreyer, gave him the opportunity to expose the pestilence in the soul of his nerves', and that 'the expression on his troubled face denotes a true pity' (Païni 2006, 40). Kimberley Jannarone writes skeptically of how, through a still taken from the film which has become his most iconic image, reproduced on the cover of the Selected Works, 'his intense inwardness and charisma situate him as the noblest sufferer of history' (Jannerone 2010, 8). This recalls the embodied, mimetic relationship that Artaud projected on to his potential interpretation of Usher in The Fall of the House of Usher, as he writes to Gance: ‘There is a quality of nervous suffering which the greatest actor in the world cannot project on the screen unless he has experienced it himself. I have experienced it. I think like Usher’ (Artaud 1976, 168, Artaud’s emphasis). 3 Dreyer also wrote about his actors embodying their roles, 3

I am using the term ‘mimesis’ to designate a specifically non-representative form of expression. This follows from Borch-Jacobsen’s notion, in The Freudian Subject, that mimesis is ‘unspecularizable […], nonreflexive, prereflexive’, and is a dangerous, affective

Film-Philosophy ISSN 1466-4615

453

Film-Philosophy 17.1 (2013)

stating he found in Falconetti ‘the reincarnation of the martyr’ (Dreyer 1983, 36). He theorises, in a similar vein to Artaud, about the importance of corporeal gesture in silent film as a mimetic form of expression that communicates more directly than speech, writing that ‘the mimetic [la mimétique] acts directly upon us and evokes our emotions without the need for thoughts to intervene’, and that the mimetic gesture ‘brings the soul to the face’ (Dreyer 1983, 67). Bazin’s description of The Passion of Joan of Arc accentuates the spiritual, which is symptomatic of much writing about this film, including Dreyer’s own analysis. Most accounts of Dreyer’s film display a striking lack of critical distance. Drouzy attempts to introduce this distance by pathologising Dreyer, and attributing his artistic choices to his relationship to his mother. Bazin writes emotively about the actors becoming their characters. Mitry emphasises the expressive power of the facial close-up which he distinguishes from its usual function in narrative cinema. Perhaps the most eccentric is Stan Brakhage’s interpretation of the film, which merges Dreyer, Maria Falconetti and Joan together. He writes about the difficulty Dreyer had in finding an appropriate actress to play Joan, claiming that Dreyer chose Falconetti because she looked like him: ‘Carl found himself, thus, in a fashion magazine; and as Theadore, chose himself to play with himself in the deadliest game of all: the hermaphrodite’s game… played as always, to tortured end – Death itself by fire, for sure!’ (Brakhage 1972, 67). One question that arises through reading these various interpretations is the following: who is the protagonist of this film? Is it Dreyer himself, Falconetti as the individual actor, the inner movements of the actors’ souls visible on their faces as a kind of collective entity, or the close-up and negatives as pro-filmic elements? For on the one hand, Bazin and Brakhage both seem to suggest that the individual identities of the actors are important, yet on the other, they imply that the body’s individuality is exceeded: Falconetti becomes Dreyer, Eugène Silvain, Jean d’Yd and Maurice Schutz are identified through small facial features or qualities that form part of a collective affect. In other words, the distinction between faces, ordinarily conceived as markers of individuality, becomes blurred. The close-up of the face in The Passion of Joan of Arc often depicts substances and concentrates on small physical movements or sensations. In force that opposes the unitary subject. Borch-Jacobsen distinguishes mimesis from representation by arguing that mimesis is to act, whereas representation is to consciously reflect on that action, thus implying a distancing effect (Borch-Jacobsen 1988, 39). Mimesis as I am using it here entails a process of becoming, a ‘lack of distinction between self and other’ (Borch-Jacobsen 1988, 40) and not simply reflecting. Marks understands mimesis in comparable terms, writing that ‘in theories of embodied spectatorship, such as Sobchack’s, the relationship between spectator and film is fundamentally mimetic, in that meaning is not solely communicated through signs but experienced in the body’ (Marks 2000, 149).

Film-Philosophy ISSN 1466-4615

454

Film-Philosophy 17.1 (2013)

this sense it might also be said to illicit a mimetic response in the viewer, engaging with haptic forms of visuality. Bodily fluids such as saliva, sweat, blood, tears and mucous on the surface of skin are all emphasised at different points in the film. The haptic imagery always evokes not only touch and vision, but also smell and sound, for example when we see a fly walking slowly across Joan’s face twice in the film, or when we see the close-up of a mouth shouting or spitting, exposing rotten teeth. The intersensorial impression given off by such images does not work towards emphasising the individual but rather creating a collective affect, or a touching between bodies. This de-individualising force occurs via the face, which becomes the surface on which these transcorporeal interactions occur, for example through the scene where Massieu dries the tears from Joan’s cheeks, or where we see saliva sticking to Joan’s face, or close-ups of other characters’ faces flinching at Joan’s suffering. The faces in The Passion of Joan of Arc at times become indistinguishable, morphing into one another, such as in the shots panning around the crowd during Joan’s execution, and the individuality of bodies is blurred, the distances between them eliminated. Beugnet characterises the use of the close-up in the French ‘cinema of sensation’ as a means to ‘do away with the usual binarisms and blur the frontiers between inside and outside, masculine and feminine, figurative and abstract, sensory and conceptual, subjective and objective’ (Beugnet 2007, 108). The close-up produces what Beugnet refers to as operations of the ‘formless’, after Bataille’s informe, and she writes that it is ‘the perfect tool for capturing the process of metamorphosis of a body passing from form to formlessness, becoming a deformed and unrecognisable entity from which in turn, form emerges’ (Beugnet 2007, 192). The putting into question of gender distinctions is one way in which this deforming of the body, or the blurring of its boundaries, occurs in The Passion of Joan of Arc. Joan’s refusal to dress as a woman, when her persecutors give her the opportunity of attending mass if she stops wearing men’s clothes and she declines the offer, is one stage of this. In other ways she occupies an indistinguishable and contradictory space which confuses the gender binary; she is hysterical (a supposedly feminine condition) but simultaneously one of the ‘heroes of History’ (Drouzy quoting Dreyer, Drouzy 1982, 241); she is both dirty (as we see in the close-up shots of her dirty fingernails, and the flies buzzing around her) and clean (her and Massieu’s smooth and youthful skin place them in opposition to her persecutors); neither typically feminine (she sports a butch haircut), nor masculine (she is played by a feminine fashion model). God’s gender is also put into question, when Joan claims she has spoken to him through ‘the angel Michael’, and Cauchon demands to know how Joan could identify St Michael, if he appeared as a woman, and whether or not he was naked. Joan’s refusal to cooperate might thus be seen as a rejection of the rules of representation that she is subjected to: if she is to be taken Film-Philosophy ISSN 1466-4615

455

Film-Philosophy 17.1 (2013)

seriously in court, and therefore be representable, she must adhere to dress codes, and be able to distinguish between male and female. Subverting the National Icon: The Material Body The question of whether a clear distinction can be made between Joan of Arc’s symbolic, representative significance and her potential to become a vessel for collective affect remains. As we have seen, Artaud’s ideas about the importance of moving his audience can be situated in the context of 1920s cinema theory in which spectatorship was understood as a primarily collective experience, one which put into place dangerous and contagious forces. Deleuze would later write in The Time-Image that such forces could be easily appropriated by fascism. He provides the example of ‘Hitlerian automaton’ that came out of an appropriation of expressionist cinema, writing: 'the revolutionary courtship of the movement-image and an art of the masses become subject was broken off, giving way to the masses subjected as psychological automaton, and to their leader as great spiritual automaton' (Deleuze 1989, 264). This is perhaps one reason why by the 1950s and 60s the dominant trends in film theory had largely abandoned the notion that there was a dangerous, collective force at play in the cinema, and began to concentrate on the individual spectator. The problem with theories concentrating on the collective experience of cinema spectatorship arises when they privilege a particular kind of body and present it as a valid vehicle for universal identification. In this light it is perhaps interesting to consider that Joan of Arc is currently used as a figurehead for the extreme right in France: this is surely an example of what Deleuze would identify as the fascist appropriation of the spiritual automaton, and demonstrates a white, French, Catholic collective body, rather than a non-normative affective entity that seeks to undo the boundaries between individuals. Joan of Arc thus becomes the embodiment, rather than the victim, of cultural prejudice. Artaud himself, as one recent study of his theatre production work has argued (Jannarone 2010), whilst vehemently rejecting the contemporary European culture and context in which he wrote, often ended up veering rather closely to the kinds of fascist discourse that Deleuze warns against. I want to argue, however, that Dreyer’s interpretation seems to suggest an altogether different version of Joan of Arc than the figure appropriated by the extreme right. It is undeniable that Joan of Arc has a huge symbolic significance; however, this means that she has been appropriated in a variety of different contexts in radically different ways. This is also true of Dreyer’s film. Charles O’Brien points out that it has often been used as an example of a national French cinema subverting Hollywood tradition. He argues, on the contrary, that the film escapes the Hollywood/avant-garde binary, and that what Dreyer’s version of Joan of Arc subverts is ‘the national film aesthetic derived from the academic art of the nineteenth century’ (O’Brien 1996, 3). Film-Philosophy ISSN 1466-4615

456

Film-Philosophy 17.1 (2013)

He quotes from an article on Dreyer published shortly after the release of the film, in 1928 that places Dreyer within a school of ‘international’ directors: Of Danish nationality and formation but Swedish ancestry, Carl Dreyer does not derive from the cinematography of any particular country, but instead belongs to a school of directors who make up a more generally human cinema, international in its accessibility to all people, of whatever race, people, class or condition. (O’Brien 1996, 7, quoting Jean Arroy) Critics writing at the time, O’Brien demonstrates, were more concerned with this vision of Dreyer as an ‘international’ director, implying that Dreyer’s Joan of Arc subverts the symbolic weight of the national icon. Artaud expressed a similar view, arguing that it was a vehemently anti-establishment film: Dreyer was determined to show Joan of Arc as a victim of one of the most painful distortions there are: the distortion of a divine principle passing into the brains of men, whether they are called the Government or the Church or by some other name. (Artaud 1976, 183) We might read this as precisely a declaration against the ideological appropriation of Joan as a symbolic figure. Dreyer’s declared intention was ‘to move the viewers so they would feel in their own flesh the suffering endured by Joan’ (O’Brien 1996, 21). The scenes from the film that did not pass the censor were those depicting real bodily discomfort, for example the scene of Joan bleeding in which Falconetti actually gives blood (Drouzy 1982, 246). If critics at the time described Dreyer’s film as ‘too “cruel” for sensitive viewers’ (O’Brien 1996, 20), it is surely in the sense that Artaud advocates in his ‘theatre of cruelty’, where cruelty is defined as an affective and threatening force precisely because it moves the spectator and disrupts the boundaries between self and other. If Dreyer’s Joan is to avoid becoming an image of the ‘fascist automaton’, it is as an expression of a transcorporeal, non-normative bodily experience that threatens a set of given binaries rather than re-enforcing them. As critics have shown, this occurs through disruption of techniques associated with a given set of cinematic conventions. For David Bordwell these are the conventions associated with Hollywood narrative cinema (Bordwell 1981, 9), for O’Brien it is those associated with national cinema that follows the painterly tradition, and for Richard Abel it is historical cinema, as he describes The Passion of Joan of Arc as an ‘anti-historical film’ (Abel 1984, 198). Following an Artaudian reading, however, I want to argue that it is in the very materiality of the images that the disruption of bodily limits occurs. Film-Philosophy ISSN 1466-4615

457

Film-Philosophy 17.1 (2013)

Artaud writes of ‘the revelatory aspect of matter’ (Artaud 1970, 57), opposed to a purely symbolic representation of a body, and the way in which the bodies interact in The Passion of Joan of Arc takes on a new turn if we consider the materiality of the negatives. Bazin draws attention to the quality of the photography in the film, and viewing it now (even with the widely available digitally-enhanced version) one cannot help but appreciate the grain of the film, as well as blemishes on its surface, which we might associate with the haptic. But it is not so much the inevitable aging of the filmstock that makes this film interesting as a material object, as the history of its storage. Curiously, the negatives underwent a similar fate to the body they portray as it is consumed by flames; the original version was destroyed in a fire in 1928, so Dreyer had to re-edit the entire film using the discarded footage from the first montage. This second version was yet again destroyed in a fire at the GM Société de Tirage in 1929, and thought to be lost. In 1952 the negatives of the second version were rediscovered and the film was rather clumsily put together with new intertitles and a soundtrack by Lo Duca. Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc circulated principally in this form, as what Drouzy calls a ‘mutilated version’ (Drouzy 1981, 248), until 1981, when what might be called a ‘miraculous’ discovery was made: a copy of the original version of the film was found in a Norwegian psychiatric hospital.4 There are clearly various parallels to be drawn between Joan of Arc’s fate and the fate of the negatives: both were destroyed by fire, reappropriated via various different versions, and miraculously resurrected (Joan as a Saint, the film as a deluxe, digitally-enhanced Criterion Collection DVD edition). One might also see a parallel in Drouzy’s implication that Joan, like all of Dreyer’s characters, suffered from a borderline personality disorder (Drouzy 1982, 149), and the fact that the negatives were found in a psychiatric institution. All this is to say that in its very materiality, the body of the negatives has a mimetic relationship to the body on film, not only because it has an indexical relationship to the body that was there, but perhaps also because it suffered the same fate. This seems like a typically Artaudian end. In the preface to The Theatre and its Double, Artaud wrote, as if referring back to the Joan of Dreyer's film, 'if there is still one hellish, truly accursed thing in our time, it is our artistic dallying with forms, instead of being like victims burnt at the stake, signalling through the flames' (Artaud 1958, 13). Never content with simply writing about destroying the body, Artaud frequently destroyed the surface of the page, boring holes in the paper with his pen, or burning it with cigarettes, but rarely enough for it to be completely annihilated. In The Passion of Joan of Arc the force of the images lies not in the narrative, but 4

See the notes included in the 1999 Criterion Collection re-issue.

Film-Philosophy ISSN 1466-4615

458

Film-Philosophy 17.1 (2013)

rather in the intensity of affect that undermines the story, and is rendered all the more visible in the materiality of the film and the bodies that it interacts with. Deleuze writes that like for Eisenstein, Artaud’s theory of cinema proposes that ‘from image to thought, there is shock or vibration, which must give rise to thought in thought’, but what distinguishes Artaud from Eisenstein is the idea that the cinema advances ‘not the power of thought but its impower, and thought has never had any other problem’ (Deleuze 1989, 166). This ‘impower’, as an analysis of Dreyer’s film in relation to Artaud’s writing has shown, relies on an emphatically corporeal expression of the cinematic body, and if Deleuze argues that ‘the brain is the screen’ (Deleuze 2003, 264), we can conclude that for Artaud, as for Dreyer, the film is the body, in a distinctly material sense.

Film-Philosophy ISSN 1466-4615

459

Film-Philosophy 17.1 (2013)

Bibliography Abel, Richard (1984) French Cinema: The First Wave 1915 – 1929, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Artaud, Antonin (1958) The Theatre and its Double trans. Mary Caroline Richards, New York: Grove Press. Artaud, Antonin (1970) Œuvres complètes vol. III, Paris: Gallimard. Artaud, Antonin (1974) Œuvres complètes vol. XIII, Paris: Gallimard. Artaud, Antonin (1976) Selected Writings ed. and introduction Susan Sontag, trans. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Berkeley, California: University of California Press. Bazin, André (1975) Le Cinéma de la cruauté, Paris: Flammarion. Beugnet, Martine (2007) Cinema and Sensation: French Film and the Art of Transgression, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Borch-Jacobsen, Mikkel (1988) The Freudian Subject trans. Catherine Porter, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Bordwell, David (1981) The Films of Carl-Theodor Dreyer, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Brakhage, Stan (1972) The Brakhage Lectures, Chicago: Good Lion. Deleuze, Gilles (1986) Cinema I: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, London: Athlone. Deleuze, Gilles (1989) Cinema 2: The Time-Image, London: Athlone. Deleuze, Gilles (2003) Deux régimes de fous, Paris: Minuit. Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix (1980) Mille plateaux, Paris: Minuit. Dreyer, Carl Theodor (1983) Réflexions sur mon métier, Paris: Cahiers du cinéma. Drouzy, Maurice (1982) Carl Th. Dreyer, né Nilsson, Paris: Éditions du Cerf. Epstein, Jean (1974) Écrits sur le cinéma I, Paris: Seghers. Epstein, Jean (1977) ‘Magnetism and Other Writings’, translated Stuart Liebman, October, volume 3, 9 - 25.

Film-Philosophy ISSN 1466-4615

460

Film-Philosophy 17.1 (2013)

Gordon, Rae-Beth (2001) ‘From Charcot to Charlot: Unconscious Imitation and Spectatorship in French Cabaret and Early Cinema’, in Critical Inquiry no. 27, vol. 3, 515 – 549. Jannarone, Kimberly (2010) Artaud and his Doubles, Ann Arbour: University of Michigan Press. Marks, Laura (2000) The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment and the Senses, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mitry, Jean (1987) La Sémiologie en question, Paris: Éditions du Cerf. O’Brien, Charles (1996) ‘Rethinking National Cinema: Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc and the Academic Aesthetic’ in Cinema Journal vol. 35, number 4. Shaviro, Stephen (1993) The Cinematic Body, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota. Sontag, Susan (1983) Under the Sign of Saturn, London: Writers and Readers. Filmography Dreyer, Carl Theodor (1928) La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (France). Dulac, Germaine (1928) La Coquille et le clergyman (France).

Film-Philosophy ISSN 1466-4615

461