Artaud The Screaming Body

An account of Artaud's film projects, and his conception of Surrealist cinema.

Antonin Artaud (1896-1948) remains one of the most inspirational, provocative and challenging figures in world-wide contemporary culture. His trajectory extends from the Surrealist movement, to the Theatre of Cruelty, to the lunatic asylums of France, and finally back to Paris and the most astonishing period of his work. In this unique book, Stephen Barber explores the most violent extremes of Artaud's vision - work that is traversed by forces of ecstasy and annihilation, and sutured together by a raw imagery of the screaming human body. Based on extensive interviews with Artaud's closest friends and enemies, including the psychiatrist who gave him electro-shock treatment, ARTAUD: THE SCREAMING BODY gives a full and authoritative account of Artaud's film projects, and his conception of Surrealist cinema. It also examines his unique series of drawings of the fragmented human body, begun in the ward of a lunatic asylum and finished in a state of furious liberation. Finally, the book captures Artaud's ultimate experiment with the screaming body in the form of his censored recording "To Have Done With The Judgement Of God” -an experiment which is unprecedented in the history of art, and which ultimately decimates that history.

Antonin Artaud (1896–1948) remains a massively inspirational figure, worldwide, in contemporary art, film, writing and digital media. In this definitive biography, author Stephen Barber tracks Artaud’s extraordinary and compelling life, from his volatile alliance with the Surrealist movement in the 1920s, to his legendary Theatre of Cruelty of the 1930s, to his nine-year asylum incarceration and his final period of drug-ravaged freedom in 1940s Paris. ARTAUD: BLOWS AND BOMBS provides a vivid, potent portrait of Artaud’s extreme and provocative life. Artaud’s creative influence has been seminal, from the Beat movement to Punk, from the revolutionary theatre movements of the 1960s to contemporary digital media theory. This first-ever biography locates the vital source of that influence. Artaud’s wild life was full of conflict, desperation and fury. Many of its crucial aspects have been totally unknown, notably Artaud’s apocalyptic journey to the Aran Islands in 1937, from which he returned to France in a strait-jacket, and his agonizing electroshock-treatments of the mid-1940s; ARTAUD: BLOWS AND BOMBS illuminates all of these critical moments in Artaud’s life for the first time. Based on fifteen years of research and on many interviews with the people closest to Artaud, this is a unique and electrifying biography that will be read for decades to come.

The first comprehensive and authoritative account of the life and work of the man who changed the course of modern theatre. Antonin Artaud is one of the great cultural legends of the twentieth century. His Theatre of Cruelty altered the course of modern theatre, and his experiments with the Surrealist movement have proved inspirational throughout Europe and America, But Artaud's life was one of terrible failure and confrontation, an exploration of the extremes of agony and joy. At the end of a long series of journeys - both physical and spiritual - aimed at creating a magical culture of the human body, he was arrested and interned for nine years in a succession of French lunatic asylums, where he suffered starvation and was subjected to fifty electroshock treatments. Stephen Barber's book is a faithful and moving portrait of a unique figure. '...valuable, readable and pacey.' Independent

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"Artaud remains one of the significant and influential theorists of modern theatre."—Gerald Rabkin, Rutgers University

The work of Antonin Artaud (1896-1948) is among the most seminal, shattered and inspirational of the twentieth century, extending across literature, film, performance, manifesto, sound art, drawing and a sequence of exploratory journeys. His body of work is still able to anatomise and negate all compromised cultures, and engender new theories, images and texts of the body, revolution, madness and the creative act. Now Stephen Barber's intensively researched work on Artaud has revealed Artaud's work to English- language readers in all of its intricacy.