Sensuous Scholarship

6. Artaud, Rouch, and the Cinema of Cruelty

~ AR1A~~, R~~~H, A~~ 1B~ ~I~~MA ~f ~R~~t11 Sensuous scholarship .may well have begun in 1954 in the film theater of the Musee de l'Homme. A select audience of African and European intellectuals has been assembled to see a film screening. Marcel Griaule is there, as are Germaine Dieterlen, Paulin Vierya, Alioune Sar, and Luc de Reusch. Jean Rouch, a pioneer of ethnographic film and cinema verite, is in the projection booth. He beams onto the screen the initial frames of Les maitresfous. Rouch begins to speak, but soon senses a rising tension in the theater. As the reel winds down, the uncompromising scenes of Les maitresfous make people in the audience squirm in their seats. Rouch asks his select audience for their reaction to the film. Marcel Griaule, Rouch's mentor in anthropology, says that the film is a travesty; he tells Rouch to destroy it. In rare agreement with Griaule, Paulin Vierya, an African filmmaker, also suggests that the film be destroyed. There is only one encouraging reaction to Les maitresfous, that of fellow anthropologist Luc de Hensch.' This reaction clearly wounded Jean Rouch. Should he destroy this film? In filming Les maitres fous Rouch's intentions were far from racist; he wanted to demonstrate how Songhay people in the colonial Gold Coast embodied knowledge and practices "not yet known to us." Just as in one of his earlier films, Les magiciensdeWanzerbe (1947), in which a sorcerer defies commonsense expectations by vomiting and then swallowing a small metal chain of power, so in Les maitresfous, Rouch wanted to document the unthinkable-that men and women possessed 120 Embodied Representations by the Hauka spirits, the spirits of French and British colonialism , can handle fire and dip their hands into boiling cauldrons of sauce without burning themselves. Always the provocateur, Rouch wanted to challenge his audiences sensuously to think new thoughts about Africa and Africans. Could these people of Africa possess knowledge "not yet known to us," a veritable challenge to racist European conceptions of Africa's place in the history of science? Perhaps Rouch's intent in Les maitresfous was naive. The brutal images overpower the film's subtle philosophical themes. After other screenings to selected audiences in France, Rouch decided on a limited distribution-to art theaters and film festivals . Rouch was troubled by such criticism, for his prior practices and commitments were clearly anti-racist, anti-colonialist, and anti-imperialist. Critics have suggested that the controversy surrounding Les maitres fous compelled Rouch to make films, especially his films of "ethno-fiction," which more directly confronted European racism and colonialism. Such a view may well be correct, for after Les maitresfous Rouch made a series of films that portrayed the political and cultural perniciousness of European ethnocentrism and colonialism in the 1950s. But Rouch's political films are not simply the result of his reaction to stinging criticism, they also embody, in my view, a cinematic extension of Artaud's notion of the theater of cruelty. In a cinema of cruelty the filmmaker's goal is not to recount per se, but to present an array of unsettling images that seek to transform the audience psychologically and politically. In the remainder of this chapter I first discuss the Artaudian theories of the cinema and theater and speculate about the contours of a cinema of cruelty. I then use those contours to analyze four of Rouch's more politically and philosophically conscious films, Jaguar (1953-67), Moi, un noir (1957), La pyramide humaine (1959), and Petit apetit (1969). I conclude with a discussion of how a cinema of cruelty is a lesson in sensuous scholarship. Artaud, Rouch, and the Cinema a/Cruelty 121 Artaud and the Cinema Throughout his life Antonin Artaud (1896-1948) suffered from long bouts of incoherence-the result of schizophrenia and drug addictions. Despite these difficulties, Artaud broke into the theater as an actor in 1921. Between 1921 and 1924 he joined the experimental repertory company of Charles Dullin, for whom he acted and designed sets and costumes. He also acted with Georges and Ludmilla Pitoefs, who produced plays by Blok, Shaw, Pirondello, Capek, and Molnar. During this period, Artaud also began to write plays, essays, poems, manifestoes , and film scenarios. In 1925 he joined Andre Breton and other Surrealists contributing essays to the review The SurrealistRevolution . Between 1926 and 1929, he, Roger Vitrac, and Robert Aron founded the Theatre...