The Cinematic Defeat of Brecht by Artaud in Peter Brook’s Marat/Sade

Torner, Evan M

Publication:
The Cinematic Defeat of Brecht by Artaud in Peter Brook’s Marat/Sade

dc.contributor.author	Torner, Evan M
dc.contributor.department	University of Massachusetts - Amherst
dc.date	2023-09-22T19:52:18.000
dc.date.accessioned	2024-04-26T16:32:47Z
dc.date.available	2024-04-26T16:32:47Z
dc.date.issued	2009-10-01
dc.description.abstract	In this work, I analyze Peter Brook's film interpretation of Peter Weiss' modernist drama Die Verfolgung und Ermordung Jean-Paul Marats dargestellt durch die Schauspielgruppe des Hospizes zu Charenton unter Anleitung des Herrn de Sade (Marat/Sade, 1964-5) in terms of the dialectical aesthetic of the latter. Weiss had intended Marat/Sade to be a literal, figurative and aesthetic debate on equal footing between the dramatic theories of Bertolt Brecht and Antonin Artaud, portrayed respectively through the figures of the French revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat and the epicurean cynic Marquis de Sade. Techniques of Brechtian distanciation are also employed within the written play alongside contradictory Artaudian elements of grotesquerie and horror, each grappling with the other in an unresolved dialectic. Yet Brook's filmed version of his stage production unintentionally transgresses against Weiss' play-without-a-resolution, primarily siding with Sade, Artaud and the "theater of cruelty." Though the French and German New Wave movements in cinema, which questioned the artifice of film production using Brechtian alienation techniques, were contemporary with Brook's film in 1966, the film appears not to have taken these movements into account while trying to portray Weiss' dialectic in its cinematography and mise en scène. I contend that the violence portrayed within Brook's Marat/Sade is broadcast as a spectacle to be consumed by an omnipresent viewer, whereas Weiss cogently intertwines such brutality with a concrete understanding of its mechanical function within society. This begs the question of how one can filmically portray cruelty both as spectacle and as socio-political reality.
dc.description.sponsorship	This article came about as a marriage of two graduate seminars - Susan Cocalis' "20th Century German Drama" and Barton Byg's "Brecht and World Cinema" - to which (and to whom) I owe a great theoretical debt. I would also like to acknowledge the encouraging words of Fatima Naqvi when I presented this paper at the 2007 "Violence: A Necessary Evil?" conference at Rutgers University.
dc.identifier.uri	https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14394/22459
dc.relation.url	https://scholarworks.umass.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1001&context=edge&unstamped=1
dc.source.status	published
dc.subject	Drama Film studies
dc.subject	Bertolt Brecht
dc.subject	Antonin Artaud
dc.subject	film
dc.subject	theater
dc.subject	adaptation
dc.subject	1960s
dc.subject	theater of cruelty
dc.subject	epic theater
dc.subject	aesthetics
dc.subject	political modernism
dc.subject	Peter Brook
dc.subject	Peter Weiss
dc.subject	Marat/Sade
dc.subject	Die Verfolgung und Ermordung Jean-Paul Marats dargestellt durch die Schauspielgruppe des Hospizes zu Charenton unter Anleitung des Herrn de Sade
dc.title	The Cinematic Defeat of Brecht by Artaud in Peter Brook’s Marat/Sade
dc.title.alternative	Brecht's Defeat in Brook's Marat/Sade
dc.type	article
dc.type	article
digcom.contributor.author	isAuthorOfPublication\|email:etorner@german.umass.edu\|institution:University of Massachusetts - Amherst\|Torner, Evan M
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digcom.identifier.contextkey	699519
digcom.identifier.submissionpath	edge/vol1/iss1/1
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