Thursday, May 31, 2007

there is no going back . . .

Titicut Follies

The only American film banned from release for reasons other than obscenity or national security, Titicut Follies was filmed inside the Massachusetts Correctional Institution at Bridgewater, a prison hospital for the criminally insane. (distribution blocked by legal order, 1967-1992)


we are listening to Tanz Debil by Einsturzende Neubauten (the original film was without soundtrack)


miss Charlotte




'Frenchmen, one more effort, if you want to be Republicans!'


from: Cook, David. (5.14.2002). 'Frenchmen, one more effort, if you want to be Republicans!'The 2002 French Presidential Election. ctheory.net. retrieved on 31.05.07 from
www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=339


" . . . Jospin may also have been his own undoing in contributing to the record absenteeism of the first vote. Not Baudrillard's 'silent majority' but rather more than likely the absentees who were absent with pay. Once the thirty-five hour workweek came into effect, coupled with the notoriously clever French system of 'bridging' holidays together, much of the nation is on vacation. Nothing wrong with escaping the noose of the factory system as the wish fulfillment of the thirty-five hour week has caused a boom in the vacation industry. This may also account for the popularity of Michel Houellebecg's Plateforme, which details the French fantasy of an inclusive Thai holiday with middle life sexual (dis)satisfaction, and made complete, I suppose, by a final terrorism attack. Here, nonetheless, is the republican spirit of Sade where the sexual fantasy runs the effort to become virtuous -- even if one really comes from Cherbourg. For Sade, the couplet of vacating/vacation was the algorithm of libertine life just as the circulation of the leisure parks and sun holidays dominates much of the 'real' life of the republic. . . . "

la Bastille

Some lucid remarks by the Director of a recent Italian production . . .

«I had been feeling the need for some time to return to Peter Weiss's play. It is a work which I regard as being among the finest of the Twentieth century. Marat-Sade is a classic that cannot, and must not, be conceptually linked to a specific political and social period, which does not allow itself to be bound to eminently or exclusively “political” interpretations, but which deals with an unresolved problem, the great dichotomy between “acting” and “being over-hasty”. One finds here a far-reaching reflection that is able to go beyond the militant sentiment out of which the play was written, linked to a specific historic period, to reach the heights of an articulate philosophical digression. Here, Form and Substance come together. The Form becomes structure, in which the aesthetic sign is ethical value - Form and Substance fused in an absolutely and stunningly avant-garde conception of the need and beauty of Revolution and on its contextual negation, to the greater glory of Reason and Thought. Peter Weiss clearly structures this lofty philosophical debate in the form of a Miracle Play, a Mass (supreme ritual) with choir, officiant, the sacrificial lamb, the rite of eternal blood - blood that becomes word, and word that becomes blood».
Walter Le Moli
see http://www.teatrostabiletorino.it/tst0405/catalog_view.php?lang=eng&ID=9 for the source
(The production had its National premier debut at the Teatro Argentina, Rome, on 11 January 2005.)

a review of Push Production's revival in 2006

from: Denton, Martin (June 15, 2006). Marat/Sade. nytheatre.com. retrieved May 31, 2007 from http://www.nytheatre.com/nytheatre/mara3560.htm


" . . . The year is 1808 and Napoleon is at the height of his power; through his story of Marat, de Sade explores the dangers of despotism and conformity—and through the interplay of the sensualist de Sade and the moralist Marat, Weiss delves even deeper into the same thematic territory. The genius of Weiss's concept is the layering of contemporary observations onto historical ones, so that the play-within-the-play's frequent railings against oppression and for liberty may be read as (a) inmates earnestly wishing for freedom from the repressive mental institution where they're imprisoned; (b) Marat's followers and opponents, playing out the issues of the French Revolution; (c) thinly veiled protests against Napoleon's regime; (d) thinly veiled protests against Hitler's and other recent (in 1964) fascist regimes; and even, in Kimmel's interpretation, (e) thinly veiled protests against policies of our current government.


Dec.1, 1999. "Civil Emergency" at the WTO in Seattle.

But the content of Marat/Sade, compelling though it is, is not even the half of this show. Weiss exploits his asylum setting to turn a theatre into a madhouse and a madhouse into a circus. This is the stuff of Brecht's epic theatre, and I wonder how jolting and exciting it might have been four decades ago when Brecht's work was still new and not so densely explored. Kimmel does an admirable job putting this show on its feet, but he can't surprise his audience the way that Peter Brook could when Marat/Sade premiered on Broadway, and that's a shame: in terms of structure and form, the play almost feels dated, its innovations and inventions having become so commonplace. . . . "

The world of l'aliénation mentale before and after Sade's stay at Charenton: an excerpt from Faulk's novel Human Traces

from Faulks, Sebastian. Human Traces. London: Vintage Books, 2006. pp. 102-105.


". . . Next to Chiarugi, he placed a copy of Johann Reil's Rhapsodies of the Psychological Method of Cure in Mental Alienation [1803] , the first book, as far as he knew, to have stated that madness was not a supernat­ural visitation, but an affliction of the tissues of the brain, in a way that pneumonia is an ailment of the lung, no less physical for being invisible. Next to that he placed Traité medico-philosophique sur l'aliénation mentale [1801] by the Frenchman Philippe Pinel, who was known even to the dreamy undergraduates in Thomas's lectures as the man who 'struck the chains from the lunatics' at the Bicêtre hospital and I the Salpetrière in Paris. Thomas's professor had pointed out that Pinel had in fact replaced the chains with straitjackets and that his real contribution was to have believed that lunatics with periods of lucidity were curable.

In any event, there was something else Pinel had written that was of particular interest to Thomas because it seemed to have a bearing on the plight of Jacques's brother, Olivier. Pinel had noticed a partic­ular group of symptoms that first afflicted young people, between puberty and adulthood; he seemed to have sensed, without stating it clearly, that this might be a distinct disease entity, and Thomas was convinced by what he had seen in the asylum that a large number of patients, particularly those demented and hearing voices, were suffering from what — for lack of any other term — he and Jacques had come to call 'Olivier's disease'.

On this point, Thomas was also excited by the writing of an English alienist, John Haslam, a medical officer at Bethlem. In Observations on Insanity [1810] , Haslam reported how he carried out post mortem inspections of twenty-nine Bethlem inmates and found that the lateral ventricles of the brain were noticeably larger than normal; he filled them with measured spoonfuls of water to prove it. If such physical phenomena could be shown by a teaspoon and a naked eye, Thomas thought, what might more advanced techniques not show? What, indeed, did Olivier's brain look like?

Had Sonia been able to see the care and respect with which Thomas shelved his small library, her anxieties for him might have been allayed. His own mind had been so inflamed by enthusiasm that he was almost immune to weariness; he felt the pity of what he saw about him in the asylum, but it did not touch him with despair; it inspired him: the slavering, the shouting and the shipwreck drove him on. Next to Haslam, he placed the three volumes of Des maladies mentales, published by Pinel's pupil, Jean-Etienne Esquirol, in 1838. Esquirol had become master of the asylum at Charenton, a place of cultivated gardens, billiards, dancing parties, tender nursing and something approaching douceur de vivre, from which patients had been sent home cured. Here, just outside Paris, the rising arc of enlightenment had seemed most exuberant.

Next to Esquirol, in the middle of the shelf, in a place of honour, Thomas placed Die Pathologie und Therapie der psychischen Krankheiten, the book most admired by the other alienists he had met. Its author, Wilhelm Griesinger, [1817-1868] was a physician who insisted that, since lunatics suffered from a disease of the body in nerve and brain, psychiatry must become part of medicine as a whole. The training he devised bore out his belief: one of his student psychiatrists was instructed, in mid-tuition, to intervene in a complicated labour causing concern in the obstetric ward next to the lecture hall. Thomas had read Griesinger in Heidelberg; even with dictionaries to hand, he found the prose extremely difficult to understand, but all the students he had met in Germany knew by heart Griesinger's battle cry that psychiatry must emerge from its hermetic life as a kind of guild and become an integral part of medicine. Thomas was considerably irritated to discover, on his return home, that the book had been translated into English more than a decade earlier.

These were his heroes, respectfully shelved; but now psychiatry was in need of a new one. While he sincerely believed that there was a rapid increase of knowledge and a growing consensus of the wise. it had to be admitted that there was an insidious and growing counter-movement. The setting-up of public asylums in France and Britain had brought welcome seclusion to many and had ended the use of chains and irons; but before long the huge buildings had come to falter under the mounting weight of numbers — from the jabbering multitude for ever at the gates. The trouble was that although the pioneering writers had humanely and beautifully described the problem, they had not found any cures. While Griesinger and the scholars scratched their heads, while they pored corpses on the slabs, observed their patients and puzzled at the wondrous meeting of thought with cell, there came into being an alternative philosophy whose main tenet was simple: in the absence of cures, there can only be management. Such a brutal belief naturally did not need volumes to articulate itself, Thomas thought, because it found its purest expression in McLeish's bookless shelves.

The last volume he put away epitomised the urgent need for rapid advance. The Physiology and Pathology of Mind [1867] by Henry Maudsley argued that lunacy was passed on from generation to generation; that characteristics not only inborn but acquired by a parent could be transmitted to a child and that the mentally ill were therefore part of a process called 'degeneration'. As such, they were to be viewed as a waste product of healthy evolution and were fit only for excretion. Maudsley doubted whether asylums helped to cure patients and pointed out that many became better only when they were released; he thought sedation by narcotics not much better than imprisonment by ball and chain, and concluded that psychiatrists were well advised merely to watch and learn until such time as they were in possession of more information about their subject.

Maudsley was right about the need for further observation. Thomas thought, the need to study the whole length of a disease from childhood to post-mortem; but such work needed time, and time was what a medical officer in a giant asylum never had. On the contrary, he had to rush and grasp at any evidence he could find in the rooms that opened off the reeking corridor. What lab­oratory conditions, Thomas thought. What carnival of delusion and inconsequence. What temptation to despair. A symptom that occurred in two people might be the central diagnostic point of the illness in one, and incidental in the other. Without time, though, how would he ever tell?

He relied on certain facts and insights provided by the authori­ties whose books he treasured and, to support them, he depended, to an extent he admitted was undesirable, on instinct. In the confu­sion and the headache, there were patterns, he was sure, and he could occasionally see them. There was, for a start, such a thing as Olivier's disease. He could predict how those afflicted by it would behave and report their symptoms; there were common, recurring factors that gave it a profound identity. A young German called Kahlbaum had also noticed the group of symptoms and called it 'hebephrenia', or young madness. How it was to be cured, though, he could not say.

Then, thought Thomas, there was the case of the warship inventor, whose wife was such a friend of Gladstone and who daily expected a letter from the Queen. These symptoms were also predictable, consistent and apparently separable from other kinds of madness; they formed a stage in the general paralysis of the insane, which had been noted by Haslam and Esquirol many years before; some thought the source of the illness appeared to lie in youthful debauchery and use of prostitutes, and that it might be related to physical symptoms of syphilis earlier in life; but how it entered the mind was impossible to describe . . . .”

Monday, May 28, 2007

figures in a fresco: Fellini's Satyricon



" . . . The "theatre effect" is often the sign of primitivism in film drama -- except when it's Orson Welles or Frederico Fellini. Satyricon's sets are spectacular, neo-modernist constructions that combine both the pictographic art of the past with the angular sensibility of the present. Characters declaim their lines to phantoms beyond the screen or to decadent aristocrats in the burlesques that are frequently featured within the playhouses, feasts, tombs, temples and the other venues that carry the action of this mythical adventure. . . .


. . . They wander the city, which is a warren of the grotesque, a bizarre brothel, a merchant mall of the unconscious. A huge head is being dragged through an alley, a nightmare from a beheading, or an icon of the local Caesar (the megalomaniacal Trimalchio, as it later develops). They retire to Encolpio's room, make love, but in the morning are found by Ascylitus. Instead of fighting, they decide to go their separate ways, split their possessions, but when asked who he wants to be with, the faithless Gitone chooses Ascylitus. Encolpio barely has time to dwell upon this treachery when an earthquake hits, and the city collapses, blocks splitting from the huge dream walls, burying citizens, animals and the collective memory. . . . "

from Lawrence Russell's writing about Fellini's Satyricon




a right f**cking bloody mess . . .


". . . . The jokes are bad, very bad. The acting, well, just don’t call it acting. Every scene lasts just too long. There is no point to any of this. It all amounts to nothing. It makes no sense whatsoever. If you’re looking for meaning, go look somewhere else. Everything is repeated once too often. And somehow it all fits together and makes for a brilliant performance. The whole show seems to be drenched in a profound sadness and melancholy. Watching “Bloody Mess” is like one of those moments after a heated argument when you suddenly laugh and wonder what the fuck you were arguing about. It’s like one of those moments when, ahh well, whatever. . . . ."

from Ivar Hagendoorn's writing about Bloody Mess (2004): see his excellent site

Weiss in the Cold War

I WAS REFERRED TO THIS PHD THESIS IN OPFERMANN'S ART OF DARKNESS:

Auschwitz in der geteilten Welt: Peter Weiss und ‘Die Ermittlung’ im Kalten Krieg. By Christopher Weiss. (Literatur im historischen Kontext) St Ingbert: Roehrig. 2000. 2 vols. 1380 pp.; 55 ill. 984. ISBN 3–86110–245–5 (pbk).

If any German-language drama of the post-war period warrants over 1300 pages of analysis and documentation, then it is Peter Weiss’s spoken oratorio Die Ermittlung. Inspired by the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials (1963–65) and premiered on 19 October 1965, in a unique Ringurauffuehrung taking in more than a dozen cities in both Germanies, the play prompted a major political and aesthetic debate: not only had Weiss dared, through the speeches of witnesses and defendants, to put Auschwitz on stage, he also used the play to criticize the Federal Republic. Exploiting much previously unknown archival material, the present study by Christoph Weiss examines both the place of Die Ermittlung in Peter Weiss’s literary oeuvre and the impact of Cold War antagonisms on its reception.

The first, analytical volume begins by surveying Peter Weiss’s literary output in the six years following his West German breakthrough in 1959, attributing its gradual politicization to the traumatic past of the German-Jewish exile and his growing unease with aspects of the Federal Republic. A key text here is the Inferno, the unpublished first part of a planned triptych based on Dante’s Divine Comedy. Arguing that the typescript preserved in Weiss’s Nachlass is ‘ein vollstaendiges, ohne Zweifel auffuehrbaresTheaterstueck’ and ‘ein in vieler Hinsicht erstaunliches Kunstwerk’ (p. 56), Weiss identifies stylistic similarities with the enormously successful Marat/Sade (1964) and an anti-capitalism that anticipates Die Ermittlung, originally conceived as a dystopic Paradiso.

Peter Weiss was so productive in 1964–65, and also the subject of such intense media attention, that Christoph Weiss has split his account of this period into several strands, devoting separate sections to the writing of the Inferno, the latter stages of which overlapped with the writer’s attendance at the Frankfurt trial, to the genesis of Die Ermittlung, begun several months before the Inferno was shelved, and to the reception of Marat/Sade, which was an international hit but also the subject of repeated revisions. However, since the issue of concurrence is vital to Weiss’s argument, some form of time-line might usefully have been included.

A second section considers the genesis of Die Ermittlung and points out that practically all the politically contentious elements in the play—including the explicit references to IG Farben, the section on industrial exploitation of prisoners placed in the middle of the ‘Gesang vom Ende der Lili Tofler’, and the repeated mention of Soviet prisoners of war (alongside the total omission of the word Jude)—were added after the typescript had been distributed to theatres, under the influence, it is argued, of the Rostock production of Marat/Sade and of the testimony in Frankfurt of former IG Farben employees. That theatres were initially presented with a play far less tendentious than the final text helps to explain why the idea of a simultaneous premiere was taken up with such alacrity. This section also assesses the impact of the many political statements made by Peter Weiss in 1964–65. Culminating in the 10 Arbeitspunkte eines Autors in der geteilten Welt’, published in September 1965, these helped to polarize attitudes towards Die Ermittlung.

The third section of Weiss’s study is devoted to the organization and reception of the Ringurauffuehrung. It provides a selective commentary on the 410 articles, all published in the German press in 1965, that are assembled in the second volume. Concerning himself primarily with the politicization of the cultural event, Weiss demonstrates that, whereas most East German papers crowed with officially sanctioned delight both before and after the premiere, in the Federal Republic there was genuine debate, with reviews of Die Ermittlung generally being far less ideologically freighted and prone to unsubstantiated criticism than the previews. Whether so much documentation was necessary is questionable. However, the chronological ordering and inclusion of much that is concerned with Marat/Sade and with its author’s political statements serve to re-entwine the threads which Weiss has teased out in his narrative, while the decision not to abridge material makes it fully available to other scholars who may wish to explore different questions, such as how readily early commentators compared Die Ermittlung with other documentary dramas.

Peter Weiss himself does not come out of this account well. Christoph Weiss not only criticizes last-minute changes to Die Ermittlung but also repeatedly draws attention to the writer’s political naivety. Although one can appreciate that a guilt complex regarding his failure to participate actively in the Second World War perhaps made Weiss feel obliged to speak out against what he saw as dangerous continuities, this reader concurred with his publisher Siegfried Unseld, who advised ‘daß es doch richtiger waere, Du schriebest Deine Arbeiten, und ueberließest das Reden einfach anderen’ (p. 221).

In its meticulous attention to detail this study will provide both a model and a resource for other scholars. Christoph Weiss shows how much can be achieved by thorough archival research, not only presenting an authoritative account of Peter Weiss’s emergence onto the German literary scene but also laying bare the forces that shaped that scene at the height of the Cold War.

University College London Judith Beniston

(c) Modern Humanities Research Assn



our first phone meeting

David and Gini spoke for a long time on the 27th May. A happy thing to share some ideas.
Some of the items on the radar screen:

  • Sade saved his skin by writing an engratiating eulogy for Marat . .
  • our culture of consolidated and restricted access to information through widely distributed news services
  • Orwell's 1984
  • we MUST implicate the audience . . . how are we playing off the apron?
  • roles will reverse

David suggests that Gini takes a look at Skype in order to save on those cell phone bills :-) (My username at Skype is david_sceno ~ We could also speak over MSN Messenger: you will find me at dvivianqccan@hotmail.com)

Sunday, May 27, 2007

review from a recent production at Yale

from the yaledailynews.com

Published: Friday, April 6, 2007

'Marat/Sade' is crazy for the revolution



Nicole Villeneuve Theater Recap

Let's face it: "The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade" sounds like a daunting reading for your next history seminar. But the play of that title, typically abbreviated Marat/Sade and produced by undergraduates this weekend, offers greater intellectual stimulus than any such article could provide.

Peter Weiss' play revolves around intellectual debate between French revolutionary leader Jean-Paul Marat and the now-infamous writer and philosopher Donatien Alphonse Francois, the Marquis de Sade. Although contemporaries, the two men of history left little evidence of interpersonal discussion, save a eulogy Sade wrote upon Marat's death, controversially influenced by the tense political times.

In Weiss' interpretation, however, the men are given a chance to speak face-to-face, albeit in another potentially-biased circumstance; the play takes place in an insane asylum, where patients perform Sade's interpretation of Marat's death. But Marat (Serena Gosden-Hood '08), ostensibly played by a paranoiac, is soon overtaken by the persona of his role and debates with Sade (TD Smith '07) over questions of individual responsibility, the purpose of the written word and censorship in times of political unrest. The audience is continually called to further entangle itself in the action by choosing sides in the debate; the narrator-figure of the herald (Tessa Williams '10) entreats, "Two champions wrestling with each others' views . You must choose."

But choosing between Gosden-Hood and Smith poses quite a challenge; their emotional commitment to their often-cerebral dialogue brings energy and vigor to the competing philosophies. Even more startling is junior Adrianna Villa's '08 portrayal of Charlotte Corday, Marat's assassin. Although introduced as a narcoleptic in the play-within-a-play, Corday's waking moments herald the production's most powerful and threatening scenes. The distinction between theatricality and reality becomes blurred, despite the constant reminders of the dramatic situation, as Corday's emotion transcends her mere role and dominates her entire self. Although we first see the players as asylum patients, Corday forces the audience to recognize that we are all living in a theater of the insane.

Unfortunately, this passion is at odds with the antics of the Greek chorus, which comments on the debates between Sade and Marat with rhyming dialogue and intermittent unaccompanied song interludes. Although the unnatural quality of these remarks is intentional, meant to increase our awareness of the illusion, the meaning behind the words is absent; the words become sing-song and the choreography, often literal enactments of the words, becomes mundanely contrived. Without this attention to the text, the audience receives little of the impact intended to force viewers into self-questioning; insanity merely becomes yelling.

The Pierson-Davenport Auditorium lends itself well to the production; the exposed beams and pipes of the building make the theatrical illusion of the play transparent and highlight Weiss' Brechtian influences. The sets are spare and give little means of distraction, save the wooden tub - made iconic by Jacques-Louis David's portrayal - in which Marat sits throughout the play, in order to soothe his debilitating skin disease. The cast uses all corners of the space, running up steps and climbing up walls, but director Sam Kahn '08 manages to consistently create some semblance of order in the chaos that ensues, a sizeable task with a cast of 11 that is constantly on stage.

The intimacy of the theater also serves the work's design, as audience members are forced to commune physically, as well as emotionally, with the actors. It allows for "an assault on the audience [that is manifested] closer to literally than any other play," Smith notes. "You should actually have a visceral reaction."

And though this effect is inconsistent, "Marat/Sade" makes an impact. Vacillating between insanity and the mundane, the audience only remembers the madness.

from the Beauvoir précis

"In his fascination with the conflict between consciousness and the flesh, Sade exposed the contradiction of the sadistic enterprise. The contradiction, according to Beauvoir is this: attempting to lose himself in the pleasuresof the flesh and in this way to experience both the ambiguity of his being as consciousness made flesh (or flesh made consciousness) and the reality ofhis being for and with others, Sade substitutes the spectacle for the lived experience and accepts counterfeit transactions of domination and assimilation/incorporation for genuine relationships of reciprocity and gratuitous generosity." . . . these are immersive environments, as Jean Bridge would call them, for example re. the upcoming conference on campus . . . . the same world and power plays as online computer gaming . . . ?

see the précis here

Must We Burn Sade?

Gini is reading Simone de Beauvoir's essay "Must We Burn Sade?" (1951, 1952) David found a description of the essay here (I've excerpted it below.)

7. Must We Burn Sade?: Freedom and the Flesh

We are a long way away from Pyrrhus and Cinéas where Beauvoir declared our freedom immune from assault. In that early work, our freedom insulated us from the risks of intimacy. In The Second Sex, avoiding the risks of intimacy remains possible, but now this avoidance is identified as a mark of our moral failure to live the ambiguity of our condition. Beauvoir's essay "Must We Burn Sade?" (1951, 1952) written in response to a request to write an introduction to Sade's Justine, details the effects Beauvoir's changed position on the relationship between freedom and intimacy has on her ethical reflections. The central ethical question: "the problem of the true relation between man and man" remains unchanged. Indeed what interests Beauvoir about Sade is that, "[he] posed the problem of the Other in its extremist terms; in his excesses, man-as-transcendence and man-as-object achieve a dramatic confrontation." What has changed is Beauvoir's understanding of the drama of intersubjectivity. Marking this change, this essay also marks a return to the question of the responsibility of the artist raised in The Ethics of Ambiguity.

Must we Burn Sade? identifies the Marquis's decision to write as an existential project, an authentic ethics, and a politics of rebellion. Crediting Sade with uncovering the despotic secrets of the political machine and recognizing his utopian appeal to freedom, Beauvoir accuses Sade of perverting the meaning of our individuated and situated freedom. He was, according to her, a great moralist who endorsed an unsatisfactory ethics.

Sade is Beauvoir's Janus-faced ally. She does not refute his claim that cruelty establishes a relationship between the self and the other. Sade is correct. Cruelty reveals us to each other in the particularities and ambiguities of our conscious and fleshed existence. The tyrant and victim, Beauvoir tells us, are a genuine couple. They are united by the bonds of the flesh and freedom.

Beauvoir does not dispute Sade's validations of the flesh and freedom. She admires his phenomenological point of departure. This is the source of his ethics of authenticity. His descriptions of the powers of cruelty and the meaning of torture, however, are incomplete and therefore inadequate. Insofar as his descriptions account for the powers of cruelty, they allow him to mount an effective critique of our social, political and personal hypocrisies. Insofar as they do not attend to the perversions of freedom and the flesh that cruelty exploits, they fail to offer a legitimate understanding of our intersubjective lives.

In the end, Sade was mislead (which does not mean that he was innocent). He mistook power for freedom and misunderstood the meanings of the erotic. In his fascination with the conflict between consciousness and the flesh, Sade exposed the contradiction of the sadistic enterprise. The contradiction, according to Beauvoir is this: attempting to lose himself in the pleasures of the flesh and in this way to experience both the ambiguity of his being as consciousness made flesh (or flesh made consciousness) and the reality of his being for and with others, Sade substitutes the spectacle for the lived experience and accepts counterfeit transactions of domination and assimilation/incorporation for genuine relationships of reciprocity and gratuitous generosity.

Centering his life in the erotic, Sade missed the truth of the erotic event. This truth, Beauvoir tells us, can only be found by those who abandon themselves to the risks of emotional intoxication. Living this intoxication we discover the ways in which the body turned flesh dissolves all arguments against the immediacy of our bonds with each other and grounds an ethic of the appeal, risk and mutual vulnerability.

Between the early Pyrrhus and Cinéas and the later "Must We burn Sade?" we discern the impact of what might be called Beauvoir's phenomenological turn to the body. Once she abandons the idea that our freedom, as absolutely internal, is immune from an assault by the other, and accepts the radical vulnerability of our lived embodiment, questions of violence and desire cannot be severed from the question of our fundamental humanity or questions of ethics and justice. In condemning Sade for his perversion of the erotic, Beauvoir also faults him as an artist. Though she criticizes him for being a technically poor writer, the heart of her criticism is ethical not aesthetic. Sade, according to Beauvoir, violated his obligations as an author. Instead of revealing the world to us in its promise and possibilities; instead of appealing to us to work for justice, he took refuge in the imaginary and developed metaphysical justifications for suffering and cruelty. In the end Beauvoir accuses Sade of being the serious man described in her Ethics of Ambiguity.



http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/beauvoir/


27/05/2007 12:50 PM

Thursday, May 24, 2007

Drawing the connection between Terezin and Charenton, Eichmann and Sade

Chapter 7: Major Players

from: Opfermann, Charlotte G. The Art of Darkness. Houston: University Trace Press, 2002. pp. 63-73.

Hannah Arendt wrote a scholarly obituary for Obersturmbannfuehrer Adolf Eichmann when she penned "Eichmann in Jerusalem"63 based on her observations and evaluations during his trial64. But he successfully wrote his own eloquent and grandiose eulogy much earlier when in 1942 he initiated the Freizeitgestaltung in the Ghetto Theresienstadt. That was twenty years before his trial and exe­cution in Jerusalem. The Freizeitgestaltung department within the camp's internal structure was a mirage supposedly run by and for the prisoners.

A sketch drawn by Wilhelm Konrad in 1944 of an other­wise unidentified performance at the Kavalier barracks real­istically portrays a lone actor on the stage, entertaining a half dozen patrons in the audience, seated on crude benches.

Only a few doors away from this room65 was the isola­tion ward for prisoners who suffered from diphtheria and other highly contageous diseases. I was installed here in late summer 1943. I was quarantined in this bare isolation ward, together with eight or ten very sick women. We received nei­ther medical or nursing care nor medication. However, because of our illness we did not have to work and were per­mitted to benefit from bedrest. Some of us even got well.

Downstairs, in the former stable of the Kavalier (the one time cavalry barracks) were the dismal, catastrophically over­crowded quarters for insane prisoners. Just like the diphthe­ria patients on the second floor above, the unfortunate inmates in this 'mental ward' received neither nursing, med­ical care nor therapy. The quarantined patients in the infec­tious disease ward and the locked-up inmates behind the fence of the stable/ward for the mentally ill had neither Freizeit (free time) nor taste for entertainment. We were much too sick for such frivolity.

Eichmann's propaganda film was created in 1942-1944 by members of the Freizeitgestaltung under close supervision from a separate team of our captors. The film 'documented' the artistic engagement of the prisoners for a unique view of the camp from the outside. The propaganda film followed the movie making practices of the time. Eichmann and his team could not hope to compete with the much more famous, more successful, vastly influential and widely viewed propaganda film Jud Suess (The Jew Suess) by the leading National Socialist producer Veit Harlan66. Jud Suess premiered on September 24, 1940 and its anti Semitic message facilitated the murder of European Jews at the hands of various German perpetrator entities: Wehrmacht, Gestapo, Sicherheitsdienst SA and SS. Like a similar project, Der Ewige Jude (the Eternal Jew), these were propaganda tools intended to support, under­score and justify the goals of the Final Solution and its aim of total extermination of Europe's Jewish population.

Werner Krauss, Ferdinand Marian and Kristina Soederbaum assisted Veit Harlan in performing roles for ]ud Suess. Twenty million Germans watched the film Jud Suess between 1940 and 1945. It was mandatory viewing for con­centration camp guards, members of the SS, police and Hitler Youth and many other party organizations67. My grade school teacher, Fraeulein Pusch, dutifully marched our entire class of sixty students from Hebbelschule in the poet's quarter of town to the Thalia Theater at Kirchgasse in the heart of the shopping dis­trict. During the early years of the National Socialist regime I was not yet excluded from such class activities but endured silently and confused some subtle discrimination at her hands. After viewing the film "Hitlerjunge Quex" we studied other heroes and martyrs of the early Nazi Party movement and mem­orized Adolf Hitler's biography. Fraeulein Pusch energetically promoted the new regime, but refrained from open attacks on me, the only Jewish member in her class of sixty students.

The German movie production company UFA (Universum Film-AG) was created in 1917 during World War I as the propaganda instrument BUFA (Bild und Film Ami). The firm was converted into a private organization after the end of that war.

During the twelve years of the Thousand Year Third Reich, UFA resumed its initial function again as one of Reichsminister for Propaganda Dr. Josef Goebbels' important tools for shap­ing public opinion. The UFA roster included legendary stars like Zarah Leander, Brigitte Helm, Hans Albers, Emil Jannings, Heinz Ruehmann, Heinrich George as well as great directors and producers like Fritz Lang68 and Josef von Sternberg.

Major Nazi era propaganda films such as "Hitlerjunge Quex", "SA Mann Brand" and "Hans Westmar"69 were manda­tory viewing for schoolchildren, students, and party func­tionaries. However, compared to the enormous popularity of "Jud Suess" and "The Eternal Jew", they were only moderately successful.

Kurt Gerron, a one-time member of the UFA roster of artists, is the better known of the two producers of Adolf Eichmann's propoganda film. After UFA70 had dismissed all Jewish employes on March 29, 1933, he escaped first to Austria, then to France, eventually to Holland. He arrived in Theresienstadt with a transport of Dutch Jews from the camp Westerbork.

Mentioning UFA and the German film production between the two wars evokes memories of "Metropolis", "The Blue Angel", and "Muenchhausen" (in color), in addition to "Jud Suess".

During the Nazi years UFA perfected script writing and film production techniques with which they translated impor­tant events and settings into effective teaching and propa­ganda tools for the benefit of the Reich and its policies. The now 99-years old dancer, actress, and film director Leni Riefenstahl was Goering's, Goebbels', and Hitler's great friend and frequent dinner companion. Under Adolf Hitler's per­sonal orders71 she translated the ceremonial march forma­tions of thousands of faithful party members at the Nuernberg rallies, then seen in person by a viewing public of two million, into a breathtaking screen encounter for sixty million.

Her famous 1934/35 masterpiece "Triumph of the Will" and the innovative filming of the 1936 Olympic Games are still widely admired industry classics because of the many technical innovations she employed.

Adolf Eichmann was well aware of the potential for this propaganda tool. But where Riefenstahl, Harlan Veit and oth­ers succeeded, Eichmann and his team were complete fail­ures. Only some serious historians and researchers of Nazi era propaganda works have ever heard of the Eichmann movie, and then only by its post War title "The Fuehrer makes the Jews the gift of a City."

At the time of the Nuernberg War Crimes Trials72 the Nazi defendants staged their own perfect, effective, self-serving claim: they were only obeying orders. This scenario has with­stood the test of time and -right or wrong- has entered into the history books.

Several years later, during the first Auschwitz Trial73 in Frankfurt, Peter de Mendelsohn was one of the journalists who followed the proceedings from the gallery. He wrote that the tribunal concentrated unduly on the person of the late Adolf Hitler, 'blaming the light bulb and not the light'. The Auschwitz Prozess provided a scenario similar to the International War Crimes Trial in Nuernberg twenty years before.

Another member of the fascinated spectators74 at the first Frankfurt Auschwitz Prozess (Auschwitz Trial) was Peter Weiss75. He was born into a 'mixed marriage' in Berlin. But his family had escaped Nazi persecution by leaving the country. Weiss was very much affected by what he saw and heard (as were many young Germans among the 1960s viewing public) and subsequently wrote a powerful play "Die Ermittlung" (The Investigation). All of Weiss' dramatic scripts create powerful interactive, personal relationships between viewers, actors, visual objects and the presentation on stage.

The play "Die Ermittlung" has recently76 been staged in a new adaptation by Jochen Gerz at the Hebbel Theater in Berlin. Like Peter Weiss, Jochen Gerz creates art forms in many media which often become spectacular events entirely of and by themselves.

The decisions, the rationale and the mood of the various concentration camps' SS commanders in the 1940s was guided by orders received from headquarters, the ReichsSicherheitsHauptAmt (RSHA) in Berlin, at times aug­mented by special instructions from the Reichsfuehrer SS Heinrich Himmler. All were brilliantly guided by the evil genius and the—still—effective propaganda machine of the Reichsminister fuer Propaganda Dr. Joseph Goebbels.

Peter Weiss caught the mood of the Third Reich and its time in another well known drama Marat/Sade77 which pre­miered on April 4, 1964 in Berlin. He fully understood that dreams are essential for living, even under the most inhuman conditions. And for the Theresienstadt inmates, as spectators and participants in this Freizeitgestaltung, the cultural experi­ences offered seemed like a dream come true, if only for a lit­tle while and for a select few. Many believed the dream. It did contribute to their quality of life in a setting where that phrase sounds ironic, cynical and entirely inappropriate.

During the years 1942 to 1945 the participating artists created many immortal works of art, music, paintings and drama in a setting which resembled an insane asylum in every way. In many respects, it was their last will and testament, their hands reaching from the grave to a world which just might survive—even if they did not.

Seemingly, Marat/Sade deals with the French Revolution and presents vividly portrayed, mostly imagined, experiences of some inmates at the insane asylum Charenton near Paris. The patients interact with their aristocratic audience (also played by inmates of the hospital) on stage. On the surface, the play portrays the brutal stabbing of the French revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat by the young aristocrat Charlotte Corday on July 13, 1793.

However, Peter Weiss makes a powerful statement about Germany and the entire free world during the much more recent bloody years of World War II. This technique of play-writing was used extensively by Berthold Brecht. It is often labelled 'alienation' and places the action on the stage at a dis­tance (in time and place) from the viewing public. Peter Brook produced the Marat/Sade play in England with the Royal Shakespeare Company and said in his foreword

"Starting with its title, everything about this play is designed to crack the spectator on the jaw, then douse him with ice-cold water, then force him to assess intelli­gently what has happened to him, then give him a kick into the balls, then bring him back to his senses again. It's not exactly Brecht and it's not Shakespeare either, but it's very Elizabethan and very much of our time."

It can be claimed that no other play by a German writer has enjoyed success equal to Marat/Sade, not since the years after the end of World War II when all the world was fascinated by Berthold Brecht. After April 29,19 64 when the Marat/Sade play premiered in West Berlin, Peter Weiss was acknowledged as one of the most remarkable members of the post-War gen­eration of German artists . His intensely intellectual play has been translated into many different languages and has been successfully produced all over the world. All the most out­standing directors have directed it at one time or another.

Peter Weiss was born in Berlin in 1916. According to the Nazi's 1935 Nuernberg Racial laws, he was half Jewish, a Mischling. As such, he was destined to be sterilized, possibly killed. But the family escaped to Sweden before the outbreak of World War II. In addition to his writing, Weiss was also a well-known painter, a theatrical and operatic producer and he directed films.

During a visit to Prag in 1937, Weiss met the equally multi-talented Petr Kien (1919-1944) who was later a prominent and immensely popular member of the prisoner artist group affili­ated with the Freizeitgstaltung inTheresienstadt, from 1941 until his deportation to Auschwitz on October 16, 1944.

Petr Kien worked also on the production of Adolf Eichmann's propaganda movie "Report from the Jewish Settlement Theresienstadt". Under the supervision of that film crew's special team of SS guards, he wrote one of several scripts.

Remembering Petr Kien and his tragic death, Peter Weiss later wrote in his novel "Abschied von den Eltern" (Leavetaking) "Fliehe, Petr Kien, fliehe..." (Flee, Petr Kien, flee...).

Kien was one of the most prolific members of the Freizeitgestaltung group, even though he is less well known than some others. He enjoyed privileged prisoner status, as did about two hundred other artists, one-time scientific, political and military greats. This entitled him to better housing, increased food rations and less arduous work assignment. He worked in the Zeichenstube , where under the leadership of Bedrich (Fritz) Taussig (who used the nickname "Fritta") he and fellow graphic artists drew vignettes for the illustrated reports sent from the internal Jewish camp administration's Zentralevidenz to the SS Kommandantur.

On his own and in his free time he drew numerous large and small, realistic sketches which depicted life and death in the camp. Such illustrations were briskly bought and sold (in exchange for food or articles of clothing—we had no money) and were traded among the inmates much like baseball cards in today's America. We prized these possessions and they often decorated the walls near our cots. Kien also made sketches of his many friends among the Freizeitgestaltung artists.

As a sixteen year old student, Petr Kien had written a prophetic ode about the end of German literature in the Czech-Bohemian environment: "Vom Ende der Literatur in boehmischen Laendern", leaning loosely on the writings of a 15th century Bohemian author (Johannes von Tepl):


I fear the huge, blue darkness of death.

I am gripped by fear

when I think of him

who kills off the old, small children and weak women

or those who are weakened by illness....

Kien wrote the libretto for Viktor Ullmann's opera "Der Kaiser von Atlantis" (the Emperor of Atlantis) which satirizes Adolf Hitler (portrayed as the Kaiser Ueberall, the name point­edly recalling Germany's national anthem "Deutschland, Deutschland ueber alles"). The piece dramatizes the struggle between a brutal tyrant and his hapless subjects.

The entire libretto is a powerful meditation on the sub­ject of death. Fully acknowledging the organized mass mur­der and the industrialized killing which surrounded us, Kien creates the character of Death who refuses to do his job until the cruel tyrant Ueberall is conquered and succumbs. The opera carries the subtitle Die Todverweigerung (death declines). The longing for a normal, natural death consumes the Emperor's subjects, just as it did occupy our thoughts at the time:

"Death, return! Hunger, Love, Life" .

Amidst all the misery, hunger, sickness, desperation and dying around us, we longed for normalcy, even for a normal death.

Death's powerful monologue shows Kien's uncanny understanding for this longing:

"I am Death, the gardener....

It is I who frees you from pestilence,

Not the pest.

It is I who delivers you from your suffering,

I am not he who makes you suffer...."

Unfortunately, some experts now use an English transla­tion of the Kaiser's name "Ueberall" and refer to him as 'Overall'78. This misses the point: the wicked Kaiser persona and his name Ueberall link him specifically and intentionally to the proud German anthem 'Deutschland ueber alles'. It iden­tifies him as Adolf Hitler, as our enemy, a German perpetra­tor. And Petr Kien's brilliant vision of a Kaiser Ueberall who himself becomes the victim of death79, ultimately, clearly makes this complicated point: when death refuses to do the Kaiser's bidding, the victims will live. But once the Kaiser suc­cumbs, his victims can die as well.

In a similar vein, Paul Celan would comment "...der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland..." (Death is a Master from Germany). Celan's and Kien's Death are take-charge types. Both artists, Kien and Celan, knew their subject well.

This Kaiser persona, himself conquered by death, intro­duces the concept of our eternal, lasting triumph—of good conquering evil. Innocence was our armor. The few survivors' living are the true, lasting victory. This fact testifies long after the librettist's own death, after the death of the composer and of the millions of perpetrators, even after Kaiser Adolf Hitler's suicide at the end of his War.

Petr Kien plays God and decrees that, if the victims of Ueberall do not die, then we—his victims—have won. He was nothing short of prophetic: the powerful libretto, its message and Viktor Ullmann's immortal music live on. They tell our story, a riveting drama in the deceptively simple manner of a medieval morality play, to a forever unbelieving world.

Whenever and wherever Marat/Sade is played, the audi­ence is fascinated by the powerful personality of the mad Marquis de Sade80 who whips his performing madmen-actors, his fellow asylum inmates, as he directs their performance. He keeps them in check by force of extreme cruelty and willpower.

"How close is any living being to falling

into a state of madness,

and how strong are the artifices that keep us all

from being engulfed by chaos?"

The question grabs the Marat/Sade theater audience by the throat and threatens to drag them into the abyss of a men­tal asylum. The Nazi prisons, ghettos and extermination camps were not unlike the insane asylum Charenton near Paris which Weiss uses as the setting for his play. Like an omi­nous cloud, the knowledge of the 1940s Nazi Euthanasia T4 extermination programs of the Reich's mental patients hovers over every performance.

Adolf Eichmann and his henchmen were the almighty master Herrenmenschen puppeteers. They controlled the artists, the performers and the audience in the same fashion as the mad Marquis de Sade—in the play—controls his fellow-actors and fellow-patients. The guards whipped, tortured, beat and killed us. And the Nazi perpetrators to this day still hold sway over the minds of those who fall prey to their calculated pro­paganda, long after the writers-directors-producers of the real life-and-death Holocaust drama and the few surviving victims have departed from the scene, long after the killers have met their Maker or, if they live in hiding, have faded into obliv­ion.

Marat/Sade is one of the best-known works of the 'the­atre of cruelty', a term used by Antonin Artaud81 to describe an approach to theatrical performance that keeps the effect of the spoken word to a minimum, using instead physicality and sound in order to jolt the spectators out of their complacency. This makes the patrons in Marat/Sade [on and off stage] become active participants of the performance.

Inmate-audiences and inmate-performers in Theresienstadt's Freizeitgestaltung programs had a unique set­ting for the productions which they offered at the time. Our daily life and the suffering, dying, hunger, thirst and disease all around us compared with no theatrical or cultural setting known to man. The survivors of this real life drama can empathize with the Marquis de Sade's victims on today's stage. These are our murdered brothers and sisters who have come to life, thanks to the creative genius of Peter Weiss. And they tell our story.


-----

selected notes:


64. which, ultimately, ended with his conviction and hanging

65. identified as 'Hall number 16'

66. see ARD documentary movie about the 1948/49 trial of Harlan Veit

67. Ludwigshafener Rundschau 10-27-2001

68. who declined Goebbels' offer to head the UFA concern and left Berlin in 1933, instead

69. about Horst Wessel

70. where Gerron had starred i.a. in "The Blue Angel" with Marlene Dietrich

71. ibid.

72. from November 20, 1945 to October 1, 1946

73. 1963-1965

74. estimated at 20,000

75. 1916-1982

76. 2001

77. The full name of that play in its English version by Geoffrey Skelton is:"The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat, as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade." Atheneum New York 1965

78 'Overall' is an article of clothing—a working man's blue jean garment.This name would arbitrarily change the meaning and the opera's mes­sage.

79. as Hitler was to die eventually by his own hand

80. Sade spent his last years (1801 to 1814) in the Charenton institution

81. Artaud was not a stranger of insane the asylum experience: all told, he spent roughly 15 of his 52 years in institutions of one sort or another. His idea of a theater of cruelty is set down in his work "Le theatre et son double", 1938-1945, and has significantly influenced modern notions of theatrical performance.


Wednesday, May 23, 2007

as ghoulish as this might seem . . . Terezin

thinking about Terezin (Theresienstadt) in the Czech Republic which was a building project contemporary to Sade, and then redeployed as an internment camp and site of alleged cultural fulfillments . . .

http://ww2panorama.org/panoramas/terezin
http://photo.net/travel/bp/terezin
http://www.interdisciplinary.neu.edu/terezin/index.htmlx.html
http://www.deathcamps.org/reinhard/terezin.html
http://www.jocund.org/series/Terezienstadt/
http://www.mediapiculture.net/360days/qtvr/ww2p/85terezin.html

not thinking so specifically about the history of Terezin, but thinking about the fundamental shapes and architectures that organized these refugee/(economically and
culturally) incarcerated communities - apparently a co-product of the vision of the 'construction' of 'utopic' communities (think the despotism we might find in Africa, the hope of Israel, the current immigration legislation aimed at illegal immigrants/Mexicans in the States, the Canadian Indian Act . . . )

What I do find interesting about Terezin is the veneer of the civilizing Architecture: it had the original shape of a refined and cultivated 18th c. military establishment, with the tyranny of entablatures and cornices and the organized 18th c. plan of the community quite intact - not a stockyard, not Abu G - but there were indeed perforations in the fabric of this veneer, for example the diminutively laid railway, like sewing needles stuck into the Oasis floral foam . . . (flower arranging : yet another insistence upon the utopic other)










. . . and pictures from Charenton?









Sunday, May 20, 2007

Gini's Letter to the Company 20.05.07

Hello, all!

I am attaching an updated cast list which lists additional roles you
will be playing (it is not the end, believe me!) PLEASE NOTE, that in
my hurry to get the original list to you I listed "Sade's Mother",
where it is supposed to be "Marat's Mother" (DV: please change on
website)

Again, please try to resist seeing the Peter Brook film or listening
to a recording. We want to create our own. New. Fresh.

I know some of you have a script. Enjoy. The cut version is coming
very soon and I will be able to e-mail it to you. There are fewer
cuts than I thought, so you will be able to start learning the long
speeches soon. I will indicate when I send it, what HAS to be learned
before you return (all, would be nice). This is a very rhetorical
play. Lots of the text comes from actual speeches and writings. The
sooner you get it in your body, the sooner we can work with it.

RESEARCH
What I would like you to do NOW is to start doing research. We will
be providing you with some information, but part of your actor work
will be your own research. Start keeping a journal - now - and in it
include your research - now. So, historical characters (Simonne
Evrard, Jean-Paul Marat, Duperret, Coulmier, Jacques Roux, Charlotte
Corday, Marat's Mother & Father, Voltaire, Sade, Lavoisier) - research
this person and their work, their writings, their speeches, their
lives, surroundings, etc. The more you know, the more you can draw
upon in your work. You will be presenting a short oral report to the
company on what you have learned.
Rossignol, Kokol, Cucurucu, Polpoch -- find out where they come from
-- find out about entertainment in France between 1789 and 1808 (or
earlier)
Herald -- where does your character come from in theatre history?
French theatre history?
Scientist -- what were science and the Academie like 1789 to 1808?

EVERYONE: If you are not currently able to discuss the following
comfortably, please find out about them. I don't want to spend a lot
of time filling in history for you:

Louis XVI & Marie Antoinette
la Bastille
the 14th of July
the French Revolution
the Reign of Terror
les Incroyables
the National Assembly
Napoleon and the Empire
the Napoleanic wars

Happy hunting! If you have questions, I am just an e-mail away!

If your character's mental illness is stated (usually by the Herald),
please feel free to read up on it, but don't worry - that we will be
working through with you.

Gini

Updated Cast List

Marat/Sade

Cast list: Updated May 20/07

Blythe Barker: Simonne Evrard
Aaron Berger: Jean-Paul Marat
Chris Boyle: Schoolmaster
Bree Burns: Herald
Cassandra Clace: Rossignol, Corday 3
Aaron Core: Duperret., Priest (sc.26)
Erin Fahey: Coulmier
Jordin Hall: Scientist, Corday 2
Rob MacMenamin: Jacques Roux , Marat’s father
Will Maund: Kokol, Military Representative
Carly Robinson: Charlotte Corday 1
Kayla Rocca: Marat’s Mother, Mad Animal
Trevor Rotenberg: Voltaire, Abbot (Sc.14)
Graham Shaw: Marquis de Sade
Carlene Thomas: Cucurucu, Newly Rich
Brian Waters: Polpoch, Lavoisier

(Note: cast members play many other roles in addition to the ones listed)

Virginia Reh: Director
Andrew Fleming: Assistant Director

Friday, May 18, 2007

musings

the problem of performance as therapy for the state's crimes/decisions is taking shape (not unlike the show 7 Important Things by Acheson that I saw at the NAC) . . . more and more I'm thinking about cultural utopias being at the core of the M/S argument.

Tuesday, May 1, 2007

what we are up to this summer?

some of our travel dates:

Gini: Vancouver May 11 - June 20

David: Trinidad and Tobago April 25 - May 3; Ottawa May 9-10; Montreal May 10-13; Prague June 11-21; Helsinki June 21 - July 8; gosh what's next . .

Andrew?
Joanna?
Stan?