Tag Archives: Antonin Artaud

FILM MAUDIT 2.0 — REZA ABDOH

When we speak the word “life,” it must be understood we are not referring to life as we know it from its surface of fact, but to that fragile, fluctuating center which forms never reach. And 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, signaling through the flames. Antonin Artaud*

Film Maudit is here. Inspired by Jean Cocteau and presented by Highways, the second iteration of the festival of “outré” films brings together dozens of features and shorts for free streaming.

One of this year’s highlights is Adam Soch’s immersive documentary REZA ABDOH—THEATRE VISIONARY, a view from inside the transgressive work of the late, great theater provocateur, creator of such spectacles as The Hip-Hop Waltz of Eurydice, Bogeyman, The Law of Remains, Father Was a Peculiar Man, Minamata, Tight Right White, and Quotations From a Ruined City.

Featuring extensive documentary footage of Abdoh’s rehearsals and produced work at the Los Angeles Theater Center, the Long Beach Opera, New York’s Diplomat Hotel, and the streets of the Meatpacking District, the film includes interviews with the actors, artists, friends, and advocates in his circle: Alan Mandell, Tony Torn, Ken Roht, Tom Pearl, Tom Fitzpatrick, Jacqueline Gregg, Juliana Francis-Kelly, Peter Jacobs, Edwin Gerard, Diane White, Elsbeth M. Collins, Morgan Jenness, Bill Bushnell, Anne Hamburger, Peter Sellars, Norman Frisch, Daniel Mufson, Sylvie Drake, Sandy Cleary, David Schweizer, Tal Yarden, Sabrina Artel, Anita Durst, Alix HesterJohn Jahnke, Laurel Meade, Alyson Campbell, his mother Homa Oboodi, and his brothers Sardar and Salar Abdoh.

See link below for screening details.

REZA ABDOH—THEATRE VISIONARY

Directed by Adam Soch.

Film Maudit 2.0

Now streaming.

*Antonin Artaud, The Theater and Its Double, translated by Mary Caroline Richards (New York: Grove Press, 1958).

Reza Abdoh, from top: The Law of Remains (1992), photographs (2) from the Hotel Diplomat, New York, production, photographs © Paula Court; Bogeyman (1990), photograph © Jan Deen; Tight Right White (1993), photographs (3) from the 440 Lafayette Street, New York, production, photographs © Paula Court; The Hip-Hop Waltz of Eurydice (1990), upper photograph © R. Kaufman, lower two from the Sigma Festival, Bordeaux, production in 1992, photographs © Patrick Veyssière; Quotations From a Ruined City (1994), written by Salar Abdoh and Reza Abdoh, middle photograph © Paula Court, upper and lower photographs from the 448 West 16th Street, New York production, photographs © Jan Deen.

Below: Salar Abdoh (left), Reza Abdoh, and Sardar Abdoh; Reza Abdoh, photograph © Richard Liebfried.

WITKACY / TWO-HEADED CALF AT REDCAT

The plays of Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz (1885–1939,* born in Warsaw, and known as Witkacy) languished in relative obscurity throughout most of their creator’s short life. A home country revival took place in the 1950s, and adventurous theater companies in Western Europe and the United States started producing his work in the 1970s.

A key figure of the European avant-garde—a peer of Artaud, Beckett, Genet, and IonescoWitkacy’s resolutely anti-realist theater work has inspired WITKACY / TWO-HEADED CALF, a new collaboration by Natalia Korczakowska (the artistic director of Warsaw’s Studio Teatrgaleria), and CalArts Center for New Performance.

Witkacy believed that nature can be a source of metaphysical experience that gives us a chance to protect our individuality from the soulless social machine of Western civilization. WITKACY / TWO-HEADED CALF is a journey of a neurotic boy and his family from Poland to the California desert—and also a journey into the depths of oneself.**

For the next eight days at Redcat, performing artists from Studio Teatrgaleria and CalArts will present the American premiere engagement of this sui generis production.

WITKACY / TWO-HEADED CALF**

Friday and Saturday, October 18 and 19, at 8:30 pm.

Sunday, October 20, at 3 pm.

Tuesday through Friday, October 22, 23, 24, and 25, at 8:30 pm.

Redcat

631 West 2nd Street, downtown Los Angeles.

*Witkacy allegedly committed suicide upon hearing of the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939, but when his grave was disinterred many years later, the body reportedly belonged to someone else.

Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz and Natalia Korczakowska, WITKACY/Two-Headed Calf, performance photographs by Rafal Nowak and Hao Feng. Images courtesy and © the photographers, the performers, the director, Studio Teatrgaleria, and CalArts Center for New Performance.

DAVID WOJNAROWICZ AND BEN NEILL — ITSOFOMO

“In 1983, Ben Neill moved from Ohio to New York City. What was going on at the time in music was a very free improvisatory kind of style, a way of fusing different elements together through oppositions and similarities. The result was rather superficial. Ben was more interested in isolating some elements in order to produce a kind of deep resonance keeping each element separate, unexpected, untimely, a kind of creative chaos, in which the pieces clashed and resonated in the distance without ever being pinned down logically. It was the aesthetic of the collage. This is what attracted Ben to David Wojnarowicz’s work.

“With David you always got the feeling that the pieces weren’t randomly chosen; they made some kind of underlying structure that held the pieces together. There was something in his visual work that Ben was trying to do in a musical sense, putting together styles from different historical periods and contemporary forms, but always with the idea of creating some kind of larger by-product. It was very profound. So he called up David and he suggested that they do a collaborative piece at the Kitchen with him. And this was ITSOFOMO [In the Shadow of Forward Motion].

“In 1946 Antonin Artaud recorded a radio version of his famous text To Have Done with the Judgment of God. Directed by Artaud himself, this remarkable recording set shrieks and drumbeats inspired by the Tarahumara Indians against Artaud’s reading of a text about the mid-century American technology of war. War in a test tube, as the Virus of the Invisible, a destruction that is accomplished without bodily contact, spreading as seamlessly as the dream-transmission of primitive plagues.

“Fifty years later we are plagued by the invisible violence of a technology so accelerated that human life has come to a standstill. A globe cut up into cities of dead time. The texts that Wojnarowicz reads are an antidote to abstraction. Passionate, grounded, and dead precise, these texts violently reclaim the body by forcing us to experience the visceral reality of space and time. Set against Neill’s delicate, composed mutantrumpet, percussion, interactive electronics, and South American ethno-music, ITSOFOMO‘s forward motion becomes a battle to reclaim the organism of life.” — Sylvére Lotringer*

This weekend, Wojnarowicz and Neill’s multimedia performance piece ITSOFOMO will be restaged and performed by Neill and Don Yallech at KW Berlin.

ITSOFOMO (IN THE SHADOW OF FORWARD MOTION)

Friday, April 26, at 8 pm.

Saturday, April 27, at 6 pm.

KW Institute for Contemporary Art

KW Hall

Auguststrasse 69, Berlin.

*Sylvère Lotringer, in conjunction with the 1992 CD ITSOFOMO by David Wojnarowicz and Ben Neill, and included in the liner notes for the 2018 vinyl release by Jabs.

From top: David Wojnarowicz, ITSOFOMO, performance (1) and rehearsal (2, 3) at the Kitchen, 1989, photographs © Andreas Sterzing; Ben Neill (left) and Don Yallech perform ITSOFOMO at the Whitney Museum of American Art, 2018.

DULAC AND ARTAUD

Directed by Germaine Dulac from a script by Antonin Artaud, LA COQUILLE ET LE CLERGYMAN (1927) was the first film of Surrealism, premiering a year before Buñuel and Dalí’s Un Chien andalou.

This weekend—as part of the UCLA Film and Television Archive series The Cinematic Impressions of Germaine Dulac—a screening of La Coquille will close an afternoon selection of Dulac shorts.

Live musical accompaniment will be provided by Elaine Carey Haswell and Cliff Retallick.

 

LA COQUILLE ET LE CLERGYMAN

Saturday, September 15, at 3 pm.

Billy Wilder Theater, Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Boulevard, Westwood, Los Angeles.

Scenes from La Coquille et le clergyman.

 

 

ACÉPHALE AT CINEFAMILY

“There were some joyful moments in 1968, feast-like, maybe Dyonisian here and there, but mainly we were serious and grave, first because we hated the greasy laugh of our elders, but also because we could not get satisfaction.” — Patrick Deval, director of ACÉPHALE*

As part of its Zanzibar Films series, Cinefamily presents a rare screening of ACÉPHALE, a 1968 feature that documents the lives of young Parisians navigating the immediate aftermath of May ’68. One translation of its title—taken from Georges Bataille’s journal—indicates the need to move beyond rational thought:

“I became a bit radical in my refusal of Western civilization, constantly raving about the end of the white man. Rouch was closer to this view, becoming himself a joyful African in the oral tradition. But that was not so far from Rimbaud, Artaud, or Gauguin when he decided to ‘ensavage’ himself.” — Deval*

ACÉPHALE will be preceded by a screening of Serge Bard’s DETRUISEZ-VOUS.

ACÉPHALE, Saturday, August 26, at 6 pm.

CINEFAMILY, 611 North Faifax Avenue, Los Angeles.

cinefamily.org/films/zanzibar/

Image: Scene from Acéphale.

See Deval’s interview in Senses of Cinema:

Deval in ’68: An Interview with Patrick Deval

2015