Artaud: The Screaming Body: Film, Drawings, Recordings 1924-1948(1999)

Stephen Barber

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.