'My Life and Times...'

I agree that this film is difficult to rate. What are we rating? The exploration of Artaud’s theory in the film, or the filmic quality of the story told? Like others in the class I found the insight into Artaud’s personal life interesting and I suppose an insight not easy to find through other means, such as writings between Artaud and contemporaries. In this sense I would give the film a 3/5 – not deserving full figures seeing as it is slow at times with irrelevant café scenes and love making (?!) I don’t think you can gain much, if anything, about Artaud’s cruelty theories however, and would rate it a 1/5 in this respect. The visual use of colour, the grainy black and white stock, and positioning of the camera throughout the film I did think had a specific artistic effect, though it is debatable how much it perpetuated Artaud’s ideas on cruelty. The black and white visually creates the bleak world that Artaud lived in, clearly expressing the extremes within which he lived and with which he struggled. The camera’s eye is Artaud’s, and so we see the world through his desolate eyes. When in public the camera is positioned so that the busyness of the world around him is something isolated from Artaud’s ‘eye’. At the train station, the camera stays still while the bustle of people rushes around it. The camera often focuses on a particular body or object such as a handbag and then follows this through the train station, giving the impression of Artaud’s scrutinising and objectifying eye isolated from the rest of society. Likewise, when Artaud and Prevel are on the train/bus the camera is positioned so that it can focus and then blur alternatively on the two men and on the busy streets behind them. The way the camera works in both these instances is to distinguish the isolated Artaud from the alien world around him. I don’t think it represents any aspect of cruelty however, just demonstrates Artaud’s artistic seclusion.

The contrast between piercing noise and blinding silence is however a clearer representation of Artaud’s ‘cruelty’. Silence and what seems like a ‘slowing down’ of the camera corresponds to the moments in the film that are most ‘cruel’. This silence is cinematic language for Artaud, where words cannot express the pain and anguish society inflicts upon us. So silence is used instead, strangely creating a noise much louder and piercing than any scream could affect. Colette silently rails at her audience, Prevel coughs and experiences near-death though with his spluttering muted, and Artaud’s funeral is filmed in absolute silence. These silences are combined with the camera seeming to either swirl around or flicker on the object, or focus on particular aspects of the scene while blurring others. I think these rare moments in the film correspond (remotely) to Artaud’s ideas on cruelty, though they could never express the visceral pain as directly as Artaud’s own live performances did.

All in all, an interesting biographic film that makes insightful decisions to express something of the ‘cruelty’ that Artaud experienced. You won’t learn much about his theories in this though other than when he screeches instructions to Colette in her rehearsal.