Artaud & the Phantom of Materiality: Cinepoetry of the Occult – an essay by Stephen Sunderland

The Shell and the Clergyman, by Germaine Dulac (1928)

Antonin Artaud’s writing for the cinema exists in a strange, suspended state. It is neither simply theoretical nor entirely practical; neither visionary prose nor merely the blueprint for a production. Instead, it inhabits a liminal zone in which writing becomes invocation—an attempt to conjure a new kind of cinematic being. This essay explores what might be called Artaud’s cinepoetry of the occult: a form of scenario-writing that treats the cinema not as a vessel for representation, but as an alchemical crucible for intensities, affects, and embodied metamorphosis. It is here, in the writing-toward-cinema, that we encounter not just plans for unrealised films, but a poetics of transfiguration. Drawing on Blaise Cendrars’ notion of the scenario as a self-sufficient poetic object—a cinema of the page that already breathes with kinetic force—we see Artaud’s scenarios as spell-like texts. They are not preludes to production, but rituals of projection, summoning a cinema that disaggregates the image, attacks the mind, and reveals matter’s occult vitality.

Affect, percept and concept are three inseparable powers, going from art to philosophy and the reverse. Cinema and philosophy are brought together in a continuing process of intercutting. This is philosophy as assemblage, a kind of provoked becoming of thought.

[Bernd Herzogenrath, Film as Philosophy]

Contemporary film theory suggests a way in which cinema’s materiality might be said to inevitably disrupt relationships between image and idea, haunting us with new possible perspectives and ways of thinking, beyond language’s capacity for capture. It is no surprise that this new technological medium appealed to the Avant Garde. Yet this exciting notion - of cinema as a radical ‘thinking machine’ - proposed its function and value quite differently in the philosophy of the official Surrealism as compared with that of one of its early-excommunicated participants: Antonin Artaud.

Paul Hammond summarises the Surrealist position as one of hope that this new thinking machine might be capable of rendering an ‘objectivized subjectivity’ which ‘could transfigure and redeem our perception and experience of reality by letting us into the affective clandestine life of the material world; it could reconnect us with the utopian promise our "night thoughts" have.’ Clearly, the notion of utopia in turn presupposes the materiality of a realm or alternate world, a physical integer of thought, something perhaps aligned for the Surrealists with the newly discovered Freudian territory of the Unconscious.

Artaud’s first film The Shell and the Clergyman seems to suggest that he shared these aspirations for the medium, yet looking more closely at his pronouncements on cinema, and at the implications inscribed within his own screen scenarios and his discussion of them, it could equally be argued that he was already far away from Surrealism’s position, seeking in cinema a much more militantly occult kind of agency.

‘In the cinema I have always distinguished a quality peculiar to the secret movement and matter of images’, says Antonin Artaud in his essay “Cinema and Sorcery”, an indicator of the occult fascination behind his attention to cinema. Artaud is interested in cinema for its capacity to materially illuminate lack-in-presence - and for its capacity to agitate the spectator directly away from representation (the veil) towards embodiment. The key to this agitation appears not to be content-led, but kinetically manifested through a combination of movement and superabundance of image and sensation.

Artaud’s The Shell and the Clergyman (1928) represents perhaps the earliest foray into the techno-unconscious possibilities of cinema, a blearied fever dream of sin and desire breaking through the cast of its own self-imprisoning armour and out into daylight, on a phantom-ride which stages not only ‘a provoked becoming of thought’ but an attempt to make of the paraphernalia of modern production a new crucible for the ‘eternal work’.

Yet the film left him disappointed. Directed by Germaine Dulac and released in February 1928, The Shell and the Clergyman’s presentation at the Studio des Ursulines reputedly led to a riotous demonstration orchestrated by members of the surrealist group, against its overly determined representation of Artaud’s original scenario. Whether Artaud joined in this protest or not, his ambivalent attitude towards the final production is evident in correspondence of the time; and seems to centre in particular on the more technical flourishes of the production, its focus on the fetishisation of objects by transitions and dissolves which threaten to render the scenario more statically than had been anticipated, and seem bound up with its focus on the presentation of a dream-state and its qualities.

Such concerns serve to identify a distinctive Artaudian ‘Cinema Brut’, which unlike the Bretonian idea of an illuminated unconscious realm, sees the projected image on the screen as working like a powerful drug, a stimulant – something which would instantaneously shatter the illusions of the conscious mind through disruptions of the body, causing a disaggregation of images from their static suspension within the fallacious iconography of ‘reality’. For Artaud, what lies beyond the conscious mind does not consist in an elaborate territory of dream, a realm of the marvellous, so much as it offers an extension of the body’s capacity to face otherness and endure its own belittlement in something approaching a non-dualistic cosmological re-setting.  

 ‘The cinema has an unexpected and mysterious side which we find in no other form of art’ asserts Artaud. ‘Even the most arid and banal image is transformed when it is projected on the screen. The smallest detail, the most insignificant object assumes a meaning and a life which pertain to them alone, independently of the value of the meaning of the images themselves, the idea which they interpret and the symbol which they constitute. By being isolated, the objects obtain a life of their own which becomes increasingly independent and attaches them from their usual meaning. A leaf, a bottle, a hand, ETC., live with an almost animal life which is crying out to be used.’

Artaud’s fascination here seems to reside in his perception of cinema’s capacity to project a phantom of materiality which in turn evokes the super-essence beyond lived reality.  In describing this ‘magical’ quality to cinema which he believes is offering access to the potential of objects themselves to reveal this super-essence, we find ourselves in the realm of alchemy, and the quest for the prima materia.

Commentators have indeed drawn parallels between Artaud’s theorising of the theatre and its ‘double’ - and the philosophy underpinning alchemy, the great work which engages with the materials of our world as holding the potential formulations of a total order of being, in the suprasensible-kairological realm of deep time. Where he sees theatre as capable of breaking through the cast of our entombed reality by glossolalia, by rigid embodiments cutting across the linguistic and cultural codes that spatialise it, so he sees in cinema the ultimate mechanism to make these antiquated methods redundant.

‘Essentially‘, Artaud asserts, ‘the cinema reveals a whole occult life with which it puts us directly into contact. But we must know how to divine this occult life.’

Whilst The Shell & the Clergyman may have disappointed Artaud because of its director’s over-attentiveness to the representation of dream-life, it’s still easy to see how this film anticipates future experiments in the sphere of avant-garde and expanded forms of cinema, not only in Un Chien Andalou which arrived fifteen months later (Bunuel studied The Shell and the Clergyman in preparing and developing his own cinematic methods) but also in the work of Maya Deren, in Robbe-Grillet’s work; and for more specifically for its esoteric concerns, in the entire oeuvre of Jan Svankmajer.

Given the failure of Artaud’s cinematic project to find its wings and plagued by bad luck with the film which did secure its production, Artaud’s cinema has traditionally been marginalised by comparison with his theatrical work, yet it’s also easy to project what Artaud’s cinema might have looked like by comparing the scenarios themselves, firstly with a cinematic equivalent in the case of The Shell and the Clergyman; and then with other scenarios, in particular The Butcher’s Revolt, to notice a continuity of thematic obsession in the images that unravel.

Despite the accounts of Artaud’s disappointment with the film, several months later, he is still keen to talk about the ‘attempt or idea’ that preceded The Shell and the Clergyman’s filmic version, which was to capture a ‘truly magic’ element of cinema, having ‘the characteristics of the very vibration, the profound, unconscious source of thought’. Thus far, we might still be in the surrealist tent, yet Artaud’s emphasis goes on to betray the occult source of his fascination when he summarises how the film tries to ‘ally itself with the mechanics of a dream without really being a dream itself’, so that ‘the mind, left to itself and the images, infinitely sensitised, determined to lose nothing of the inspirations of subtle thought, is all prepared to return to its original functions, its antennae pointed towards the invisible, to begin another resurrection from death.’

Artaud’s fascination with this circular motion, reminiscent of the cyclical stages of the alchemical process, or to the notion of ouroboros, is evident when we examine the text of his key scenarios. It’s clear that his desires for cinema push way beyond the delicacy of the film’s stylish delivery of dream, implicating the viewer in a cinema of cruelty in which the audience is drawn into a ritualised stripping away of identity and a rebirth at any cost, to deliver humanity in the process from the rotting carcass of modern society.

Recurrences of such hermetic imagery are striking in The Seashell and the Clergyman: we begin in an alchemical laboratory, immersed in its smoke and mists amongst broken vials – in much the same way that Marlowe positions his audience in the middle of an occult ritual at the beginning of Doctor Faustus. The provocation is unmistakable – in this case, what is more, we are observing a clergyman dabbling in a forbidden role.

The smashed vials are echoed later in the breastplate of shells ripped from the woman; and later we see dissolving images of oyster shells and finally an immense glass bowl which at one point contains the clergyman’s own head which dissolves into a blackish liquid which the

clergyman then drinks from another oyster shell container. These images of dissolution and consumption link to other notions of dissolution in the film: the clergyman, the military officer and the woman undergo ruptures to identity in rapid movement, with dissolves and superimpositions, a jumbling of position, status, gender fixities in such a way as to evoke a sense of the eternal flux of possibilities of form in the present.

Thematically, the film and its scenario present a jumble of obsessive ideas: hypocrisies of power and status demonstrated through its depiction of amour fou, framed within a fragment of narrative concerning the great unfinished work of alchemy, the ouroburos of consumed knowledge; and the life of objects enduring across temporal and sensory zones. 

Composed two years later, The Butcher’s Revolt presents obvious parallels with Seashell. The scenario has a similarity of form, using a detached observational mode of description, evoking oneiric impassivity, the intransitivity of sentences like free floating associations within a unit of rhythmic thought.

It’s interesting to note that this time we have concrete locations: the Place de l’Alma is the film’s location. Again, we have a man ‘waiting for a woman’. Yet how would we know he’s waiting for a woman if this were not offered by a personal detail? Artaud appears to accidentally intrude into the text here, the lunatic protagonist clearly a surrogate self. 

When the butcher’s van drops its solitary side of beef and the lunatic scares off its driver, we are left to follow the lunatic’s ‘static’ odyssey from the square to the bar to the slaughterhouse, his wait for the woman representing a wavering desire, from which he’s blocked by people-obstructions, in particular the prostitute and pimp. His pre-emptive attack on the latter announces the spoken text-mantra running through the scenario: Off with your head to the slaughterhouse!

What is heralded here, in similar fashion to the collapse of heads in The Shell and the Clergyman, is a call for the destruction of the conventional business of the mind and consciousness – a making way for the thundering meat cart!

Binaries whir and oscillate in this text: what is the implicit horror in this ultimate destination? To discover yourself somewhere between the animate and inanimate, or, objectified in subject position? There seems to be a beckoning to the non-dualistic oriental philosophical position in these text-images, noticeably in these voices and identities detached from one another in a dancing symphony of materials.

It is indeed difficult, knowing what we know, to fully imagine how the realised film would set these ideas in motion without bringing down their intent, collapsing them into formula; and this precarious situation is indicative of the paradox at the heart of Artaud’s creative-phenomenological enterprise - that ‘voicing’ objectifies the subjective unconscious in such a way as to obscure its sight of what lies beyond this; the non-dualistic embodied experience of the infinite cosmos. 

His aspirations for cinema are perhaps best captured at the moment of his purest disappointment in it. In “The Precocious Old Age of Cinema”, written in 1933 and at the tail end of his efforts to bring these scenarios alive, he ultimately describes the world of the cinema as ‘dead, illusory and split up’ - by virtue of its intractably precise but merely surface-capturing lens and the human sensibility wielding it. In describing its limitations, he betrays his desire for a cinema that might ‘replace life’ with something which gives us an idea of what lies beyond ‘the unfinished puzzle of things’; even though  a miraculous cinema of dynamic revelation does not exist, Artaud speculates, clearly in one of his darker moments of disappointment, that if  ‘the objects thus photographed, thus stratified on the screen, could move, we dare not think of the void, of the hole in appearances which they would create.’ 

The Butcher’s Revolt seems to be a pure articulation of this idea: the stripping away of the ‘derm’ of reality flays us back to meat in the Svankmajerian sense of that material identity: a form of meat that sits around, goitrous and lame in bars, or plays forfeits with itself as a form of currency in speeding taxis going to the slaughterhouse, an enormous butcher already squatting on the hood.

It’s a scenario marked by an awareness of the urgency of the time: to allow cinema itself to flay the audience. Frustration and hostility marks this scenario and a desire to offend against the norms and taboos of the age. In a penultimate scene, lined up at the slaughterhouse, the master butcher contemplates cannibalising a woman whose dismembered body sits limply in a blood-stained basket; seconds before she is resurrected in wedding gown, a dim echo of the structure of the alchemical process.

By the film’s end, this ‘alchemical wedding’ has privileged the butcher and his murdered and resurrected bride, the woman who perhaps always had been waited upon by the lunatic, who leaves the gates of the slaughterhouse in the taxi, consoled as a cuckold by the pimp and prostitute. The closing of the seminary gates at the film’s end signals the new normalcy which has devoured these events, stripping and cannibalising the human soul which has been fed on these scraps of meaning and which nourish its structure.

As a critique of the complex of capitalist desire, Artaud’s scenario shrieks its woes through its frenzy of interchanging faces and bodies, its death-in-life and life-in-death concatenation of narrative structures lifted from the infancy of cinema itself, from the absurd images of the lunatic clinging to the outside of speeding car looking in on a game of forfeits, to the ceremonial wedding which supposedly shuts the door on its own happy ending. Whilst Artaud talks elsewhere of the significance of humour, the humour is so dark here, it’s hard to read it through the welter of dynamic images. More than anything, what we feel is a surge of anger and misanthropy in this scenario which speaks of frustration with his failure to realise these experiments.

Yet were these failures really failures or are the staged absences they imply really required to convey the impossibility of their goal? In many respects, the act of transposing these scenarios from page to screen becomes the gesture of renunciation, turning signs outwards into a space beyond the body or in between bodies, in a place where a primal magical anarchy exists or collapses into itself, into disbelief. Perhaps the unfinished nature of Artaud’s enterprise befits the impossibility of the unceasing work itself.

If Artaud’s cinematic ambitions appear thwarted—derailed by misinterpretation, production failure, or technical limits—then perhaps this failure is itself the key to understanding his cinepoetry of the occult. As Cendrars intuited, the scenario need not await its cinematic double; it is the work. Artaud radicalises this further: the scenario becomes a vessel for impossible cinema, a rite of invocation through which matter speaks in tongues and image dissolves into force. His scripts conjure an unfilmable cinema—not because they fail to conform to production, but because they enact a different logic entirely: that of alchemical operation, of cosmological stripping, of resurrection through obliteration.

In this light, Artaud’s cinepoetry is not incomplete. It is performative failure as method: writing that rends open the screen before a single frame is shot. It projects the phantom of materiality in advance of its capture, using cinema’s language to summon what lies beyond it. If we listen to these texts as we might to an occult ritual—half-heard, half-glimpsed, seething with obscure desire—we may begin to sense the shape of Artaud’s cinema: a cinema not of representation, but of transformation. Not a cinema to be made, but one to be survived.

References

Artaud, Antonin. 1958. The Theatre and Its Double. Translated by Mary Caroline Richards. New York: Grove Press.

Artaud, Antonin. 1988. Selected Writings. Edited by Susan Sontag. Translated by Helen Weaver. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Artaud, Antonin. 2001. Artaud on Theatre. Edited by Claude Schumacher. London: Methuen Drama.

Breton, André. 1969. Manifestoes of Surrealism. Translated by Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Breton, André. 1993. Communicating Vessels. Translated by Mary Ann Caws and Geoffrey T. Harris. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Cendrars, Blaise. 1992. Complete Poems. Translated by Ron Padgett. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Cendrars, Blaise. 2001. La Fin du Monde filmée par l’Ange N.D. In Oeuvres complètes, vol.1. Paris: Denoël.

Deren, Maya. 2005. Essential Deren: Collected Writings on Film. Edited by Bruce R. McPherson. Kingston, NY: Documentext.

Hammond, Paul. 1974. Marvellous Méliès. London: Gordon Fraser.

Hammond, Paul, ed. 2000. The Shadow and Its Shadow: Surrealist Writings on the Cinema. San Francisco: City Lights.

Herzogenrath, Bernd, ed. 2017. Film as Philosophy: Essays on Cinema After Wittgenstein and Cavell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Kobialka, Michal. 1999. Antonin Artaud: Theatre and the Culture of Cruelty. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Svankmajer, Jan. 1995. Dark Alchemy: The Films of Jan Svankmajer. Edited by Peter Hames. Westport, CT: Praeger.

Stephen Sunderland is the author of the surrealist film-novel The Cinema Beneath the Lake, three BBC radio dramas, and the visual poetry collections Eye Movement (Steel Incisors, 2022), Oneiroscope (Kingston University Press, 2023) and Refrains (Steel Incisors, 2023). His work also appears in anthologies Seen as Read (Kingston University Press 2021) and Seeing in Tongues (Steel Incisors, 2023); and in journals Mercurius, Overground Underground, Shuddhashar, Litter, The Debutante, 3:AM, and Lune: A Journal of Literary Misrule. Find him on Twitter @stephensunderla

and on Mastodon @Corsairsanglot@mastodon.social