by Susan Sontag
These are some of the difficulties which have led people to charge Marat/Sade with being obscure or intellectually shallow. But most of these difficulties, and the objections made to them, are misunderstandings—misunderstandings of the connection between the drama and didacticism. Weiss’ play cannot be treated like an argument of Arthur Miller, or even of Brecht. We have to do here with a kind of theater as different from these as Antonioni and Godard are from Eisenstein. Weiss’ play contains an argument, or rather it employs the material of intellectual debate and historical reevaluation (the nature of human nature, the betrayal of the Revolution, etc.). But Weiss’ play is only secondarily an argument. There is another use of ideas to be reckoned with in art: ideas as sensory stimulants. Antonioni has said of his films that he wants them to dispense with “the superannuated casuistry of positives and negatives.” The same impulse discloses itself in a complex way in Marat/Sade. Such a position does not mean that these artists wish to dispense with ideas. What it does mean is that ideas, including moral ideas, are proffered in a new style. Ideas may function as décor, props, sensuous material.
One might perhaps compare the Weiss play with the long prose narratives of Genet. Genet is not really arguing that “cruelty is good” or “cruelty is holy” (a moral statement, albeit the opposite of traditional morality), but rather shifting the argument to another plane, from the moral to the aesthetic. But this is not quite the case with Marat/Sade. While the “cruelty” in Marat/Sade is not, ultimately, a moral issue, it is not an aesthetic one either. It is an ontological issue. While those who propose the aesthetic version of “cruelty” interest themselves in the richness of the surface of life, the proponents of the ontological version of “cruelty” want their art to act out the widest possible context for human action, at least a wider context than that provided by realistic art. That wider context is what Sade calls “nature” and what Artaud means when he says that “everything that acts is a cruelty.” There is a moral vision in art like Marat/Sade, though clearly it cannot (and this has made its audience uncomfortable) be summed up with the slogans of “humanism.” But “humanism” is not identical with morality. Precisely, art like Marat/Sade entails a rejection of “humanism,” of the task of moralizing the world and thereby refusing to acknowledge the “crimes” of which Sade speaks.
* * *
I have repeatedly cited the writings of Artaud on the theater in discussing Marat/Sade. But Artaud—unlike Brecht, the other great theoretician of 20th century theater—did not create a body of work to illustrate his theory and sensibility.
Often, the sensibility (the theory, at a certain level of discourse) which governs certain works of art is formulated before there exist substantial works to embody that sensibility. Or, the theory may apply to works other than those for which they are developed. Thus, right now in France writers and critics such as Alain Robbe-Grillet (Pour un Nouveau Roman), Roland Barthes (Essais Critiques), and Michel Foucault (essays in Tel Quel and elsewhere) have worked out an elegant and persuasive anti-rhetorical aesthetic for the novel. But the novels produced by the nouveau roman writers and analyzed by them are in fact not as important or satisfying an illustration of this sensibility as certain films, and, moreover, films by directors, Italian as well as French, who have no connection with this school of new French writers, such as Bresson, Melville, Antonioni, Godard, and Bertolucci (Before the Revolution).
Similarly, it seems doubtful that the only stage production which Artaud personally supervised, of Shelley’s The Cenci, or the 1948 radio broadcast Pour en Finir avec le Jugement de Dieu, came close to following the brilliant recipes for the theater in his writings, any more than did his public readings of Seneca’s tragedies. We have up to now lacked a full-fledged example of Artaud’s category, “the theater of cruelty.” The closest thing to it are the theatrical events done in New York and elsewhere in the last five years, largely by painters (such as Alan Kaprow, Claes Oldenberg, Jim Dine, Bob Whitman, Red Grooms, Robert Watts) and without text or at least intelligible speech, called Happenings. Another example of work in a quasi-Artaudian spirit: the brilliant staging by Lawrence Kornfield and Al Carmines of Gertrude Stein’s prose poem “What Happened,” at the Judson Memorial Church last year. Another example: the final production of The Living Theater in New York, Kenneth H. Brown’s The Brig, directed by Judith Malina.
All the works I have mentioned so far suffer, though, apart from all questions of individual execution, from smallness of scope and conception—as well as a narrowness of sensory means. Hence, the great interest of Marat/Sade, for it, more than any modern theater work I know of, comes near the scope, as well as the intent, of Artaud’s theater. (I must reluctantly except, because I have never seen it, what sounds like the most interesting and ambitious theater group in the world today—the Theater Laboratory of Jerzy Grotowski in Opole, Poland. For an account of this work, which is an ambitious extension of Artaudian principles, see the Tulane Drama Review, Spring 1965.)
Yet Artaud’s is not the only major influence reflected in the Weiss-Brook production. Weiss is reported to have said that in this play he wished—staggering ambition!—to combine Brecht and Artaud. And, to be sure, one can see what he means. Certain features of Marat/Sade are reminiscent of Brecht’s theater—constructing the action around a debate on principles and reasons; the songs; the appeals to the audience through an M.C. And these blend well with the Artaudian texture of the situation and the staging. Yet the matter is not that simple. Indeed, the final question that Weiss’ play raises is precisely the one of the ultimate compatibility of these two sensibilities and ideals. How could one reconcile Brecht’s conception of a didactic theater, a theater of intelligence, with Artaud’s theater of magic, of gesture, of “cruelty,” of feeling?
The answer seems to be that, if one could effect such a reconciliation or synthesis, Weiss’ play has taken a big step toward doing so. Hence the obtuseness of the critic who complained: “Useless ironies, insoluble conundrums, double meanings which could be multipled indefinitely: Brecht’s machinery without Brecht’s incisiveness or firm commitment,” forgetting about Artaud altogether. If one does put the two together, one sees that new perceptions must be allowed, new standards devised. For isn’t an Artaudian theater of commitment, much less “firm commitment,” a contradiction in terms? Or is it? The problem is not solved by ignoring the fact that Weiss in Marat/Sade means to employ ideas in a fugue form (rather than as literal assertions), and thereby necessarily refers beyond the arena of social material and didactic statement. A misunderstanding of the artistic aims implicit in Marat/Sade due to a narrow vision of the theater accounts for most of the critics’ dissatisfaction with Weiss’ play—an ungrateful dissatisfaction, considering the extraordinary richness of the text and of the Brook production. That the ideas taken up in Marat/Sade are not resolved, in an intellectual sense, is far less important than the extent to which they do work together in the sensory arena.
[1965]
IV
Spiritual style in the films of Robert Bresson
SOME art aims directly at arousing the feelings; some art appeals to the feelings through the route of the intelligence. There is art that involves, that creates empathy. There is art that detaches, that provokes reflection.
Great reflective art is not frigid. It can exalt the spectator, it can present images that appall, it can make him weep. But its emotional power is mediated. The pull toward emotional involvement is counterbalanced by elements in the work that promote distance, disinterestedness, impartiality. Emotional involvement is always, to a greater or lesser degree, postponed.
The contrast can be accounted for in terms of techniques or means—even of ideas. No doubt, though, the sensibility of the artist is, in the end, decisive. It is a reflective art, a detached art that Brecht is advocating when he talks about the “Alienation Effect.” The didactic aims which Brecht claimed for his theater are really a vehicle for the cool temperament that conceived those plays.
/>
2
In the film, the master of the reflective mode is Robert Bresson.
Though Bresson was born in 1911, his extant work in the cinema has all been done in the last twenty years, and consists of six feature films. (He made a short film in 1934 called Les Affaires Publiques, reportedly a comedy in the manner of René Clair, all copies of which have been lost; did some work on the scripts of two obscure commercial films in the mid-thirties; and in 1940 was assistant director to Clair on a film that was never finished.) Bresson’s first full-length film was begun when he returned to Paris in 1941 after spending eighteen months in a German prison camp. He met a Dominican priest and writer, Father Bruckberger, who suggested that they collaborate on a film about Bethany, the French Dominican order devoted to the care and rehabilitation of women ex-convicts. A scenario was written, Jean Giraudoux was enlisted to write the dialogue, and the film—at first called Béthanie, and finally, at the producers’ insistence, Les Anges du Peché (The Angels of Sin)—was released in 1943. It was enthusiastically acclaimed by the critics and had a success with the public as well.
The plot of his second film, begun in 1944 and released in 1945, was a modern version of one of the interpolated stories in Diderot’s great anti-novel Jacques le Fataliste; Bresson wrote the scenario and Jean Cocteau the dialogue. Bresson’s first success was not repeated, however. Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne (sometimes called, here, The Ladies of the Park) was panned by the critics and failed at the box-office, too.
Bresson’s third film, Le Journal d’un Curé de Campagne (The Diary of a Country Priest), did not appear until 1951; his fourth film, Un Condamné à Mort s’est Echappé (called, here, A Man Escaped), in 1956; his fifth film, Pickpocket, in 1959; and his sixth film, Procès de Jeanne d’Arc (The Trial of Joan of Arc), in 1962. All have had a certain success with critics but scarcely any with the public—with the exception of the last film, which most critics disliked, too. Once hailed as the new hope of the French cinema, Bresson is now firmly labeled as an esoteric director. He has never had the attention of the art-house audience that flocks to Buñuel, Bergman, Fellini—though he is a far greater director than these; even Antonioni has almost a mass audience compared with Bresson’s. And, except among a small coterie, he has had only the scantest critical attention.
The reason that Bresson is not generally ranked according to his merits is that the tradition to which his art belongs, the reflective or contemplative, is not well understood. Particularly in England and America, Bresson’s films are often described as cold, remote, overintellectualized, geometrical. But to call a work of art “cold” means nothing more or less than to compare it (often unconsciously) to a work that is “hot.” And not all art is—or could be—hot, any more than all persons have the same temperament. The generally accepted notions of the range of temperament in art are provincial. Certainly, Bresson is cold next to Pabst or Fellini. (So is Vivaldi cold next to Brahms, and Keaton cold next to Chaplin.) One has to understand the aesthetics—that is, find the beauty—of such coldness. And Bresson offers a particularly good case for sketching such an aesthetic, because of his range. Exploring the possibilities of a reflective, as opposed to an emotionally immediate, art, Bresson moves from the diagrammatic perfection of Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne to the almost lyrical, almost “humanistic” warmth of Un Condamné à Mort s’est Échappé. He also shows—and this is instructive, too—how such art can become too rarefied, in his last film, Procès de Jeanne d’Arc.
3
In reflective art, the form of the work of art is present in an emphatic way.
The effect of the spectator’s being aware of the form is to elongate or to retard the emotions. For, to the extent that we are conscious of form in a work of art, we become somewhat detached; our emotions do not respond in the same way as they do in real life. Awareness of form does two things simultaneously: it gives a sensuous pleasure independent of the “content,” and it invites the use of intelligence. It may be a very low order of reflection which is invited, as, for instance, by the narrative form (the interweaving of the four separate stories) of Griffith’s Intolerance. But it is reflection, nonetheless.
The typical way in which “form” shapes “content” in art is by doubling, duplicating. Symmetry and the repetition of motifs in painting, the double plot in Elizabethan drama, and rhyme schemes in poetry are a few obvious examples.
The evolution of forms in art is partly independent of the evolution of subject-matters. (The history of forms is dialectical. As types of sensibility become banal, boring, and are overthrown by their opposites, so forms in art are, periodically, exhausted. They become banal, unstimulating, and are replaced by new forms which are at the same time anti-forms.) Sometimes the most beautiful effects are gained when the material and the form are at cross purposes. Brecht does this often: placing a hot subject in a cold frame. Other times, what satisfies is that the form is perfectly appropriate to the theme. This is the case with Bresson.
Why Bresson is not only a much greater, but also a more interesting director than, say, Buñuel is that he has worked out a form that perfectly expresses and accompanies what he wants to say. In fact, it is what he wants to say.
Here, one must carefully distinguish between form and manner. Welles, the early René Clair, Sternberg, Ophuls are examples of directors with unmistakable stylistic inventions. But they never created a rigorous narrative form. Bresson, like Ozu, has. And the form of Bresson’s films is designed (like Ozu’s) to discipline the emotions at the same time that it arouses them: to induce a certain tranquillity in the spectator, a state of spiritual balance that is itself the subject of the film.
Reflective art is art which, in effect, imposes a certain discipline on the audience—postponing easy gratification. Even boredom can be a permissible means of such discipline. Giving prominence to what is artifice in the work of art is another means. One thinks here of Brecht’s idea of theater. Brecht advocated strategies of staging—like having a narrator, putting musicians on stage, interposing filmed scenes—and a technique of acting so that the audience could distance itself, and not become uncritically “involved” in the plot and the fate of the characters. Bresson wishes distance, too. But his aim, I would imagine, is not to keep hot emotions cool so that intelligence can prevail. The emotional distance typical of Bresson’s films seems to exist for a different reason altogether: because all identification with characters, deeply conceived, is an impertinence—an affront to the mystery that is human action and the human heart.
But—all claims for intellectual coolness or respect for the mystery of action laid aside—surely Brecht knew, as must Bresson, that such distancing is a source of great emotional power. It is precisely the defect of the naturalistic theater and cinema that, giving itself too readily, it easily consumes and exhausts its effects. Ultimately, the greatest source of emotional power in art lies not in any particular subject-matter, however passionate, however universal. It lies in form. The detachment and retarding of the emotions, through the consciousness of form, makes them far stronger and more intense in the end.
4
Despite the venerable critical slogan that film is primarily a visual medium, and despite the fact that Bresson was a painter before he turned to making films, form for Bresson is not mainly visual. It is, above all, a distinctive form of narration. For Bresson film is not a plastic but a narrative experience.
Bresson’s form fulfills beautifully the prescription of Alexandre Astruc, in his famous essay “Le Camera-Stylo,” written in the late forties. According to Astruc, the cinema will, ideally, become a language.
By a language I mean the form in which and through which an artist can express his thoughts, however abstract they may be, or translate his obsessions, just as in an essay or a novel … The film will gradually free itself from the tyranny of the visual, of the image for its own sake, of the immediate and concrete anecdote, to become a means of writing as supple and subtle as the written word … What i
nterests us in the cinema today is the creation of this language.
Cinema-as-language means a break with the traditional dramatic and visual way of telling a story in film. In Bresson’s work, this creation of a language for films entails a heavy emphasis on the word. In the first two films, where the action is still relatively dramatic, and the plot employs a group of characters,15 language (in the literal sense) appears in the form of dialogue. This dialogue definitely calls attention to itself. It is very theatrical dialogue, concise, aphoristic, deliberate, literary. It is the opposite of the improvised-sounding dialogue favored by the new French directors—including Godard in Vivre Sa Vie and Une Femme Mariée, the most Bressonian of the New Wave films.
But in the last four films, in which the action has contracted from that which befalls a group to the fortunes of the lonely self, dialogue is often displaced by first-person narration. Sometimes the narration can be justified as providing links between scenes. But, more interestingly, it often doesn’t tell us anything we don’t know or are about to learn. It “doubles” the action. In this case, we usually get the word first, then the scene. For example, in Pickpocket: we see the hero writing (and hear his voice reading) his memoirs. Then we see the event which he has already curtly described.
