Artists seeking to expand the bounds of expression are constantly incited to explore the fringes of representation and draw inspiration from other art forms. This ambition infused the theories of Antonin Artaud (1896-1948), who envisioned a radical new theatre with a ritual function, a kind of transformational alchemy designed to disrupt the spectator from indolent passivity. Whereas Western theatre was psychology-based, lulling the viewer to sleep within the safe-zone of voyeuristic pleasure, Artaud called for a spectacle-based Theatre of Cruelty that is routed through the body. Agitating the body’s senses and base organs, the Theatre of Cruelty summons the body’s pre-rational awareness to the light of consciousness. Artaud believed we ‘think’ first with our senses, therefore we should not give the rational mind primacy by subordinating all elements of drama to what Artaud called ‘the tyranny of the text’. Instead, the text should only serve as a point of departure from which all aspects of mise-en-scène and sound are re-innovated into a spectacle, seeding a multiplicity of ideas that run counter to a unified aesthetic or dominant ideology.
Because of cinema’s ever increasing capacity to profoundly affect the spectator, it should come as no surprise that certain films scattered throughout film history closely align with Artaud’s original vision, two such films being Akira Kurosawa’s Dodes’ka-den (1970) and Julie Taymor’s Titus (1999). Of the manifold ideas put forward in Artaud’s 1938 book, The Theatre and its Double, my discussion will narrow in on these films’ correspondence with two of Cruelty’s core principles: anti-rationalism and non-logocentrism. By defying the rules of conventional psycho-dramaturgy and venturing outside logocentrism and genre, these two films demonstrate Cinema of Cruelty’s capacity to float unanchored in uncharted waters, liberating viewers from genre-instilled prejudices and unseating their faith in rational primacy. With the support of Eric Shouse’s and Gille Deleuze’s theories on affect and time-image, respectively, a methodology emerges to explicate how certain scenes generate the transformative affect Artaud demanded.