The Theatre and Its Double by Antonin Artaud;Mark Taylor-Batty;

Author:Antonin Artaud;Mark Taylor-Batty;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

Two Notes

1. The Marx Brothers1

The first Marx Brothers film screened in France, Animal Crackers,2 came across as something quite extraordinary, for me as for everybody else, as though a special kind of magic was released through the screen, one not invoked by the usual interaction of words and images. If there is a clear state of mind, a certain distinct poetic spirit that might be called surrealism, then Animal Crackers manifests it utterly.

It is difficult to say quite what this magic consists of, but it is perhaps not anything specifically cinematographic, nor anything that is at home in the theatre, but something that only certain successful surrealist poetry, if any ever existed, might capture any sense of. The poetic quality of a film like Animal Crackers might come close to meeting the definition of humour, had that word not long since lost its sense of complete release, of the tearing asunder of all perceived reality.

To properly understand the utter, definitive, absolute, powerful originality of a film like Animal Crackers (and I am not exaggerating here, I am trying simply to provide a description, and if I am being carried away by my enthusiasm, all the better) or in some moments of a film like Monkey Business (at least throughout the final sequence), then in addition to humour we should put that sense of something disconcerting and tragic about an inevitable outcome (neither happy nor sad, but painfully elaborated) which slips in behind the humour, like becoming aware of the marks of some awful disease on a very beautiful face.

In Monkey Business we meet the Marx Brothers again, each with his own idiosyncrasies, and you get the impression that they are self-assured and prepared to get to grip with the issues at hand. But whereas in Animal Crackers each character loses face from the off, we now get to watch, and for a good three quarters of the film, a group of clowns frolicking about and having a good time, playing pranks, some of which they pull off quite well, and it is only by the end that things get difficult, that objects, animals, sounds, the master and his servants, the host and his guest, that all this comes to a head, kicks off and ends up in a riot, all closely narrated by one of the Marx brothers, ecstatic yet lucid, energized by the sense that he has finally been able to release the genie from the bottle, commenting on what he sees as though he has just stumbled across it all, astonished. There is nothing as horrific and as staggering as that manhunt of sorts, the skirmish between rivals, the chase through the gloom of a cow shed, a cobweb-strewn barn, with men, women and animals running around in circles, finding themselves in the middle of a pile of miscellaneous objects each of which, in turn, will perform its business or make its sound.

In Animal Crackers, the fact that a woman might suddenly fall onto a couch, legs akimbo,

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