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UCLA UCLA Previously Published Works Title “Parasite Cinema,” Image and Narrative, special issue on Artaud and Cruelty, 17.5 (2016), 66-79 Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/32j321fb Authors Ravetto-Biagioli, K Beugnet, M Publication Date 2019-10-18 Peer reviewed eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Martine Beugnet and Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli Parasite Cinema Abstract In Theatre and its Double Artaud explored how the plague communicates beyond simple contact, bringing death to those it touches, but also bringing fear, images, and the imagination, which transforms social rela- tions, disorganising society and producing absurd anti-social actions. In this essay we would like to relate the emergence of a parasite-cinema, one that expresses itself through predatory forms of capture and communica- tion, where images pullulate out of control (but do not destroy the body of the host), to Artaud’s understanding of plague as a proliferation of communication. Résumé Dans Le Théâtre et son double Artaud analyse la manière dont la peste communique au-delà du seul contact physique, apportant la mort à ceux qu’elle touche, mais apportant aussi la peur, des images et l’imagination qui transforme les rapports sociaux, désorganisant la société et produisant des comportements absurdes anti-so- ciaux. Dans cet essai nous nous proposons de mettre en rapport la conception artaudienne de la peste comme forme proliférante de communication avec l’émergence d’une nouvelle forme de cinéma, le cinéma parasite, qui s’exprime à travers des formes prédatrices de capture et de communication, des images qui pullulent en dehors de tout contrôle (mais sans détruire le corps de celui qui les accueille). Keywords Antonin Artaud, parasite cinema, Atom Egoyan’s Artaud Double Bill, pirated cinema, communication as contagion. IMAGE [&] NARRATIVE Vol. 17, No.5 (2016) 66 Atom Egoyan’s Artaud Double Bill (2007) Cinema has not completed its evolution. [It] will leave the screen and exist in [every] space… Magic characters will suddenly appear … [to] turn houses up-side-down, break the walls, it will be progress forever! … [A]ny amateur tourist of sound, smell or vision will carry with them something that will allow them to conjure up, next to them, the character of their dreams… However sublime the cry or the gesture, whatever the landscape one carries in one’s pocket, the luminous effect that animates the slope of the hills… are all frozen-like, held in a mold that may be ingenious but is also forever fixed. Cinema is then comparable to these terrifying masks, that have lost their potency through time and use, and which the sorcerers themselves find fit only for the glass box in the museum.1 — Antonin Artaud The cinema of the big screen may have lost some of its appeal to audiences accustomed to watching movies at home, downloading, or streaming them on mobile devices. Cinema, however, has not lost its potency. For the images projected on the big screen continue to circulate and shape our visual imagination. The scale and speed of this circulation has intensified with the spreading of a smaller, more pervasive version of the cinema which has found its way into every aspect of daily life. This is a clipped, parasitic form of cinema that recycles images and appropriates aesthetic conventions, forcing them to adapt to the restrictions of a new dispositif. With its small screen and limited storage space, it miniaturises and condenses film (like the reporting of the news or sporting events) to spectacular highlights, and as a result cinema, music videos, home-movies, and click-through native advertising fit into the same format. Thanks to these new portable devices, we can watch, but also capture, post, share, stream, and store clips that we carry everywhere with us. Virtual museums of luminous images are organised for us so that we can retrieve and display them on demand. It is tempting to refer to what Antonin Artaud presciently described as a kind of pocket-cinema to describe how we now consume cinema on, and create it for, mobile devices and social media. But in so doing we need to also heed Artaud’s warning that this experience of the cinema does not free us (or our spectacular compa- nions) from commercial cinema and the marketing infrastructures attached to it that endlessly and obsessively sell us the same pre-packaged dreams so as to insure their own economic viability. Commercial film (and now media) industries continue to manufacture staid aesthetic masks that circulate at an accelerated pace, making 1 All citations of Antonin Artaud are from Oeuvres and Le théâtre et son double (Paris: Gallimard, 1964). Translations from French to English are provided by Martine Beugnet. IMAGE [&] NARRATIVE Vol. 17, No.5 (2016) 67 cinematic images accessible at any time. These images follow us everywhere, conjuring up and animating static representations of predictable relations between us and the characters of our dreams. As Raùl Ruiz puts it: “Cinema in its industrial form is a predator” that feeds off the spectators’ longing to kill the “noonday dae- mon,” which Ruiz defines as the progeny of tristitia and ennui (Ruiz 1995, 73). Rather than exorcizing the daemon, commercial cinema kills time. But in the process this dream factory turns inconsequential actions, unconscious decisions, and chance occurrences into a normative system of meaning. Commercial cinema injects order and narrative meaning into the dreams it offers us—the manufactured dreams that infiltrate even our most private spaces. As a means of loosening the grip that narrative film has on us, Artaud called for a different kind of cinema, what Naomi Greene called a “cinema of cruelty” “that would liberate all ‘the dark forces of thought’” (qtd in Greene 1984, 29). Many critics have been attracted to the notion of a “cinema of cruelty,” that modifies or parasitizes Artaud’s “theatre of cruelty,” as a way of resisting commercial cinema—in this sense, we are no exception.2 However, rather than concentrate on the visceral effects of the cinema of cruelty that disorders the bodies by “acting directly on the grey matter of the brain” (Artaud 1972, 65), in what follows we propose to take a different approach. We will examine what Artaud found to be so radical about moving-images as modes of communication: their ability to parasitize, infect and contaminate their host, also to turn the host into a carrier of venial forms of art and a transmitter of endlessly regurgitated dream-images, gestures and expressions; and at the same time, their potential to disorganise and raze established relations between guests and hosts, predators and their prey, which opens a space for a possible renewal (Artaud 2004, 166).3 Both outcomes produce their own forms of violence. Emergent communications and their technological platforms are not neutral, as Artaud pointed out, they are also radically destructive, they “turn our houses upside down,” invade our dreams, beliefs and condition our behaviours, in the name of so-called “progress.” The new tech- nologies and the moving-images they bear perform acts of aggressive self-replication (infecting and taking over the host), but images transmitted through such technologies also have the potential to spin out of control, and therefore “cause the mask to fall, to uncover the lie[s], cowardice, baseness and hypocrisy” endemic to all forms of social (media) organisation (Artaud 1964, 46). Pocket-cinema breeds complacency, and a tacit acceptance of the ideological beliefs, models of identification, and social controls installed in the images we fetishise. Yet, another cinema, a para-cinema, accompanies this pocket-cinema. We want to turn our attention to pocket-cinema as both a parasitic form of image circulation and as para-cinema—a site of potential radical disorganisation invoked by Artaud. This strain of para-cinema is one of contagious delirium (délire communi- catif) that doubles and redoubles images that, in turn, spin out of control (Artaud 1964, 38-9). New modes of media appropriation and circulation do not just live on their hosts as predators would their prey but also in the host as a parasite. More than a predator—that sees its spectators as prey in the form of tar- gets of opportunity, potential consumers, commodities, speculative futures to be mined for value—parasite-ci- 2 In addition to Naomi Greene’s essay (Greene 1984) that seeks to rethink Artaud’s call for a cinema of cruelty in conjunction with his interest in the concept of the double and with it subjective cinema, see (Koutsourakis 2016). He argues that: “Cruelty can be seen as a resistance to commodification and not as a way of putting forward abstract moralistic and transhistorical ideas related to the “inherent violence in human nature’” (Koutsourakis 2016, 67). See also chapter 7 of Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image (Deleuze 1989); see also (del Río 2005); (Jamieson 2007); (Virmaux, Sanzenbach 1966); (Beugnet 2008); and (Ravetto 2012). 3 For a discussion of the unsettling doubling or simultaneity of media—tele-vision and tele-communications—that give us the impression of being on the scene as we are sitting on the couch, see (Weber 1996, 114-115). IMAGE [&] NARRATIVE Vol. 17, No.5 (2016) 68 nema installs itself in the host, reorganising the content, thus, corrupting the meaning of the medium, and in- fecting all ancillary products with its singular goal of frenetic dissemination. However, as Michel Serres points out: “The host is not prey, for [s]he offers and continues to give… [W]hat is essential is neither the image nor the deep meaning, neither the representation nor its hall of mirrored reflections, but the system of relations. The relation is that of guest to host [hôte à hôte]” (Serres 1982, 7-8).4 It is the parasitical relationships that ushers in what Artaud deemed the most radical form of communication: the plague.