Product Description
Reed here achieves a remarkable feat of imaginative empathy while exploring the mind of french avantgarde poet and playwright Antonin Artaud (1896-1948). A remarkable feat of imaginative empathy.... A tormented, emaciated, raving paranoid and diagnosed schizophrenic, Artaud emerges here also as an anarchic visionary who subverts bourgeois values through the power of his imagination. . . . A hypnotic exploration of madness and genius that articulates uncanny psychological insights.... Astonishing imagery."" - Publishers Weekly. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

passionate and absolutely superb
why don't more people know about jeremy reed?the more i read his fiction and his poetry the more i want. if you've never been fortunate enough to encounter his work before, this is the place to start. he creates a vivid (if not realistic or necessarily true to 'reality')artaud for his novel and shows a great deal of sympathy for his alienated suffering and painful bouts of total isolation and madness.the ending is particularly beautiful and awe inspiring, wherein artaud finally realizes the dream of all imaginative poets, writers and just creative people in general--an actual plunge into the world of the imagination.of course none of it is really realistic, but curiously enough i take reed very seriously.he is not a man filled with wishful thinking or a desire to spread his longing for poetic and artistic escapism, but a man with such a luminous and stunning inner vision that he can do nothing else than write beautiful and absolutely unforgettable works of the most intense aesthetic vitality and vividness. reed portrays artaud brilliantly as a warrior of the poetic imagination and an avowed enemy of a society that represses the surreal and the creative. "madness is the pejorative term that capitalism applies to vision", he says at one point. the critics, pretentious morons that they are, dismiss reed because they see him as too 'derivative'.if jeremy reed is derivative, i for my part can only hope that more modern writers and poets will follow his lead and become derivative, if it produces works of aesthetic genius like this one. anyone who enjoys surrealist poetry and literature (or 'anti literature' as they so aptly called it) or is interested in the history or relationships within the group, buy this book the next chance you get.and any lover of poetry, whether he or she tends toward classicism or modernism, will adore this book.a must. (also read "delirium", reed's subversive and powerful study of rimbaud and his years as an adolescent rebel and seer.)

Sanity, Sanity, Sanity
Often I wondered whether madness is just sanity not yet baptised in the virgin waterfalls of reason. Reading this book confirmed that belief. The unfathomable power of the Dionysian Hero who sacrifices his sanity and carries the burden of the entire "civilised" world to push the definition of whats "acceptable" and "sane" - that very quality shines out in the hallucinatory, rat-eating madness of Antonin Artuad. Our hero gives us hope and a dream - a dream of a better tomorrow. The book also confirmed some of my other beliefs such as the ones held by Aldous Huxley on the relationship of certain exhibit A chemical "drugs" and creativity. Apart from the fact that the entire book is like one long, beautiful poem and the poetic imagery that it arouses shoots up the spine and flashes in the brain, it challenges the hypocrisy of the society and erects crystal pyramids for the martyrs, who sacrificed their sanity back in th 60s. A "doors of perception" cleansing book! ... Read more

Product Description

The Screaming Body gives a full and authoritative account of Artaud's film projects and his conception of surrealist cinema. It examines his unique series of drawings of the fragmented human body, begun in the ward of a lunatic asylum and finished in a state of furious liberation. The book captures Artaud's ultimate experiment with the screaming body in the form of his censored recording To Have Done with the Judgement of God-an experiment which is unprecedented in the history of art.

Customer Reviews (2)

Disappointing
This book is simply a journal article padded to book length.Moreover, there is really nothing new or interesting that cannot be learned from a rigorous reading of Artaud's published work. Barber should have published this in ArtForum and we readers could have saved our money. A profound disappointment.

Fascinating obsession this Artaud
There are many who consider Antonin Artaud a madman, yet there's no question that he revolutionized contemporary theater. Artaud was such a powerful, anarchic force that critics and fans alike are still trying to find the right place for him in cultural history.

Stephen Barber has just written his second book on this visionary: Artaud: The Screaming Body. It's not a major work on the artist, but it is one of the many (and much-needed) pieces of the Artaud puzzle. At present there is not an essential English-language book on Artaud. There are anthologies here and there, but not one big critical book on this fascinating figure. Perhaps it's an impossible task; Artaud influenced not only the theater, but also poetry, drawing, radio performances, and the cinema. He's worthy of many volumes.

Artaud started out as an actor and was involved in two key films in cinema history: Carl Dreyer's 1927 film classic, The Passion of Joan of Arc, and Abel Gance's 1927 masterpiece, Napoléon. Due to his stunning looks, he was on his way to becoming a major movie star, but Artaud decided to veer in another direction. He believed that performance was not a job, but rather a way of life. He felt the world was damned, and that there needed to be a new language to convey to the world that it had lost its ability to speak. Artaud was frustrated by the uselessness of contemporary gestures and language to express what he was thinking and feeling. In response, he single-handedly invented a new theater, which later became the foundation for the Theater of the Absurd and for the works of the Living Theater, as well as the springboard for Jean Genet, Eugène Ionesco, and Samuel Beckett. Artaud created a new form that ran screaming from a dependence on language and logical thought.

While his presence was hugely felt in the theater, Artaud believed it was the cinema that would prove to be the perfect medium for his theories. Between 1924 and 1935 Artaud wrote 15 film scenarios. Only one became a film: La Coquille et le Clergyman ("The Seashell and The Clergyman") (1927). The brilliant Germaine Dulac directed the film and, as legend has it, there was a major battle between her and Artaud. Dulac added her own thoughts to the screenplay; Artaud was especially annoyed when she suggested that the events of the film were all part of a dream, since he had wanted to blur the line between reality and dream. Something that's a dream is, after all, merely a dream.

Artaud: The Screaming Body is a good introduction to the world beyond Artaud's theater essays and theories. Barber focuses mostly on Artaud's work in the cinema, his influence on drawing, and his radio performances, which took place just before Artaud's death in 1948. What we need now is the ultimate, sweeping biography of Antonin Artaud. This small, well-written book offers only a peek at the man and his magnificent, disturbed visions. ... Read more