My Life and Times With Antonin Artaud
By Jonathan Rosenbaum
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In point of fact, My Life and Times With Antonin Artaud represents only one half of a dialectic about history; the other half has been cut off by U.S. marketing strategies. Just before making this feature, the writer-director and cowriter, Mordillat and Jerome Prieur, made a feature-length talking-head documentary about the same period of Artaud’s life, Le retour d’Artaud (“Artaud’s Return”)–a documentary that one critic has compared in its methodology to both Shoah and Francois Truffaut: Stolen Portraits. The Artaud documentary isn’t being distributed in the United States, so the press materials for the fictionalized version tend to glide over it. But chances are that if we saw the two films back to back, My Life and Times would have much more to say to us; a couple of years ago the two films were broadcast on France’s Arte channel only a few days apart. Still, My Life and Times has plenty to say about French culture (and our own by contrast) with or without an elaborate cultural context. A few basic questions, however, are worth answering.
Not to put too fine a point on it, Artaud could also be described, especially during this period, as a raving lunatic–a lunatic of brilliance and vision to be sure, but a lunatic nonetheless, someone whose paranoid delusions couldn’t be separated from his manic creativity. And this fact winds up counting for more in Mordillat’s film in some ways than Artaud’s artistic legacy. (The same might be said for the German documentary about model-actress-composer-singer Nico called Nico Icon, which also recently played at the Music Box. But there the absence of any human identity for the film’s subject seems more an inadvertent offshoot of its superstar approach–including the way various self-promoters who barely knew Nico sound off about her inner soul and existential essence.)
This tolerance is all the more striking because the film presents Prevel as well as Artaud as unbearable individuals. We see and hear Artaud brutally browbeat a member of his circle, Colette Thomas (Charlotte Valandrey), while directing her in the delivery of his text (one of the film’s “historical” events); he also provides a steady stream of solemn, solipsistic pronouncements. While staying in the Prevels’ apartment, he barges into the couple’s bedroom at 6 AM asking Jacques’ wife (Valerie Jeannet) where Jacques is, then asking why she’s still in bed. “It’s very early, Monsieur Artaud,” she sweetly explains, “and I’m pregnant.” “Don’t have a child, Madame Prevel,” he tells her. “Each time a child is born, it drains blood from my heart.” A bit later he informs Jacques, “Each and every time a man and woman have sex, I feel it. They deprive me, Antonin Artaud, of something.” And still later, explaining why he considers the life of Prevel’s mistress “useless,” he says, “Seven or eight million people need to be annihilated.”
