Saturday, January 9, 2016

Considering Marat and Sade


This is my second entry into the France on Film Blogathon.
Check out the first day index here



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Entertainment could easily be described as a transient mutual insanity. We sit together, or separately but watching the same program, and willfully absent ourselves from reality. We create and accept a separate chamber of truths and consequences that did not exist before and only exists ephemerally afterward.

Politics and History could also be described in similar terms (construction of shared fictions) accept that they carry a weight of credibility that can lead from benign shared illusions to genuine blood-in-the-streets insanity. They use reality as a template and then attempt to seriously describe the truth but without establishing any exterior signal points for when we have become entirely lost in illusion.


These three items, entertainment, politics, and history are the metaphorical boundary lines of the film Marat and Sade. Filmed in 1967, based on a German play from 1963 by Peter Weiss. The film was performed by The Royal Shakespeare Company, under the direction of Peter Brook from a translation by Geoffrey Skelton.

Marat and Sade is based on the historical fact that in the last decades of his life the Marquis de Sade wrote, staged and directed plays with the inmates of the Charenton Insane Asylum as the actors. It was considered therapeutic for the inmates and was fashionable for aristocratic audiences to attend the performances. The subject of the play-within-the-play, the one performed by the Charenton inmates, is the death of 18th century French revolutionary Jean Paul Marat.


Marat was a leading voice in the most excessive and bloodiest days of the revolution. He was an influential philosophical firebrand during the infamous Terror, which saw the full employment of the guillotine. The ripe image of asylum inmates playing out scenes from the fiercest moments in a degraded and murderous historical moment bulges within the film. The set is cement floors, iron contraptions and pits covered by wooden slats, all of which lend tactile weight to what must have been meant by the term “mental hygiene.” The inmates are corralled and kept by two stern nuns and two uniformed guards who wield cudgels and only narrowly keep the performance from descending into mad attacks and unconstrained howling.

Then there is de Sade. Played by Patrick Magee he lurks about the periphery of the performance like a man watching a fuse burn. De Sade has written himself into the piece and the narrative becomes a philosophical coat rack on which Desade hangs his views about life, violence and the Revolution with Marat as foil, taking up a counterpoint that allows de Sade to expound his own views.

The difference between them is reduced to their views on the purpose of violence. Both find violence necessary to the human condition. Marat sees it as a tool to cleanse the evil out of the community. For de Sade it is a natural expression of animal ecstasy, indistinct from the pursuit and act of sex and procreation.

The philosophical postures are acted out in meta-narrative layers as the inmates menace and attack one another between prolonged fits of performance, reference is made to historical barbarity, and songs within the play are performed blurring political past and present, actual diagnosed madness and condoned social insanity.

The lines between reality, history, narrative and commentary are constantly blurred and unstable within Marat and Sade, even to the point that we never see the audience for the play-within-the-play. They are present behind a set of iron bars and we are aware of them but for the purposes of the performance we are indistinct from them. The unseen audience might well be every other viewer for the film, unseen but understood to be there and remote from the action. Thus the commentary spills out into our laps as well.
   
When the director of the asylum breaks in on the action to object to certain aspersions on current politicians and the narrator stands and says something like, “This is in reference to a remote past, we are much more evolved now.” The sarcasm cuts equally through to the audience behind the bars and the camera lens.

 Marat and Sade is a noisy and taxing film. It expects a lot of the audience but delivers a lot in return. It is profoundly impressive as a technical achievement. The choreography of performers and effects achieved through the most basic bare devices of live performance is absolutely enthralling. The editing and camera work are also remarkable, though there are some possible mistakes and strange choices, a long unbroken take of the back of an actor as he acts his heart out on a speech delivered to the audience behind the bars, a lot of difficult to ignore lags in focus-pulling which likely occurred as a result of the novelty of complex handheld shooting in a free-moving performance situation. But they add to the rough-hewn edge of the production, we are set in a 17th century insane asylum after all. Perfect technical polish might finally be stranger and more distracting than occasional mistakes.

Complex, unfolding, challenging, and strange: Marat and Sade is more than a film, more than entertainment, it is an education, a philosophical gauntlet and transient shared insanity more relevant now perhaps in a world of uprisings and murderous regimes than it has ever been.


2 comments:

  1. Whoa! This does sound like a challenging film, but also incredibly thought-provoking. Thanks for your analysis of this little-known film.

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  2. What a fantastic choice for the blogathon. I love this film and the play it is based on.

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