Past Event
This screening event and book launch marks the 70th anniversary of the death of Antonin Artaud, the immensely influential artist, Surrealist writer and film theorist.
Stephen Barber, author of several books on Artaud, will give a talk on the extraordinary last ten years of Artaud’s life, from his catastrophic journey to Ireland in 1937, though his years of asylum incarceration in France, to his two final years of freedom in Paris which are the subject of My Life and Times with Antonin Artaud.
The event also marks the publication by Infinity Land Press of Artaud 1937 Apocalypse , Stephen Barber‘s translation of Artaud’s letters written from Ireland, in which Artaud envisions signs of an impending apocalypse in the landscape of the Aran Islands, before being violently deported as an undesirable alien.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=209_iSJD-_U
Pre order Artaud 1937 Apocalypse, Letters from Ireland by Antonin Artaud here.
Stephen Barber is the acclaimed author of many books on art and film, including Antonin Artaud: Blows and Bombs (Faber & Faber) and Berlin Bodies (Reaktion). His forthcoming translation of Artaud’s Ireland letters, Artaud 1937 Apocalypse, will be published by Infinity Land Press. He is a Professor at the Kingston School of Art, Kingston University, London.
My Life and Times with Antonin Artaud (Gerard Mordillat, France, 1993)
A fascinating re-creation of post-war bohemian Paris and the relationship between the dying and paranoid theatre polemicist Antonin Artaud and the young poet Jacques Prevel who kept the cultural titan in drugs. Superb performances by Sami Frey as Artaud, whose Theatre of Cruelty was a great influence on Brook, Berkoff, Marowitz and Grotowski, and by Marc Barbé as Prevel, looking like a young Chet Baker. – Time Out
