Author: Patricia MacCormack

Marat/Sade (Peter Brooks, 1967) is a play within a film, showing the inmates of an asylum performing Sade’s (Patrick Magee) play The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade. Quills (Philip Kaufman, 2000) sees Sade (Geoffrey Rush) also as an inmate of Charenton, writing texts, novels and plays performed by the inmates, titillating the women and persecuted by authoritarian figures. The films share their setting and primary character. Both include the play-within-a-film format carried through their shared genesis as plays. Both also share their emphasising the textuality within the play within a play. In each film Sade writes dialogue for multiple characters and the films emphasise Sade’s character as a writer rather than a perpetrator of the excesses to which he points. Indeed, neither film represents any acts of sadism, or even sexual perversion, with the vague exception of Marat’s (Ian Richardson) imminent murder in Marat. Both films deal with the materiality of words, with the nature of performance and will, and with the ethics of altering paradigmatic structures of logic and desire to both oppress and liberate ‘man’. Sade as Non-Sade: Description and Imagination In The 120 Days of Sodom Sade both highlights and mourns the disjunctive relationship between imagination and action. The Bishop laments, ‘if the [crime] I perpetrate does not combine as much of the atrocious, of the base, of the vicious, of the deceitful, of the treacherous as may be possibly imagined, the sensation is not merely faint, there is no sensation at all.’ To this Durcet responds, ‘I must declare that my imagination has always outdistanced my faculties… I have conceived of a thousand times more and better than I have done and I have even complained against nature who, while giving me the desire to outrage her has always deprived me of the means' (364). Simone de Beauvoir extends this inherent lack in the (in)capabilities of the human borne of the disjunct between imagination, will and the possibilities of flesh: ‘If Sade devoted himself to [eroticism] with such energy, shamelessness and persistence, he did so because he attached greater importance to the stories he wove around the acts of pleasure than to the contingent happenings; he chose the imaginary’ (9). Sexuality as ritual, pleasure as performance, and the prevalence of the spoken word inextricable from the body illuminate Sade as not simply purveyor or describer of eroticism. Sade’s sexual philosophies are as much discursive as they are corporeal and each element envelops the other inextricably. Sade evokes imagination to destabilise the limits by which man, constructed through discourses of morality, religion and science, limits himself. Sade’s lists of perversions are matched in their depravity only by their speed. As soon as one lexicon of depravity is established – copraphagia, paedophilia, rape and murder – the narrator, and thus the observer, is hurled forward onto the next. The elements of movement in Sade are what makes rather than keeps him perverse, writing and imagining. Acts are reified by their critics, not by Sade himself, who is already moving onto the next limit, the next ophidian distortion of desire, flesh and ethics. The theatre is a work of imagination. Even historical stories, and thus history itself, are created and recreated through tales, contorted and sculpted by the modern paradigms which write them. Sade is represented more as a characterisation rather than historical figure. It is his philosophies more than his nature or persona which these two films are about. Sade in both films is adamantly a figment of his own imagination in his compulsion to liberate man as autonomous. Sade is writer, poet, playwright, but not really person. He is an undeveloped character. In Quills his need to write is more maniacal than his libidinal urges, in Marat Sade reads his own dialogue, thus doubling himself as both author and character. He is speech and word but not essence. Cinesadism: Sade, Cinema, Theatre Marat and Quills resist creating a characterisation of Sade as an insane, cruel debaucher and resonant with Sodom Sade’s ‘insanity’ is matched in Marat/Sade by the vacuous inanity of the monarchy, and in Quills by the depravity of the doctors and naivety of the clergy. The heterotopic asylum exists in an alternate reality where perception is less synthetic than material and insanity is an alternate paradigm rather than a failed sanity. The spectacle of the mad is structured in Marat as a theatrical panopticon, seen as the inmates fondle the bars which separate the ‘stage’ from their audience. Marat is played out in its entirety as a play, but does not exclude the dismembering aspects the cinematic camera affords. This plays with the tension of Sade being unfilmable. ‘I believe there is nothing more allergic to the cinema than Sade’ (223) claims Foucault. However in these two films, particularly Marat’s hermeneutic theatrical world, cinema does not succeed theatre, but extends the palimpsest outwards, creating a new layer or skin upon the surfaces of performance and spectatorship. These surfaces include: performers of the play; performers playing the observers; imagined theatre audience; camera as autonomous observer; finally, the layer of the cinema spectator. Maintaining and emphasising the theatrical aspect of its own construction allows Marat to similarly maintain what redeems it from Foucault’s anxieties of filming Sade: ‘The meticulousness, the ritual, the rigorous ceremonial form that all the senses of Sade assume exclude the supplementary play of the camera. The least addition or suppression, the smallest ornament, are intolerable. There is no place for an image. The blanks must not be filled except by bodies and desires’ (223). The glaring white lighting of the cell’s landscape in Marat leaves nothing except the bodies which occupy the space. The speeches of Marat and Sade also occupy the space with words that evoke, reflect and create desire without needing secondary representations of referents. The words alone construct, authored by Sade physically and conceptually and void of any visual interpretation through enactment or symbol. In its theatrical incarnation, the ritualised aspects of Sade can be maintained without appearing ridiculous. Every mask, every costume, draws attention to its own constructed nature, rather than invisibly suturing to the characters’ bodies and creating signification invested by the director and seamlessly representing characters, their function and symbolism unconsciously to the audience. Even though Sade is costumed, his is a vague and generic ‘older time’ costume, devoid of the frills and fetishistic flounce of Quills, or the equally fetishistic Nazi updating of Sade in such films as Pasolini’s Salo (1976) or The Night Porter (Liliana Cavini, 1974). But the storytelling aspects of all these films maintains ritualism and the emphasis on the constructed nature of the Sadean relationship between words, bodies, desire and act. In Quills it is Sade’s proclivity to spectacle and performance which outrages more than the content of both the texts and the play, which is a simple mimetic critique of the cruelty of traditional heterosexual paradigms. The play derides Doctor Royal-Collard’s (Michael Caine) demand for sex from his soon to be bride Simone (Amelia Warner). Here rape is banal and dominance over the weak is seen as inevitable in the indoctrination of female sexuality into society. This confirms Foucault’s claim that ‘Nazism was not invented by the great erotic madmen of the twentieth century but by the most sinister, boring and disgusting petit-bourgeois imaginable’ (226). Only the madman, so resonant with the artist, writer and philosopher, can invest torture with a constructedness, an acknowledged ritual which sets itself apart from established paradigms simply taken to the extreme. In Marat, Sade criticises nature and its cruelty. The cruelty of the Nazis, bourgeois and priests is simply an Id-like compulsion taken to the extreme. It is retrogressive and infantile brutality, not the philosophical created theatre of cruelty of the Sadean ritual. Klossowski writes: ‘While Freud only envisages life at the organic level, Sade admits of no difference between life at the organic and inorganic level’ (78). Freud’s description of the baby having to defer its demand for immediate pleasure, which includes the instinct to take and destroy at will, is propped onto desire, or treib. Nazis are thus big babies, reintroducing the instinctual aspects of infantilism before significations of deferral and abstraction of demand occurred. Nazis de-signify, returning to a more ‘natural’ selfishness, Sade to a refined, over-signified merciless which must identify mercy in order to repudiate it. Text and Materiality Collard’s disgust that ‘flesh and blood is no match for the printed page’ points to the horrors in traditional sexuality as a failure at both imagination and the limits of materiality in its encounter with the mind. What Collard fails to realise, and what both the Bishop and the Durcet understand in their laments, is that the word is flesh, that it has its own materiality. The word does not represent or reflect action. Thought both materialises the self and are affective materiality, where the flesh is another fold of the brain. Words mobilise and words come from mobilisation, through imagination which is infinite rather than limited by the acceptable or even the possible. As Klossowski pointed out above, the perceived inorganic aspect of word is no different to the organic drives or flesh. The use of words to titillate, the compulsive storytelling in Sodom and Sade as a writer not a libertine, in both films, is the actualisation of desire and pleasure. Reading is immanent sexuality and pointing to imminent acts; word as not...