Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century (127 page)

The film guides say that
Hiroshima mon amour
is as important to film history as
Citizen Kane.
As with all great films,
Hiroshima
is a seamless combination of story and form. Based on a script by Marguerite Duras, the film explores a two-day love affair in Hiroshima between a married French actress and a married Japanese architect. With Hiroshima so closely associated with death, the woman cannot help but recall an earlier affair which she had with a young German soldier whom she had loved during the occupation of France, and who had been killed on the day her town was liberated. For loving the enemy she had been imprisoned in a cellar by her family, and ostracised. In Hiroshima she relives the pain at the same time that she loves the architect. The combination of tender, deliquescent lovemaking and brutal war footage matched her mood exactly.
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Les Quatre Cents Coups
is generally regarded as the best film ever made about youth. It was the first of a series of five films, culminating in
Love on the Run
(1979). ‘The Four Hundred Blows’ (a French expression for getting up to no good, doing things to excess, derived from a more literal meaning as the most punishment anyone can bear) tells the story of Antoine Doinel at age twelve.
Left alone by his parents, he gets into trouble, runs away, and is finally consigned to an observation centre for delinquents. Truffaut’s point is that Antoine is neither very bad nor very good, simply a child, swept this way and that by forces he doesn’t understand. The film is intended to show a freedom – geographical, intellectual, artistic – that the boy glimpses but only half realises is there before it is all swept away. Never really happy at school (we are shown others who
are
unthinkingly happy), the boy enters adulthood already tainted. The famous freeze-frame that ends the film is usually described as ambiguous, but
Les Quatre Cents Coups
is without doubt a sad film about what might have been.
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A bout de souffle (Breathless
) has been described as the film equivalent of
Le Sacre du printemps
or
Ulysses
; Godard’s first masterpiece, it changed everything in film. Ostensibly about the final days of a petty (but dangerous) criminal, who initiates a manhunt after he guns down a policeman, the film follows the movements of a man (played by Jean-Paul Belmondo) who models himself on Bogart and the characters he has often seen in Hollywood B gangster movies.
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He meets and falls in love with an American student (Jean Seberg), whose limited French underlines his own circumscribed world and personality. Their very different views on life, discussed in the pauses between frantic action, gave the film a depth that sets it apart from the B movies it both reveres and derides. Michel Poiccard, the Belmondo character, knows only too well the failures of life that Antoine Doinel is just waking up to. It too is about what might have been.
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L’Année dernière à Marienbad,
directed by Alain Resnais, scripted by Alain Robbe-Grillet, is a sort of
nouveau roman
on screen. It concerns the attempts by X to convince A that they met last year in Marienbad, a resort hotel, where she promised (or may have promised) to run away with him this year. We never know whether the earlier meeting ever took place, whether A is ambiguous because her husband is near, or even whether the ‘recollections’ of X are in fact premonitions set in the future. That this plot seems improbable when written down isn’t the point; the point is that Resnais, with the aid of some superb settings, beautifully shot, keeps the audience puzzled but interested all the way through. The most famous shot takes place in the huge formal garden, where the figures cast shallows but the towering bushes do not.
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Jules et Jim
is ‘a shrine to lovers who have known obsession and been destroyed by it,’ a story about two friends, writers, and the woman they meet, who first has a child by one of them and then falls in love with the other.
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Considered Truffaut’s masterpiece, it is also Jeanne Moreau’s triumph, playing Catherine. She is so convincing as the wilful third member of the friendship that when she drives into the Seine because Jules and Jim have not included her in a discussion of a Strindberg play, it seems entirely natural.

Deux ou Trois Choses que je sais d’elle (Two or Three Things I Know about Her)
was described by the critic James Pallot as ‘arguably the greatest film made by arguably the most important director to emerge since World War II.’
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The plot is not strong, and not especially original: it features a housewife who works part-time as a prostitute. It is a notoriously difficult film, dense with images,
with endless references to Marx, Wittgenstein, Braudel, structuralism, all related to film, how we watch film, and – a theme underlying all Godard’s and Truffaut’s work – the place of film in how we lead our lives.
Two or Three Things I Know about Her
is also regarded as a ‘Barthian film,’ creating and reflecting on ‘mythologies’ of the world, using signs in old and new ways, to show how they influence our thought and behavior.
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This was an important ingredient of the French film renaissance, that it was willing to be associated with other areas of contemporary thought, that it saw itself as part of that collective activity: the fact that Godard’s masterpiece was so difficult meant that he put intellectual content first, entertainment value second. And that was the point. In the third quarter of the century, so far as film was concerned, traditional Hollywood values took a back seat.

In 1980 Peter Brook’s Centre International de Créations Théâtricales, in

Paris, was given the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award. It was no more than he deserved. In many ways, Brook’s relation to theatre was analogous to Boulez’s in music. Each was very much his own man, who ploughed his own creative furrow, very international in outlook, very experimental. In the CICT Brook brought a ‘research’ element to theatre, much as Boulez was doing at IRCAM in music.
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Born in London in 1925, to parents of Russian descent, Brook left school at sixteen and, in wartime, worked briefly for the Crown Film Unit, before being persuaded by his parents that a university education would, after all, be desirable. At Magdalen College, Oxford, he began directing plays, after which he transferred to Birmingham Repertory Company (‘Birmingham Rep’). In an age before television, this was a very popular form of theatre, almost unknown now: new productions were mounted every two weeks or so, a mix of new plays and classics, so that repertory companies with a stable of familiar actors played an important part in intellectual life, especially in provincial cities outside London. When the Royal Shakespeare Company was formed in 1961 in Stratford-upon-Avon and Brook was invited to take part, he became much better known. At Birmingham he introduced Arthur Miller and Jean Anouilh to Britain, and coaxed classic Shakespearean performances out of John Gielgud
(Measure for Measure)
and Laurence Olivier (
Titus Andronicus)
.
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But it was his sparse rendering
of King Lear,
with Paul Scofield in the title role, in 1962 that is generally regarded as the turning point in his career. Peter Hall, who helped found both the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre in Britain, asked Brook to join him, and Brook made it a condition of his employment that he could have ‘an independent unit of research.’

Brook and his colleagues spent part of 1965 behind locked doors, and when they presented the fruits of their experiments to the public, they called their performances the ‘Theatre of Cruelty,’ as homage to Antonin Artaud.
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Cruelty was used in a special sense here: Brook himself once said, in his
Manifesto for the Sixties,
‘We need to look to Shakespeare. Everything remarkable in Brecht, Beckett, Artaud is in Shakespeare. For an idea to stick, it is not
enough to state it: it must be burnt into our memories.
Hamlet
is such an idea.’
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The most celebrated production in the ‘Theatre of Cruelty’ season was Brook’s direction of Peter Weiss’s
Marat/Sade.
The full title of the play explains the plot:
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.
Weiss himself described the play as Marxist, but this was not especially important for Brook. Instead he concentrated on the intensity of experience that can be conveyed in theatre (one of Brook’s aims, as he admitted, was in helping the theatre to overcome the onslaught of television, which was the medium’s driving force in the middle years of the century). For Brook the greatest technique for adding intensity in the theatre is the use of verse, in particular Shakespeare’s verse, which helps actors, directors, and audience concentrate on what is important. But he realised that a twentieth-century technique was also needed, and for him
the
invention was Brecht’s, ‘what has been uncouthly labelled “alienation.” Alienation is the art of placing an action at a distance so that it can be judged objectively and so that it can be seen in relation to the world – or rather, worlds – around it.’
Marat/Sade
showed Brook’s technique at work. When they began rehearsals, he asked the actors to improvise madness. This resulted in such cliché-ridden eye-rolling and frothing at the mouth that he took the company off to a mental hospital to see for themselves. ‘As a result, I received for the first time the true shocks that come from direct contact with the physically atrocious conditions of inmates in mental hospitals, in geriatric wards, and, subsequently, in prisons – images of real life for which pictures on film are no substitute. Crime, madness, political violence were there, tapping on the window, pushing open the door. There is no way. It was not enough to remain in the second room, on the other side of the threshold. A different involvement was needed.’
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It was after another Shakespearean success,
A Midsummer Night’s Dream,
at the RSC in 1970 (and after he had directed a number of productions in France), that Brook was offered the financial assistance he needed to set up the Centre International de Recherche Théâtrale (CIRT), which later became CICT. Brook’s aim in doing this was to move away from the constraints of the commercial theatre, which he regarded as a compromise on what he wanted to do.
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Brook attracted actors from all over the world, interested as he was not only in acting but in the production and reception of theatre and in ways in which research might add to the intensity of the experience.

Orghast
(1971) was a recasting of the Prometheus myth, performed at Persepolis and written in a new language devised by the British poet tell Hughes (who was appointed poet laureate in 1984). This play in particular explored the way the
delivery
of the lines – many of which were sung in incantation – affected their reception. Hughes was also using the ideas of Noam Chomsky, and the deep structure of language, in the new forms he invented.
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Moving into the abandoned Bouffes du Nord theatre, built in 1874 but empty since 1952, Brook embarked on an ambitious – unparalleled – experiment, which had two strands. One was to use theatre in an attempt to find a
common, global language, by peopling his productions with actors from different traditions – South American, Japanese, European – but also by exposing these experimental productions to
audiences
of different traditions, to see how they were received and understood. This meant that Brook tackled some improbable ideas – for example,
Conference of the Birds
(1979), based on a twelfth-century Sufi poem, a comic but painful allegory about a group of birds that sets off on a perilous journey in search of a legendary bird, the Simourg, their hidden king.
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Of course, the journey becomes a stripping away of each bird’s/person’s façades and defences, which Brook used as a basis for improvisation. A second improbable production was
The Mahabharata
(1985), the Sanskrit epic poem, fifteen times the length of the Bible. This six-hour production, which reduces the epic to the ‘core narrative’ of two warring families, was researched in India, which Brook referred to fondly in his memoirs: ‘Perhaps India is the last place where every period of history can coexist, where the ugliness of neon lighting can illuminate ceremonies that have not changed in ritual form nor in outer clothing since the origin of the Hindu faith.’
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He took his leading actors to India to spend time in holy places, so that they might at least half-appreciate the Vedic world they were about to portray. (The various versions of the script took ten years to pare down.) The third of Brook’s great non-Western innovations was
The Ik,
a play about famine in Africa. This looked back to the books of the anthropologist Colin Turnbull, who had discovered a series of extraordinary tribes around the world, and forward to the economics of Amartya Sen, the Indian who would win the Nobel Prize in 1998 for his theories, expressed throughout the 1980s, about the way famines developed. To complement these non-Western ideas, Brook also took his company on three great tours – to Iran, to Africa, and to the United States, not simply to entertain and inform but also to study the reaction to his productions of the audiences in these very different places. The tours were intended as a test for Brook’s ideas about a global language for theatre, and to see how the company might evolve if it wasn’t driven by commercial constraints.
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But Peter Brook was not only experimental, and not only French-oriented – he thought theatre in Britain ‘very vital.’
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The CICT continued to produce Shakespeare and Chekhov, and he himself produced several mainstream films and opera:
Lord of the Flies
(1963), based on William Golding’s novel about a group of young boys marooned on a desert island, who soon ‘return’ to savagery;
Meetings with Remarkable Men
(1979), based on the spiritualist George Ivanovich Gurdjieff’s autobiography; and
La Tragédie de Carmen
(1983). He also produced a seminal book on the theatre, in which he described four categories of theatrical experience – deadly, holy, rough, and immediate. At the end of his memoirs, Brook said that ‘at its origin, theatre was an act of healing, of healing the city. According to the action of fundamental, entropie forces, no city can avoid an inevitable process of fragmentation. But when the population assembles together in a special place under special conditions to partake in a mystery, the scattered limbs are drawn together, and a momentary healing reunites the larger body, in which each member, re-membered, finds it place … Hunger, violence, gratuitous cruelty, rape, crime – these are constant
companions in the present time. Theatre can penetrate into the darkest zones of terror and despair for one reason only: to be able to affirm, neither before nor after but at the very same moment, that light is present in darkness. Progress may have become an empty concept, but evolution is not, and although evolution can take millions of years, the theatre can free us from this time frame.’
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