La vie est la mémoire, et l’homme est le hasard.233 – Fernando Arrabal, “L’Homme panique”
Even though the Oulipo and the early Collège de ‘Pataphysique are both bound up with artistic expression based in written language, pataphysics does make room for expression via other media.234 Film has a particularly strong standing within the imaginary science. Indeed, although the Collège made claims to pursue pataphysics through a variety of modes of expression, it still remained heavily dependent on the written word. Despite the group’s predilection or even deliberate choice of literature as its preferred medium, the potential of pataphysics to influence other art forms is not just hypothetical. This chapter will demonstrate that the influence of the imaginary science of pataphysics extends beyond literature and to this end I will discuss another artistic group that also became tied to the Collège, namely, the Mouvement Panique. Its members used performance and film as their media of choice, and the design and execution of their work align with pataphysical philosophy. At the moment of its founding in 1962, the movement was not associated with the Collège de ‘Pataphysique like the Oulipo was. Furthermore, its founding members, Fernando Arrabal, Alejandro Jodorowsky and Roland Topor, were at the time unfamiliar with the Collège. Nevertheless, the group’s developing philosophy paralleled and
233 Fernando Arrabal, “L’Homme panique,” in Le “Panique,” ed. Fernando Arrabal (Paris: Union générale d’éditions, 1973), 47.
234 By early Collège de ‘Pataphysique I mean the group as it functioned until its occultation in 1975.
overlapped with the pataphysical assumptions of the Collège in many aspects, the main one being the proclamation of reason and logical thinking as insufficient in one’s interactions with the surrounding world. Even though only one founder of the Mouvement Panique, Arrabal, later became personally involved in the life of the Collège, as he was officially coopted into it as a Satrap upon its desoccultation in 2000, he subsequently acknowledged the mutual interest of both philosophies and declared his fascination with pataphysics.235 This retrospective affirmation demonstrates that Jarry’s imaginary science has indirectly impacted artistic production in non- literary media, in this case film, despite the Collège’s seeming reluctance or failure to explore other modes of expression.
The word “panic” is most readily associated with its denotation of a sudden sensation of losing control over one’s body and experiencing irrational reactions and impulsive behaviors stemming from anxiety and fear. Indeed, the founders of the Mouvement Panique chose this term because of their interest in the materiality and potential of human bodies. They further expanded the term by adding symbolic layers to its meaning, reaching out to mythology as well as the morphology of the word. In Greek mythology, the god Pan resembles a faun or a satyr and embodies the wilderness of nature. The grotesqueness of his monstrous appearance and his animalistic sexuality are elements that are, as I will demonstrate in this chapter, readily assimilated into the works of the founders. Moreover, the Greek root of the word, “pan,” means “all” and suggests the plurality and a totality of the concept of le panique.236 The deliberate
235 Arrabal was the first founder of the Mouvement Panique to join the Collège, but not the first
panique to do so. Olivier O. Olivier (Pierre Marie Olivier), a painter who joined the Mouvement
Panique a year after it was founded, had been a member of the Collège since 1953.
236 In order to talk about their artistic preoccupations, the group members use the French word
panique in the masculine form (as opposed to la panique – the sensation of fear). The deliberate
inclusion of multiple layers of meaning in the name of the group, whose members devoted their time to artistic creation focused on communication with their audience through direct sensation, points to the nuanced ways they understood the group’s mission: “Le panique trouve son expression la plus complète dans la fête panique, dans la cérémonie théâtrale, dans le jeu, dans l’art et dans la solitude indifférente.”237 An artistic work that can be considered a panic creation is, thus, in itself an all-encompassing celebration of sensation and the corporeality of being human. While the group originally favored theater as its medium of expression, its scope quickly grew to include any medium that has an immediate impact on the senses and that generates intense sensations.
The three founders of the Mouvement Panique are best-known as individualistic and eccentric personas in the world of theater and cinema. In his recent volume, Panique: Arrabal,
Jodorowsky, Topor (2008), Frédéric Aranzueque-Arrieta takes on the task of elucidating their
collective efforts to advance their panic philosophy, which informed their artistic identities throughout most of their lives. This much-needed historical account maps the Mouvement Panique onto the landscape of contemporary arts and inscribes it into a tradition of other artistic movements such as Surrealism and Dadaism. I will use Aranzueque-Arrieta’s volume, along with essays and texts written by the founders on the origins and purposes of the movement, as a springboard to demonstrate a broader affiliation of the group with the Collège de ‘Pataphysique and Jarry’s imaginary science in general.238 The association of the Mouvement Panique with the
Jodorowsky’s native language, the word pánico is masculine, and such an interlingual
transplantation of a grammatical rule results in making it a new term of its own. 237 Arrabal, “L’Homme panique,” 52.
238 A collection of these texts includes, but is not limited to, “L’Homme panique” (1973) by Fernando Arrabal, “Panique et poulet rôti” (1973) by Alejandro Jodorowsky, “Petit memento
Collège is not as straightforward as the Oulipo’s, nevertheless, the ties between both groups become visible through the explicit and implicit commitment of the group’s founders to both causes. The Mouvement Panique demonstrates how the pataphysical tendency to favor the pursuit of creative ways to connect and interact with the world has branched out and freed itself from the limitations of literature into media based on corporeality and vision. I see this expansion into the media diversity as a step that was much needed to complete the pluralistic vision of pataphysics preached by the Collège, but which the Collège itself failed to attain at its beginnings.
In this chapter, I focus on cinematic works by two of the three founders of the Mouvement Panique: Fando y Lis (1986) by Alejandro Jodorowsky and Viva la Muerte (1971) by Fernando Arrabal.239 By relating them to the concepts of confusion, revised notions of memory and temporality, the monstrous and the celebratory ritual, I demonstrate how panic films fulfill the philosophy of pataphysics. As these films are their creators’ first hands-on experiences with cinema, I believe them to be the most comprehensive and the most representative of the panic thought born out of fascination with performance of the human body. While Arrabal and Jodorowsky from the start emphasized their commitment to inclusion of elements of diverse media in their works, at first their efforts were focused on theater and more specifically performance and happenings, forms of art that are bound to a very specific timeframe and depend on their works’ non-durability.240 Theater seemed to be the environment that the three
panique” (1973) by Ronald Topor, and “Panique: manifeste pour le troisième millénaire” (2006)
by Arrabal again.
239 Alejandro Jodorowsky, Fando y Lis (Producciones Pánicas/Fantoma, 1968); Fernando Arrabal, Viva la Muerte (Cult Epics 2012, 1970).
240 In the “Entretien panique,” for example, Jodorowsky described himself and his colleagues as
founders at first considered the most fertile ground for the realization of their panic philosophy. Yet, as Aranzueque-Arrieta rightly notices, “[…] si l’on associe le plus souvent Fernando Arrabal au théâtre, car c’est dans cet art qu’il s’est le plus exprimé, ou Alejandro Jodorowsky à la mise en scène, au scénario de bande dessinées […], les créations qui les ont rendus le plus populaire auprès du grand public, sont associées indéniablement au septième art.”241 The inability to reach broader audience with their panic performances indeed pushed Arrabal and Jodorowsky towards exploring other media that engage with spectators in comparable ways, but which also last. Michel Larouche states that it was the inevitable pressure of the consumer- centered society, which the three artists could not deny, that steered them towards film:
Les paniques ont donc orienté leurs efforts vers des manifestations autres, susceptibles de s’intégrer plus aisément dans les normes actuelles, en vue toutefois de les faire éclater. Ils ont donc cultivé les autres manifestations paniques, qui tendent vers la “fête-spectacle”, considérée comme manifestation idéale. Et le cinéma semble avoir été le lieu privilégié de ces manifestations.242 Cinema as a medium allowed the three artists to pursue their commitment to impact their audiences through as many sensory channels as possible, to involve corporeality and movement and to create circumstances for celebration spectacles, and at the same time to leave permanent traces of their works, something that is precluded by the idea of live performance. Martine
Pasolini and Salvador Dali, artists who tried their hand at various means of expression and
experimentation. For more details see Philippe Krebs, “Entretien panique avec Alejandro Jodorowsky.” Les Éditions Hermaphrodite, 2007,
http://sitehermaphrodite.free.fr/article.php3?id_article=25.
241 Frédéric Aranzueque-Arrieta, Panique: Arrabal, Jodorowsky, Topor (Paris: Harmattan, 2008), 108.
242 Michel Larouche, Alexandro Jodorowsky: cinéaste panique (Montréal: Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 1985), 25-26.
Beugnet, a theorist and scholar of French cinema, affirms that the cinematic medium is uniquely suited to achieving these goals and even pushing the viewers to uncover new sensations and experiences that are not accessible through individual stimulation of the senses:
Through very simple as well as elaborate operations, cinema can thus reawaken or make the viewer conscious of sensual correspondences. Through framing, camera movement, light and contrast, the grain of the image and the mix of different film stocks, as well as the variations in sound and visual intensities, the effect of the audiovisual footage extends to touch, smell and taste, and, in turn, operates as a relay between the sensual and the emotional – the diffuse but pervasive multi- sensory evocation of pleasure, desire, longing, fear and terror.243
The multi-sensory power of cinema allows the filmmaker to address multiple senses at the same time and generate unexpected affects manifested as sensations in their audiences, which I would argue was part of what attracted the founders of the Mouvement Panique to the medium.
A focused interest in the materiality and the physicality of the human body, especially in film, invites a phenomenological angle in approaching such cinematic works. The filmmakers of the Mouvement Panique exploit and experiment with the bodies of their characters but also directly with the bodies of their actors, by testing their possibilities and limitations. They also explore different ways in which people can perceive the spatial and temporal dimensions of their environment and interact through their bodies with their surroundings. Furthermore, these
panique filmmakers indeed invite their audiences to connect with their films through sensation
rather than cognition by addressing and engaging their sensorium as a whole. Even though
243 Martine Beugnet, Cinema and Sensation: French Film and the Art of Transgression (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 74.
sensory engagement cannot be equated with affective engagement, sensory reception and sensations in general can be understood as manifestations of a larger pool of affects involved in such stimulation. By dismantling the familiar patterns of cognition based on causal and hierarchical structures, established to facilitate one’s ability to understand and process phenomena, the members of the Mouvement Panique lean toward the exploration of affects rather than knowledge and logic.
In order to bring out how this process works, I will draw on the theorization of phenomenology and affect by Gilles Deleuze for several reasons. First, Deleuze’s interest in the cinematic medium makes his work particularly suited for the purpose of this chapter. Second, Deleuze accorded a special role to pataphysics in the formulation of his take on phenomenology, and he even went so far as to name Jarry a precursor to Heidegger.244 Finally, Arrabal mentioned both pataphysics and Deleuze as significant sources of inspiration in an interview given in 2006.245 Thus, a Deleuzian philosophical framework will enable me to connect these two panic films and Jarry’s imaginary science.