Marat / Sade (the film by Peter Brook)

Marat/Sade

Marat/Sade, is a film based on the play written by Peter Wiess and directed by Peter Brook, and which premiered first in 1963. The play is set up in the famous Charanton Asylum of France and set against the backdrop of the incidents following the French Revolution. The first instance, while watching the video, at which the viewer is taken aback, is when the camera zooms out though between the iron bars of the prison cells. This happens while the elite director of the prison, Coulmier, introduces the purpose of the play to the audiences and the viewers. One realizes that the viewer at the end of the visual medium is actually caught in a double fix. There is a lingering confusion that seems to prevail. What is the truth: isn’t the jailor too actually one of the asylum inmates performing? And where does the viewer place herself?  

It is impossible to go ahead without taking in account the camera at work that follows this particular scene. Although later in the film there are several scenes which, in deliberately tentative shots, focus on the audience which is seated on the other side of the iron bars. However, it is through the scenography of the performance that we, in the process of reading it, are able to decipher the magnanimity of that particular space between the 'audiences' and the 'performers'. One can see the liminal capacity of where those iron bars are placed. A performance like Marat/Sade being a "play within a play", the iron bars of the asylum also lead the viewer to understand the "audience" inside the play, namely, Coulmire, his wife and daughter. 

The choice of the scene of action is the modern bath house of the asylum, which according to Coulmier, is fitted for the best of hygiene for the inmates. The bath house is colored dull, just like the pale and insipid lives of the patients. Ironically, a bath house is also a space of privacy but in the way the performance is set up, the audience becomes voyeurs inspecting the routines of the inmates. When Coulmier briefly describes the state of the art infrastructure of the asylum, it resonates with the overt chauvinism of the state replete with it’s empty “declaration of rights”. Later on, Marat anoints himself with the soothing and cooling waters relaxing in the bath-tub, relieving his searing fever signifying the fire of flaming revolution in him. Corday stabs him with her dagger while he is in the bath tub with his seething agony. A murder of a revolutionary in his very own bath tub is very strategic and cold blooded, yet executed calmly, after having given this action a meditated and prolonged thought by Corday, between wakeful and groggy headed states of transition.

From here, we can now enter to look at the play happening within the play which is about Marat and his execution as being directed by Marque de Sade. Soon audience is led to witness the raucous wails for “freedom” just after Marat has been marched in to the centre of the stage by the “fellow revolutionaries”. The inmates, suddenly become very vocal, and unanimously know of their common desire for independence. This swift transition of the mental patients to articulating beings points towards how these asylum dwellers almost reflect the voices of common people. It gets announced in the introduction to the play that only the best inmate has been chosen to play the role of Jean Paul Marat, the revolutionary. There is this over-arching and widely pertaining feel of the Brechtian mode of acting, with which the director Brook was highly influenced in the production of this work. The prisoners even while they enact the roles from the life of Marat and the revolution are always depicted essentially as actors/patients from the mental asylum.

The characterization of Simone Evla too is striking to the viewer. She is a constant companion to Marat, and just as Marat looks determined and contained, Simone, described as his maid, looks increasingly possessed. It looks like all the insanity that must get reflected in Marat as the patient, is transferred to Simone and at the same time he cant seem to discard her altogether. In a way, she, in all her likeness to a matronly figure, lets Marat be what he is, only at moments trying to hold him back and reflect.

Then there is this scene where the revolutionaries and the jugulars try to wake up the sleepy and exhausted Charlotte Corday. The inmate chosen for her role is suffering from the disease of Melancholia and she is often seen drowsy and being prodded by the asylum attendants. She breaks into a melodious song describing her intentions to murder Marat. the way the song is sung  intends to reflect her upbringing and her hatred for the revolutionary in Marat. de Sade hands over the shining dagger to Corday in a very erotic and playful manner, signifying his own presence of controlling the occurrences in the play. In another scene, Marat, himself accompanied by his maid called Simone, describes the traitors while piercing into the camera with his stern eyes. The viewer is always thus placed is a position that only set to raise the conflicts within.

When Corday, in one of her wakeful states, comes to visit Marat, she is there to kill Marat, hiding a dagger in her bosom. The bosom being the seat of her femininity, but which is now filled with just hatred for Marat. But the director Sade intervenes just before she lifts her dagger telling her to instead wait and come back three times to the door of Marat. It is interesting how eager Corday is to simply eliminate Marat’s existence and that de Sade has to intervene to prolong this attainment. She goes back to Paris and looks for the perfect knife to kill Marat. Eventually she finds just the one done in white, with refined and neat look, just like her own upbringing, sleeping and waking in between her insanity and her calculated plot of murder. She reminds us of some very sleepy labourer worker who is in a hurry to finish off her part of the job.

As is the case with Marat and his maid Simone, even Corday is followed around and perused by a Monsieur Dubois who is a sexual maniac and who lusts after Corday. Both Simone and Dubois represent the characters who want to stop Marat and Corday pursue their respective tasks. Dubois seemingly has an aristocratic background, and represents what could be a perfect match for Corday, had she not been blinded by her intentions of murder. Therefore, both Simone and Dubois embody the notions associated with family.

We are now taken back to the character of de Sade himself, who is shown to be rather oblivious of what is happening around him, in matters of the inmates misbehaving. Often the director the Asylum seems unsatisfied with de Sade’s representations through the inmates but he remains unaffected and detached. He is aloof but often indulges in debates with Marat and they wrestle with each other in the battle of thoughts to churn the truth, which is eventually left for the viewer to decide. He compares the Nature as a mere “spectator” of the human death, thereby, instilling in the audience with a sense of helpless annoyance. His pre-supposed notion of the human being is as a destroyer and thus he believes and tells Marat that it with passionate dedication the human must indulge in destruction and death.

In the scenes that follow are essentially about de Sade’s imagination of being tortured in worst possible ways. He mentions he is filled with sheer horror when he imagines so. But again, he pressingly, with a look accusing the viewer behind the camera, talks of people who he knows of being indifferent to all that torture. The next scene concerning Marat that follows is iconic when he attempts to embody the torture faced by France in ‘lunatic’ violence. He removes his cloths while in conversation with Marat and asks Corday to whip his back while de Sade describes his accounts from the Revolution.

This iconic and memorable sequence, which is heavily influenced from Antonin Artaud’s theatre of cruelty mode of acting representation, involves Charlotte Corday whipping the back of de Sade with her hair. The whipping sound resembles that of a whip shot in air and also sometimes reminded me of the sound of sharpening the edges of a dagger against a stone. A parallel image runs in my mind that while de Sade is being whipped with each sound even the dagger to kill  Marat is also being sharpened by Cordey. While she does this with accurate precision, closely measured whipping to be precisely with the soft tips of her blond hair against the bare skin of de Sade, he goes on describing, coupled with expressions of pain and discomfort and sweat shining on his skin, the gory violence from what he saw at the war.