To explain practical implications of philosophie panique and its constitutive elements for cinema, I will focus on two key performance-related theoretical concepts devised during the Mouvement Panique’s formative years: the éphémère panique, or the panic ephemeral performance, and the fête-spectacle, a notion of panic celebration. Both informed not only theatrical plays of the members of the Mouvement Panique, but also their later cinematic works. The éphémère panique is a type of performance first described by Jodorowsky in “Vers l’éphémère panique ou sortir le théâtre du théâtre” in 1965. Already the descriptive title of the essay explains what Jodorowsky has in mind while proposing an innovative performance: he wants to free the theater from its limitations related to years of tradition shaping this particular
277 Deleuze, “Un Précurseur,” 113.
art. Such limitations result from the layout of theater buildings, a relative lack of real interaction between actors and the audience, but most importantly from the adopted linear temporal structure of theatrical plays. It is a new attitude towards time, I argue, that the éphémère panique exemplifies.
The éphémère panique is a type of performance designed to combat temporal durability. As its name indicates, such a performance is ephemeral, its existence is fleeting and short-lived but particularly impactful and especially difficult to reproduce in the same form, and it stands in opposition to things that are permanent and repetitive. Jodorowsky broaches the subject of the problematic nature of durability in what is considered another one of the founding essays of the Mouvement Panique, “Panique et poulet rôti” (1964): “Le désir de DURER tourmenta l’humanité avant la [sic] panique […].”278 There, Jodorowsky presents the human yearning to survive in time and to leave a permanent imprint that will last into the future, as a curse of humanity. He strives to raise awareness regarding the artificiality of the notion of time as measurement of linear progression and concludes that performance is the medium best adapted to realize his agenda. In “Vers l’éphémère panique,” Jodorowsky pins down theater’s limitations to the fact that this particular medium of artistic expression borrows inspiration and language from other artistic media, such as literature, visual arts, sculpture, music and architecture.279 One of the aspects that theater erroneously borrows from these media is a pretense of durability: “Cette confusion naît du fait que l’on considère le théâtre comme un ‘Art’ en prétendant lui donner le ‘caractère durable’ des autres arts. Les hommes de théâtre ont senti avec angoisse le
278 Jodorowsky, “Panique et poulet rôti,” 57, emphasis original. 279 Jodorowsky, “Vers l’éphémère,” 74.
caractère non durable de leurs œuvres et l’impossibilité d’une représentation parfaite.”280 The non-durability of the theatrical medium, Jodorowsky claims, was always sensed but often suppressed by the influences of other arts. The artist and other paniques call for a conscious insistence on the ephemerality of the medium, which is why they prefer to speak of performance rather than use the broad term of theater. The ephemerality of performance is the key element of
le panique. It prevents artists from achieving perfection, which, in a counterintuitive way, is a
good thing, as according to philosophie panique, perfection is inhuman and confusion is desired over perfection.
If theater is the convenient medium of choice to accommodate the ephemeral type of performance that the paniques seek to create, their insistence on non-durability becomes more complicated when they turn to cinema. By virtue of the cinematic medium’s recording, reproducibility, and defined time constraints, films are designed to last in more than one way. Films can be screened multiple times, which flies in the face of the idea of a unique, ephemeral performance. Moreover, a recorded film is meant to be watched in a linear fashion, from beginning to end, and has a defined duration. Arrabal, however, saw films, and especially the process of filmmaking, as uniquely ephemeral in its own way. In the interview with André Cornand, Arrabal states that despite the reproducibility of films, they can be considered even more prone to accidents and open to chance, as theater plays are rehearsed for weeks before they are performed, whereas the filming of a scene, especially in the case of low-budget cinema, is preceded by minimal rehearsing.281 I will argue that indeed it is the production process, the inclusion of spontaneous performance during the making of the film, and the use of specific
280 Ibid, 74.
cinematographic techniques, that informs the ephemeral nature of the panic films in regard to time.
In addition to the notion of the ephémère panique, Deleuze’s concepts of the time-image and the crystal-image presented in Cinéma 2 (1985) also contribute to a helpful theoretical framework to show how the paniques approach and construct the temporality of their films. In that book, Deleuze questions the relevance of the rational structuring of cinematic temporal progression based on movement and instead promotes the exploration of alternative possibilities that cinema has to offer. In what he calls the time-image, “[t]ime ceases to be derived from the movement, it appears in itself and itself gives rise to false movements. Hence the importance of false continuity in modern cinema: the images are no longer linked by rational cuts and continuity, but are relinked by means of false continuity and irrational cuts.”282 In my analysis of panic films, I will argue that false movements and false continuity are central tools used by the panic filmmakers to sabotage the continuity of time in their own productions and to dismantle its progression. Moreover, the paniques turn to the exploitation of memory (instead of past), and confusion and chance (instead of progression towards the future), to paint their own types of time-images in their films. In his presentation of the time-image, Deleuze uses terms that later on inspired and informed discourses by affect theorists, including the distinction between the actual and the virtual. Deleuze contends that time-images are virtual, as opposed to the actuality of linear movement-based sequences, because they are free from constraints of the traditional assumptions regarding the socially and scientifically constructed notion of time. The virtuality of
282 Gilles Deleuze, “Preface to English Edition,” in Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlison and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota, 1986), xi.
time-image-based cinema is one of the key characteristics shared with the structure of the cinematic productions inspired by philosophie panique.
It was the end of the 1960s that saw Alejandro Jodorowsky and Fernando Arrabal respectively carry out their first experiments with film: Jodorowsky’s Fando y Lis (1968), and Arrabal’s Viva la Muerte (1971). I chose to look at these works to demonstrate the practical implications of panic philosophy, because as their first films, they are still very much connected to their creators’ tradition and background in stage-related arts, such as theater, happenings and spontaneous performance. At the same time, they mark the beginning of the directors’ individual journeys during which, in the years to come, they both guided their artistic sensitivities in their own directions. Both films have a common foundation in the way that they solidified personal bonds of the members of the Panic Group, that they inspired fascination with one another’s work, and that they gave their authors a taste of social and artistic ostracism.283 More importantly, the two films’ common denominator is the core approach to the world and its perception by their directors, le panique, which shaped Jodorowsky’s and Arrabal’s respective takes on temporality.
While the two directors approach temporality each in their own way, they both seek to defuse or dismantle the regime of temporal progression and the idea of a linear passage from the past, through the present, and toward the future. The neutralization of temporal linearity in their
283 Indeed Jodorowsky made Fando y Lis based on Arrabal’s theatrical play by the same title, Arrabal, in turn, included Topor’s drawings in the opening sequence of Viva la Muerte. These ae only examples of how fascination with one another’s work brought the artists together. As for their ostracism, Jodorowsky’s film caused a scandal at the Acapulco festival in 1968 at which it premiered, which led to closing down of the festival. Similarly, Arrabal’s creation encountered severe criticism of its provocative visuals at the Cannes festival of 1971 and was subsequently banned in France for a year. It was, nevertheless, the French intellectual scene that provided the artists from different parts of the world and similar experience of being rejected by mainstream criticism, with exile where they could cultivate freely their own take on art and aesthetics.
works starts for both of them already at the conceptual stage. Jodorowsky prides himself in having shot Fando y Lis as a highly-improvised performance, without a script, based only on his subjective memories from the time of staging Arrabal’s play in Mexico.284 Such an approach to filmmaking singles out the present as the only relevant temporal plane, and imagines the past not as the time that precedes and leads to the present, but as a panic conception of memory, virtual in its atemporality, that folds onto and becomes superimposed on the present. Arrabal, for his part, proposes his own vision of time as memory in the state of confusion, thus practically experimenting with the panic theorization of time. Whereas in his autobiographical novel, Baal
Babylone (1959), on which Viva la Muerte is based, Arrabal focused on describing the past of his
childhood, in the film he renders the storyline’s ties to the past fluid and vague. The images in
Viva la Muerte become less a representation of memories based on past events and more an
expression of sensations and affective reactions triggered by the author’s fantasies built around his childhood experiences. Both Jodorowsky’s and Arrabal’s approaches to the construction of temporality in film bring about results that are close to the elements of what Deleuze theorized as the time-image and the crystal-image. Interestingly, later in his life, Deleuze tied his conception of time to pataphysics when in the Critique et Clinique essay on Jarry and phenomenology he wrote: “La science sous ce caractère technique rend d’abord possible un renversement pataphysique du temps: la succession des trois stases, passé, présent, futur, fait place à la co-
présence ou simultanéité des trois extases, être du passé, être du présent, être du futur.”285
Fascinated with the science of pataphysics, Deleuze praises it as a domain that allows for the conceptualization of and experimentation with the simultaneity of the traditionally sequential
284 In his commentary to the 2003 DVD release of Fando y Lis, Jodorowsky admits to having a one-page script for the film, which still leaves plenty of room for improvisation and spontaneity. 285 Deleuze, “Un Précurseur,” 119.
elements of time: the past, the present, and the future. As philosophie panique advocates the confusion and unification of these three facets of time, the members of the Mouvement Panique, Deleuze, and pataphysicians find common ground in the way they imagine time.