The Sadeian Aesthetic: A Critical View

The Sadeian aesthetic is the Quintessence of the high modernist sacerdoce: sitting tight and watching the unwatchable (listening to the unlistenable, reading the unreadable) because the capacity to bear such self-inflicted violence is what distinguishes us from those who prize only the facile pleasures of low or middle-brow culture. And because of the pride we take in our Spartan ability to pay this blind tribute to the sadistic artist-god. For years I was the epitome of that elitist spectator, dutifully attentive to Buñuel/Dali's eyeball-slitting, to Franju's butchered horse, but also to Brakhage's endless cascade of blurs and blotches, to Guyotat's opaque obscenities or to the ever-elusive beauties of 'contemporary music': it is in the arts of finite duration that the Sadeian aesthetic achieves 'its object all sublime'. The cult of the figure of the Marquis de Sade is French to the core, it grew in symbiosis with phallocentric modernism, that indisputably French creation. First associated with the Bohemian eccentricities of a Baudelaire or a Flaubert, it became a broad consensus among intellectuals of the generation of Barthes and Robbe-Grillet... and Simone de Beauvoir. For psychoanalyst Nancy Huston, that post-war passion for de Sade was a typically French way of dealing with horrors that could not be faced - Auschwitz, Hiroshima - by eroticizing them. I was educated in Paris in the fifties, I made the Sadeian cult my own. I went on to write embarassing pages. When did I notice that the eyeball in Le Chien andalou was a woman's? Or that my own masochism was playing on the wrong team? When did I remember that one of my earliest enchantments was Der Blaue Engel, premier manifestation of von Sternberg's masochistic aesthetic, developed in Hollywood but prolonging Modernism's 'symptomatic shadow' - androgynous, decorative, 'Orientalist'... which Peter Wollen traced back to the Ballets russes, to the designs of Paul Poiret, to the painting of Matisse. A masochistic aesthetic recently named and deciphered by Gaylyn Studlar working through the grid of Gilles Deleuze's pioneering essay. A masochistic aesthetic which I once went groping to devise in a handful of obscure films. Here then is an experiment in anti-terror, in the glorification, not the profanation of the mother: contra the Sadeian aesthetic with its capital S, a patchwork of stabs at a lower case masochistic art... Programme (onder voorbehoud/provisional) Noviciat (Noël Burch, 17 min.) Correction, Please (Noël Burch, excerpt/fragment) Switch (a work in progress) (Michèle Larue, 18 min.) The Act of Seeing with One's Own Eyes (Stan Brakhage, excerpt/fragment) The Devil is a Woman (Joseph von Sternberg, excerpt/fragment)