Antonin Artaud at Alliance Francaise

The French film 'My Life and Times With Antonin Artaud' (En Compagnie d'Antonin Artaud), a powerful fictionalized account of renowned French poet, actor, and intellectual Antonin Artaud will be screened at 3 pm on Tuesday Feb 13 and 6.30 pm on Wednesday Feb 13.

The film directed by Gérard Mordillat and portrays the life ofAntonin Artaud who in life walked a fine, often blurred line between genius and insanity. It is told from the viewpoint of Artaud's intimate friend, student, and pusher, the poet Jacques Prevel.

Set in bohemian Paris of 1946, this jazzy but dark feature stars Sami Frey (who played Theresa Russell's almost-murdered lover in Black Widow) as Antonin Artaud, the actor, writer, and founder of the infamous Theater of Cruelty. Newly released from a mental institution, Artaud--who is dying painfully of cancer--befriends Jacques Prevel (Marc Barbé), a young poet who wrote to him during Artaud's confinement.

Penniless, self- absorbed, and sexually involved with two women, Prevel provides Artaud with pain-killing drugs, for which the legendary artist favors him with money, encouragement, and his most desperate insights into the horror of living. Tyrannical, generous, maddeningly oblique, terribly vulnerable, Artaud in his final days becomes a figure lost in a forest of misery, comforted only--so this story tells us--by Prevel's words.

Shot in black and white, the film is a haunting evocation of post-war moral exhaustion among artists set against renewed urban energy, the French equivalent of America's nascent Beat movement.