What exactly would you say Artaud was hoping to achieve in his film scenario La Coquille et le Clergyman?

This is a project from the mid-1920s, at the time when Artaud was in tension with the Surrealist movement, partly over his career as a cinema actor, which the Surrealists disapproved of — he was in numerous celebrated French films of the period, such as Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc and Lang’s Liliom — before deciding he was definitively finished with film in the early 1930s. Artaud wrote many film scenarios, which he intended to direct himself, though he could never raise the money; however, one of them was filmed, by the filmmaker Germaine Dulac — a film which Artaud, at least initially, detested, and whose premiere led to a riot in which the Surrealists supported him, despite their other disagreements. Buñuel, the director most closely associated with Surrealist film, saw Dulac’s film at the time when he was preparing his collaboration with Dalí, Un Chien Andalou. So, first of all, in writing his scenario, Artaud intended to incite enough interest to raise the money to make a film. But he also had an intricate theory of cinema in which the film image (which would remain silent — Artaud opposed the introduction of sound to cinema at that time) would have an engulfing and transformational impact on his spectators’ perception, and lead them to adopt a more ‘active’ position in reaction to the images they were in contact with. Artaud saw that reaction as a corporeal one.

What was it like to meet Gaston Ferdière in the flesh? What are your own opinions on him and his treatment of Artaud?

Gaston Ferdière was the director of the asylum of Rodez, where Artaud spent the years 1943-46 (he had previously been in other asylums, since 1937), and he made the decision to try a treatment of electroshock therapy on Artaud, though he didn’t apply the treatments himself and delegated them to one of his assistants. At that time, electroshock therapy was new and had an aura of innovation, and Ferdière was a young doctor who wanted to experiment. Artaud experienced the treatment (over fifty sessions in all) as agonizingly painful, and as triggering severe memory losses. Many of his final writings (in the years 1946-48, after his release from Rodez and return from Paris) are outcries against his treatment at Rodez.

I met Ferdière in 1985, when he was nearly eighty years old, and he was a poignant, isolated, maudlin figure by that time — though still combatively certain he had applied the right treatment on Artaud, and still practicing electroshock therapy even then, on children, at a private clinic in Aubervilliers, in the northern suburbs of Paris. My feelings were divided between having the chance to talk at length with him, over the years until his death in 1990, since he had had a unique life-experience and was a fascinating character in his own right. (He had been a Surrealist poet himself in the early 1930s, and his own obsessions, at the time I knew him, were with pornography, drugs and bouffant hairstyles). Everyone who knew Artaud well has now died, so, whatever merits or otherwise of my books on him, at least they draw on a primary contact with people like Ferdière. But I side with Artaud on the question of electroshock.