Cover to Cover with Jack Foley, for July 11, 2012 - 3:00pm
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To End God’s Judgment by Antonin Artaud. Artaud’s radio play was to have been broadcast on February 2, 1948 at 10:45 p.m. in the series, “The Voices of the Poets.” On February 1, 1948, the day before the poem was scheduled to be broadcast, Vladimir Porché, director of the French Radio Service, stopped the broadcast. Despite protests, Porché maintained the ban. In 1965, the San Francisco Actor’s Workshop under the direction of Ken Margolis recorded Victor Corti’s translation of Artaud’s play for broadcast on KPFA, but the show was not aired until 1967. Introduced by Erik Bauersfeld, the production was rebroadcast in 1975. Today’s show is a presentation of the first half of the Actor’s Workshop production. The play is not only a fierce attack on Christianity but an attack on the very people who had recently “liberated” Paris: the Americans: “For the Americans are finding they are more and / more short of hands and children, that is, not workers / but SOLDIERS, and they want to make and produce soldiers / at any price and by any means / with a view to all the planetary wars / which might eventually take place and which would be / intended to establish, / by the crushing virtues of force, / the superiority of American products and the results of / American labor in all fields of activity / and the ultimate dynamism of force.” Michael McClure remarked that Artaud’s play was “like the Sermon on the Mount.” Part One.
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Comments
Thank you so much for re-broadcasting this radio play.
I have two questions I would like answered:
(1) was the play first broadcast in France in the late 60s or in the late 70s? (French wiki (in a link) says the former, English wiki says the latter, but neither makes a citation.)
(2) would you please explain the surprising absence in your above informative narrative, why it took two years, 1965 to 1967, for KPFA to broadcast the recording it had made? Was it self-censorship, or a difficulty in getting permission from Artaud's copyright holder, or something else?
Thanks again, and I hope you can answer these queries.