Marat/Sade
by Peter Brook
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Product details
Actor: Clifford Rose, Glenda Jackson, Ian Richardson, Michael Williams, Patrick MageeDirector: Peter Brook
Cinematographer: David Watkin
Editor: Tom Priestley
Producer: Michael Birkett
Writer: Adrian Mitchell
Writer: Geoffrey Skelton
Writer: Peter Weiss
Edition: VHS Tape
Audio: English (Original Language), Analog
Format: Color, NTSC
Running Time: 116 minutes
Release Date: 1998-11-11
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Publisher: Water Bearer Films
Studio: Water Bearer Films
VHS Movie Reviews of Marat/Sade
Movie Review: Brilliant/Perfect
Summary: 5 Stars
You ever watch a movie that just sends chills up and down your body from beginning to end? You ever watch a movie that cements itself in your subconscious and pulverizes you with its magnetism over and over, until you just cannot take it any more? You ever watch a movie that is so rich and so disturbingly authentic that you feel compelled to laud it above all others?
This is that movie.
From the opening credits until the closing ones, `Marat/Sade' is one of the most engaging and utterly phenomenal pieces of art I have ever witnessed. It is mind shattering in its delivery, coupling some of the most intriguing and utterly brilliant performances with one of the most compelling concepts ever put to film. This is a masterclass film, one that gets everything (and I mean EVERYTHING) right.
The film tells of the Marquis de Sade, a man imprisoned at Charenton Asylum in 1808. He writes and directs a play starring his fellow inmates, a play that tells of the French Revolution, and he puts it on for the asylum director Coulmier and his family. The film, taking place within the small confines of a prison cell and never leaving that one particular room, is so visually expansive that it is beyond me how director Peter Brook was able to accomplish this. The film feels so much bigger than it is. It's hard to really explain well how this movie works, but just know that despite the fact that it never leaves the one room it takes you to places much further than the confines of a cell would suggest.
The film is based on the stage play by Peter Weiss and is shot much like a theatrical production, but it never feels stiff as some `stage to screen' films can feel. This film moves with such fluidity, it's insanely impressive.
Brook's decision to focus quite frequently on facial expressions of the cast was a brilliant way of making the film feel much more intimate than a mere stage production. What is so important about this decision was that it allows the audience to see the insanity that lurks behind the inmates eyes, because the real story being told is not that of the play being put on but that of the character development of these lost souls, each of them playing their part in this intense and very controversial production. These inmates become these characters and they absorb their weaknesses and their strengths and they embellish them with reckless abandon. Watching their own humanity fester behind their sockets is chilling to say the least.
There are two performers here that are beyond mesmerizing and that truly deserve all our recognition; and they are Glenda Jackson and Patrick Magee. Patrick Magee delivers such a powerful and moving performance as the Marquis de Sade, his control so consistent and absorbing. He takes a much different approach to the character than the one presented by Geoffrey Rush in `Quills', both spectacular but Magee is leagues better. There are scenes where the camera is focused on his face and he is delivering a lengthy monologue that just sinks right into our flesh and becomes a part of us. He is matched every step of the way by Glenda Jackson, who embodies Charlotte Corday from head to toe. Just watch the way she connects to the dagger as if it were her long lost friend. The scene is so symbolic of the actual revolt that is dominating the minds of the inmates as the carry on this play.
And then there is that hair-whipping scene between Sade and Corday that just blew my mind.
This is not a film for everyone, for the concept and delivery is far from commercial, and so if you are not a fan of the `arthouse' type films then this is one you may not want to entertain yourself with; but if you do enjoy a film rich with substance, some of which you may have to really uncover personally, then this is a film for you and one I urge you to find and watch. The performances, the direction, the script and lighting; the editing and costumes and makeup and just everything are utter perfection. There is not one sour note here, honestly.
Movie Review: WHY -for Pete's sakes- IS THIS NOR AVAILABLE ON A DVD FOR REGION 2 ???????
Summary: 5 Stars
An excellent movie, which is no more or less than stunning, stark and bleak filmed version of Peter Weiss' haunting, diturbing and magnificent play. It is very well cast, with the same actors who first perfromed the play in London under Peter Brook's direction.
Great perfomances all round by some very great actors, some of whom are well known, some of whom are not.
Among the well known names: Glenda Jackson MP, who is a memorabla Corday, although one bitten by a Tse-Tse fly, the late Ian Richardson, yes the snide and sneaky Francis Urquhart, who is a brooding and glowering Marat, he even looks like the real Jean-Paul Marat and Richardson is spot on as Marat, who was a raving idealist, his body and mind hollowed out by illness and paranoia, excactly as depicted in the play.
Among the not so well-known: Freddie Jones, good as ever, as one of the four man musical troupe, and Patrick Magee as the marquis de Sade.
Patrick Magee should of course not be confused with the debonnaire, brolly-wielding John Steed, Patrick MacNee, who later often co-starred in the vomitingly godawful "Murder She ****ing Wrote", no that 's a different bloke altogether. Magee was also in "Clockwork Organge" and in lots of other proper artie movies, not al that camp telly crap which John Steed was in.
My only trouble with this is: why can't we get this on DVD in Europe?
I've been to the play several times, and have several times seen the movie in retro-season in my friendly neighbourhood indie cinema, but I want a copy of me own!!! Please bring it out on DVD for region 2 as well, amazon!
Movie Review: The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction
Summary: 5 Stars
This is an amazing film along with being an amazing play. Peter Brook, who is one of the world's most renowned theater directors, has made an excellent adaptation of The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade (the gloriously long official title). I saw this film in college, and love the intensity of the whole thing. Now that I am older and have read de Sade and a touch of Marat (which I didn't read in college, imagine that), things actually make more sense now, and the film/play resonates more deeply. Patrick Magee and Ian Richardson are phenomenal in this film, and Brook's direction manages somehow to incorporate the best of the film aesthetic and theater aesthetic. It is an amazingly intense experience, one that will sear itself in your memory.
A note on the transfer. The current edition is by MGM/UA, and while it isn't great (the film elements are a little worn out), it is letterboxed and the audio is decent. There was a haphazard, sloppy DVD put out by Image in the early days of DVD. That version was pan and scan and looked wretched. The Image DVD is thankfully out of print. So go ahead and partake of the MGM/UA DVD of Marat/Sade.
Movie Review: Great for Theatre Students
Summary: 4 Stars
I have to say I enjoyed this one more when I was a theatre student and obsessed with theatre of the absurd. Its still a fun one, but not for just anybody....Movie Review: Brillaint and intense
Summary: 5 Stars
Marat / Sade is an incredible theatrical production that was captured well in this film. Complaints that has been made about the sound quality of the DVD though is well founded but unfortunately this was a problem with the movie when it first appeared in theatres.
The movie takes place on a stage behind bars in asylum of Charenton. Behind the bars as well sit confident arrogant and ignorant asylum's director and his family. Performed is a play written and directed by the Marquis de Sade (Patrick Magee).
In point of fact plays written by de Sade and performed by the inmates of Charenton actually took place. But Peter Brooks takes things to another level as he through the character of Sade poses many questions to the viewer while at the same time shocking the sense. Cleverly the actors are given parts that have something in common with their mental disorder.
This is a musical but probably like no other musical you have ever seen. It is somewhat like some of the Mystery plays of the Middle Ages. There are plays with in plays, clever references made and word play, as like are found in the Mystery plays, to and regarding the actors themselves and the surroundings where they are performing.
The play is about the death of Marat but it is within it is a larger play about the French Revolution. But the play is more than a history lesson. All through it the character playing Marat sits in a bathtub as Sade taunts him. Much of his taunts take the form of long philosophical soliloquies belittling Marat, the Revolution and society in general. Through out the play the inmates fall in and out of character to the symptoms of their various mental illnesses.
The songs are incredibly well integrated into the play and are quite witty and enjoyable -some of them almost joyous.
Comically the director of the asylum, a condescending buffoon, interrupts the play time and again when statements are made that go against the current ideology.
As the play about a revolution concludes a real revolution starts behind the bars and the film ends in chaos.
The final scene is a pan back showing the audience at the bars in which the stage is enclosed. Are they clamoring to get in? Do they too want to be inmates? Do they want to become part of the free for all?
Peter Brooks offers up a beautiful but disturbing movie and vision of the world.
Summary of Marat/Sade
In 1964, German playwright Peter Weiss wowed the international theater scene with his Berlin production of The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade. An instant sensation, the play caught the attention of iconic theater director Peter Brook, whose own stage production captivated audiences in New York the next year. Brook then filmed his production in 1966, and the resulting movie, Marat/Sade, stands as one of the best-loved screen adaptations of a play, by both critics and theater fans alike. (The 1996 film Quills is a good example of the story's lasting resonance.) As can be surmised by the play's original title, the action focuses on the Marquis de Sade (Patrick Magee) circa 1808, who, while imprisoned at Charenton Asylum, writes and directs a play starring his fellow inmates. Dramatizing the final hours of French revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat (Ian Richardson) before he was killed by Charlotte Corday (Glenda Jackson, in one of the defining moments of her career), de Sade offers the play as an entertaining whim for the tiny audience of asylum director Coulmier (Clifford Rose) and his family. Utilizing the "theatre of cruelty" theory of avant-garde pioneer Antonin Artaud--once an asylum inmate himself--Brook's presentation of Marat/Sade confronts with jagged language, sounds and visuals, in an attempt to shock the movie audience into dissatisfaction and action against the status quo, mirroring the way de Sade's play within the film stirs the asylum inmates to high dudgeon and revolution. --Heather CampbellGeneral Video
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