Captive Feast (Mario Ruspoli, 1962).
In the final shot of Mario Ruspoli’s short documentary Captive Feast (La fête prisonnière) (1962), we find a cameraman attempting a tracking shot of two doctors walking and talking on the grounds of a psychiatric hospital. While they walk out of the frame, the cameraman turns to advance toward Ruspoli’s own camera. All the while, a voice-over mulls over what madness means: “Only among others can we be human; others we find, appreciate, lose, and rediscover . . . ”
Captive Feast takes place at Saint-Alban, a former fortress turned experimental hospital in southern France. The film concerns a summer party thrown by the asylum’s patients, which was attended by both hospital residents and people from the surrounding village. In Ruspoli’s filmmaking, a major influence on Jean Rouch and the direct cinema movement, social and political realities are mutually constructed. Captive Feast is paradigmatic of this commitment: is the cameraman a resident of the hospital practicing filmmaking—a self-reflexive gesture akin to Renaud Victor's Ce gamin, là (1976), another film from this period, in which an autistic child is filmed playing and interfering with the sound equipment that records her—or is this a deliberate filming of the filming of Captive Feast? The ambiguity unsettles the fixed and recognizable binary of so-called normality and pathologized madness, revealing a continuum. The doctors at Saint-Alban did not see patients as objects to be diagnosed nor pathologized; fittingly, the images of the film are mutually created, which refuses to position patients as only objects of documentation.
Ruspoli’s short is one of three films made in collaboration with radical Catalan psychiatrist Francesc (or François) Tosquelles. Tosquelles is the subject of an exhibition at the American Folk Art Museum in New York, Francesc Tosquelles: Avant-Garde Psychiatry and the Birth of Art Brut, which featured parallel film programs at the Museum of the Moving Image and Anthology Film Archives. Both exhibition and screening programs map out the various figures associated with postwar French radical psychiatry, otherwise known as institutional psychotherapy, with Tosquelles as the organizing node. The psychiatrist was a militant anarchist, involved in working-class movements against fascism throughout his life.
A Look at Madness (Mario Ruspoli, 1962).
During the Spanish Civil War, Tosquelles was adamant that non-professionals, or amateurs, take care of the so-called mad or war-traumatized. His care team at the front included artists, lawyers, and, most radically, sex workers. In Tosquelles’s vision, these non-professional psychiatrists would be less beholden to stigmas surrounding madness—unlike traditional doctors. Tosquelles insisted that traumatized soldiers were reciprocally rendering services to their would-be caregivers; in his view, the rigid line between cared-for and caregivers was far more porous. His radical methodology upended traditional psychiatric relationships and concentrations of power, reflective of the surrounding world, which made impossible effective care for those deemed absolutely other. For the Catalan psychiatrist, it was important to understand the other particularly through the lens of translation. As a therapeutic strategy, he spoke French with a Catalan accent and his native Catalan with a French accent to maintain the appearance of being foreign. Attempting to understand, rather than pathologizing, the other would later be articulated as a methodology of curing not the patients but the hospital itself. For instance, in exile from Franco’s Spain, Tosquelles set up a psychiatric care barrack at the Septfonds refugee camp in France, which became the means by which people could escape the camp.
Tosquelles is said to have crossed the Pyrenees on foot, with Jacques Lacan’s thesis in hand, to arrive at Saint-Alban, where there already existed a rich history of radical psychiatric practices, mostly facilitated by women, including continuing the tradition of nuns as nurses; the removal of straitjackets and other constraints; the collective production of a newspaper; the inclusion or allowance of beauty, hygienic, and personal items (such as mirrors, jewelry, and personal sinks); and circumventing the Vichy regime’s so-called “soft extermination” famine by foraging and exchanging on the black market. The subsequent historicizing of institutional psychotherapy, however, erases these foundational contributions by the women of Saint-Alban, such as former director Agnes Masson and psychiatrist Germaine Balvet, among many others, as noted by scholar Joana Masó.1 The practice was only named and defined as such in the mid-twentieth century, when Tosquelles arrived at the hospital.
Despite congruent political sentiments, the contemporaneous anti-psychiatry movement was, in many ways, oppositional to institutional psychotherapy, which it saw as reformist. For Tosquelles, anti-psychiatry’s calls for total deinstitutionalization were nothing but pure utopian thinking. He challenged the idea that freedom could be found in the world outside of the hospital, an institution he conceived to be constantly transforming into a refuge from the world's ills. Tosquelles continued to staff nonprofessionals among his hospital care team, and held great regard for their experiences and sentiments concerning treatment. Alongside regular group meetings with the entire staff and residents of the hospital, Tosquelles also established several practical workshops in the hospital. The placard newspaper produced under the previous director, Paul Balvet, evolved into two newspapers under Tosquelles: the first was circulated internally, and the second was intended for readers outside of the hospital. In this way, Tosquelles helped establish a community within the hospital among patients, care staff, and others as well as social relations in the surrounding villages. Many of these social activities and productions, from the newspapers to collective meetings and artmaking, were filmed in Ruspoli’s A Look at Madness (Regards sur la folie) (1962).
A Look at Madness (Mario Ruspoli, 1962).
Institutional psychotherapy was largely informed by a Marxian and Freudian framework and contextualized through exile, the Spanish Civil War, and organized resistance against the Nazi and Vichy regimes’ eugenics practices. Saint-Alban was active in Resistance networks and offered political refuge for many refugees, resistance fighters and other political dissidents. Patients were well aware the hospital was hiding Resistance fighters and aiding their efforts. Institutional psychotherapy, as Félix Guattari has noted, was a “constant activity of calling things into question”2 (or a “permanent revolution”3) that, through a collective responsibility, “endeavored to produce a new type of subjectivity.”4 Other practitioners of radical psychiatry included decolonial revolutionary Frantz Fanon, whose clinical work is the subject of one film in MoMI’s screening program, True Chronicles of the Blida Joinville Psychiatric Hospital in the Last Century, when Dr. Frantz Fanon Was Head of the Fifth Ward between 1953 and 1956 (2024). His practices at the Algerian institution included removing restraints (allegedly, Fanon went through the hospital undoing straitjackets on his first day), establishing more culturally relevant programs for the Muslim men’s ward, and advocating for daytime hospitalization for patients instead of permanent, overnight residences. Fanon’s clinical practice and militant revolutionary practice were co-constitutive in the sense that both had as their objective a transformation toward a new and liberated form of being. Madness, Fanon related on many occasions, was a pathology of freedom, whereas Tosquelles maintained a far more explicitly porous relationship between madness and freedom.
Alongside Fanon, other major figures who spent time at Saint-Alban were Jean Oury and Felix Guattari. The former would go on to found La Borde clinic, where the latter also practiced, which Tosquelles saw as the most effective iteration, or translation, of Saint-Alban’s methodology. Tosquelles crossed paths with pedagogue and writer Fernand Deligny during a period in which Deligny was experimenting with a nomadic para-institutional collective of youth called La Grande Cordée. The collective roamed throughout France and aimed to break away from cycles of institutionalization (many of the youth would have been sent to prison or psychiatric hospitals otherwise). Like Tosquelles, Deligny was deeply invested in filmmaking, the asylum as refuge, and the image. Although he was briefly active at La Borde, Deligny was not formally associated with institutional psychotherapy and remains an outsider figure. Deligny had been obliged to stay at La Borde for a time due to the material precarity of La Grande Cordée, though he was radically opposed to the hospital’s fixation on psychoanalysis (despite his proximity to late Lacanian thought) and talking (he refused to participate in the regular group meetings). Supposedly, it was only in Deligny’s painting and woodworking workshop at La Borde where patients were not forced to talk.5
Deligny eventually left La Borde and set up an informal care network6 in the Cévennes mountains of southern France. Here, he worked with largely nonverbal autistic children alongside a team of nonprofessionals, who were members of the working-class or artisans, which he called “close presences.” Renaud Victor’s Ce gamin, là was completed after the director spent three years living with the commune (a result of the conditions set by Deligny). The film was collectively authored, avoiding a single subject or object, and its sequences are reliant on gestures and poetic abstractions. Given Deligny’s radical break from Tosquelles’s insistence on the institution, it is in filming that we can locate the shared aspects of Deligny’s and Tosquelles’s praxis and thought. The image offers another mode of language and circulation for Deligny; for Tosquelles, it is a pedagogical and social tool. Both practitioners’ insistence on spontaneity and chance is folded into the practice of film itself via experimental approaches. As Deligny says in Ce gamin, là, “Language disappeared as one may say of the sun.”
Strangers of the Earth (Mario Ruspoli, 1961).
Visitors to Saint-Alban included Jean Dubuffet, a key figure in the American Folk Art Museum exhibition. Tosquelles took issue with Dubuffet’s conception of art brut, which conceptualized the art of the patients as “raw,” outside of culture. For Tosquelles, the work made by patients was crucially contextualized by its broader circulation. The art produced by patients (some of whom, such as Auguste Forestier, achieved a degree of fame for their works’ inclusion in Dubuffet’s collection) were not solely exhibitionist; they were part of an exchange with those outside of the hospital. Forestier would display his works upon the walls bordering the hospital, where the farmers of Lozère would pass through and buy one for a pack of cigarettes or a handful of coins. We see these same farmers participating in the summer ball in Ruspoli’s Captive Feast, and they take center stage in Strangers of the Earth (1961).
Ruspoli’s turning of the camera onto the viewers in Captive Feast, a nod to the mutual construction of so-called madness and its counterpart, so-called normality, is the defining feature of another film in the exhibition’s parallel series: artist Mireia Sallarès’s Potential History of Francesc Tosquelles, Catalonia and Fear (2021), cowritten with Joana Masó. The film very explicitly engages with Tosquelles’s conception of the camera as a crucial pedagogical tool, visiting sites that are significant to Tosquelles’s legacy, while also folding in archival footage of numerous people associated with Saint-Alban, as well as filmed images of archival objects. Sex workers and nuns are prompted to gauge their own responses to Tosquelles’s radically unconventional colleagues, especially in light of their omission from historical accounts. These contemporary responses do not idealize Tosquelles, but instead offer historical political context, such as the unionization of sex workers at brothels during the Spanish Civil War. The film’s approach, which includes conventional documentary aesthetics such as talking heads and archival object photography, both satirizes the legitimized, official histories and takes seriously the violent gaps in the archives left by the dictates of narrative and narrator, state and regime.
Sallarès narrates: “Potential history must be committed to the naked circulation of words.” And it is. Hers is a film that asks much of its viewers in its discourse-heavy approach, with interviews, conversations, and narration running throughout. Borrowed from visual culture and media theorist Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, the term “potential history” signifies an intervention on the supposed “natural” order of official historical accounts. Potential histories might speculate on unrealized or unrecorded events, which also renders the past as unending, continually in progress. Sallarès’s film turns the camera discursively onto the viewers by collapsing the role of spectator and narrator.
Potential History of Francesc Tosquelles, Catalonia and Fear (Mireia Sallarès, 2021).
Tosquelles made films himself. Le Clos du Nid (1959), filmed with Maurice Lambilliotte, documents the autistic children he worked with near Saint-Alban. He also made a number of Super 8 films with his wife and collaborator, Elena, which, even more so than his collaborations with Ruspoli, served to demonstrate “the social life of the hospital,”7 including costumed bullfights, dances, and games that aim to hit with a ball the papier-mâché face of Tosquelles with cigar in mouth. The camera is wielded as if by another partygoer at the asylum’s summer ball, in the middle of it all, without definite position or place. Any coherent image of the “mad” patient is utterly destroyed: the viewer sees feet dancing, spectacular costumed bodies, and the backs of heads. The struggle to discern pathology, to establish boundaries, is futile. But to recognize this struggle is not necessarily to have attained a liberated subjectivity—as if raising consciousness is enough for emancipation (breaking through walls beyond the hospital, that is). As Tosquelles prophesizes in François Tosquelles: A Politics of Madness (1989), an interview shot by François Pain, Danielle Sivadon, and Jean Claude-Pollack which is excerpted to conclude Sallarès’s Potential History, “I would imagine that the proletariat could stay with the unconscious, and not with raising consciousness.”
In Ruspoli’s film, the camera weaves in and out of conversations, where a man, who may or may not be a patient at the hospital, states to the group he sits with, “It’s a prison party since it’s taking place in a prison.” Neither the films, the patients, nor Tosquelles romanticize Saint-Alban. It is precarious. The revolutionary asylum is never attained, but the struggle continues.
- Joana Masó, “About the Collective with Women,” Cahiers du Genre 73, no. 2 (July 2022): 233–262. An English translation by the author and Jesse Newberg is forthcoming in Parapraxis (August 2024) under the title “Women of the Collective: Care and Politics around Saint-Alban Psychiatric Hospital: 1930–1960.” ↩
- Félix Guattari. Chaosophy. (Los Angeles: Semiotexte, 1995), 191. ↩
- Ibid., 194. ↩
- Ibid., 191-192. ↩
- François Dosse. Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari: Intersecting Lives. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010)
- 72;. Sandra Alvarez de Toledo. “Pédagogie poétique de Fernand Deligny,” Communications, no. 71 (2001): 270. ↩
- Fernand Deligny, Oeuvres, ed. Sandra Alvarez de Toledo (Paris: L’Arachnéen, 2007), 839. ↩
- François Tosquelles. Soigner les institutions. Ed. Joana Maso. (Paris: L’Arachnéen, 2021), 228. ↩