The (Un)Reason for Cacatastrophe
	Randomness is a concept not usually associated with Samuel Beckett. In such lean works as Come and Go and What Where, one senses an editing process so rigorous that should any words be further omitted, the meaning of the play would collapse. For such verbose works as Not I and Krapp's Last Tape, the actor feels compelled to obey every pause and punctuation, succumbing to the text as a rule for the performance. In such formally strict works as That Time, one finds the following stringent stage direction: "Silence 10 seconds. Breath audible. After 3 seconds eyes open. After 5 seconds smile, toothless for preference. Hold 5 seconds till fade out and curtain." Everything about Beckett's writing is deliberate. On the other hand, the Dadaists thrived on randomness. Sophie Taeuber-Arp and Hans Arp created papiers collés by tearing up coloured paper and letting them fall haphazardly, fixing them in whatever configuration they landed. Marcel Duchamp abandoned The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even after eight years of work, declaring it finished only after an accident shattered its glass panes. And if any existing object could be considered a ready-made, then there is no decision-making on the artist's part; anything and everything is art. But as much as Beckett's deliberateness and the Dadaists' randomness seem irreconcilable, they are kindred in spirit. War prompted a reaction from both Beckett and his fellow Absurdists and the Dadaists alike; political subversion is laced throughout the artists' works from both movements. If nihilism is the Dadaist objective, then existentialism is the Absurdist obsession. It is no coincidence that the Absurdists, Dadaists, and Surrealists were inspired by Alfred Jarry, whose Ubu Roi is laden with death and nonsense. The eponymous anti-hero of Jarry's play has a penchant for cursing, opening the play with "Shit!". Other highlights of his vernacular include "buggerapschitt" and "pschittahook". Jarry's irreverance toward proper language is shared by Dada, whose very name could mean "father", a hobby-horse, or nothing at all. The repetitive sounds of gibberish are echoed in Cacatastrophe, whose title nods to both Ubu and Dada: "caca" and "shit". Cacatastrophe is a shitty catastrophe. Cacatastrophe fuses Absurdist and Dadaist sensibilities. The core of the film is Beckett's Catastrophe, a play written in 1982 and dedicated to Vaclav Havel, the Czech playwright, politician, and dissident. Havel was imprisoned during the writing of Catastrophe, and oppression is the dominant theme of the play. But while the actions of Catastrophe can be overtly political, the dialogue is subtle and abstract. The Director and female Assistant speak of the Protagonist's appearance as if he were a model, tossing mundane phrases like, "Why the gown?" and "The hands, how are the hands?" The characters in the play make no reference to politics or current events. Cacatastrophe is more explicit with its politics. The film was made in February - April, 2006, certainly during a time of war and, more specifically, upon an upheaval in Canadian government: the election of the Conservatives. Cacatastrophe is not sly in its reaction to the event, casting the fur-clad Director as a Fascist, the female Assistant as a put-upon peon from middle-management, and the Protagonist as a homosexual shopkeeper who supports public healthcare. In keeping with the Absurdist passion for bizarre imagery -- a woman buried to her neck in sand, people transforming into rhinoceroses -- Cacatastrophe has the Protagonist being painted white. In Catastrophe, the Assistant simply makes a note to "whiten cranium"; in the play, the characters discuss, whereas in the film, the characters do. The differences between Catastrophe and Cacatastrophe continue, particularly with the Dada-inspired audio (and lack thereof). The word bubbles in Cacatastrophe do not match the movement of the actors' mouths; what the actors are saying (mouths) is not what the characters mean (word bubbles). The discrepancy draws attention to the arbitrariness of language. By forcing the spectator to read the dialogue in unconventional word bubbles rather than conventional subtitles, Cacatastrophe speaks more dynamically, self-consciously varying its methods of communication. Word bubbles are more urgent than subtitles, and they reflect the playful mischief of Dada. What the actors are actually saying might win the approval of Tristan Tzara: "Blah". Every word spoken by the actors during filming was "blah". The fact that Cacatastrophe shuns synchronised dialogue is an act of rebellion. Current-day spectators are accustomed to "talkies", so any film that requires reading will alienate them (aside from foreign films being subtitled, which is a practical convention rather than artistic). Like Dada and Absurdism, Cacatastrophe draws attention to its form and artifice. In fact, due to its overt politics, Cacatastrophe could be considered Brechtian, but that is a separate thesis altogether. The audio of Cacatastrophe channels the spirit of Dada in its randomness. The narrator is reading arbitrarily from Catastrophe, speaking bits of dialogue and stage direction haphazardly as her eyes dart around the page. The guitar is plucked and struck without structure, played and recorded without regard for the picture. The rules for lining up audio to picture were purely formal: No narration over word bubbles, compose the audio according to sound and not content. The audio thus references Beckett, whose numerous monologues are stream-of-conscious and arguably unintelligible. When Lucky spews his diatribe in Waiting for Godot, when the Mouth rattles off in Not I, the shape, cadence, and rhythm of their words are more expressive and meaningful than the content. But again, their words are not random, as Beckett would not allow such chance. Conversely, the narration of Cacatastrophe is guided by chance, even if its origins are in the unrelentingly orchestrated text of the play. The film appropriates the play with serendipity as its axiom. Because the narration and guitar were created without subjugation to the picture, the sounds compete with the images. Both elements are full and expressive on their own; the audio can exist as its own artistic entity, and the picture remains effective even when silent. The images are playful and cheeky while the audio is haunting and dark. One could say the elements clash, but a more judicious argument would say the sounds and images counterpoint. Juxtaposing conflicting pieces engages the spectator's intellect, a practise not unknown to the Absurdists, Dadaists, and montage theorists. In fact, the Absurdists, Dadaists, and Surrealists routinely celebrated incongruency, with non-sequiturs running rampant in Ionesco's The Bald Soprano, with Magritte proclaiming, "Ceci n'est pas une pipe." The melancholy audio of Cacatastrophe challenges the whimsical images by imparting a sense of nihilism and pessimism. Like Lucky being abused as a slave in Godot, like Duchamp's urinal, Cacatastrophe brings humour to the grotesque. In periods of war and Conservative government, perhaps the most potent criticism is to make fun. -- Norman Lup-Man Yeung April, 2006
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