Le Grand Guignol's topics - tribe.net

Stage Terror in a Time of Terrorism

2007-06-26T23:31:46Z

Is it right to create ultra-violent entertainment in times such as we are living? What does it do for us? Does it serve a greater good in terms of theater? Is it irresponsible? Any musings or thoughts on my crisis of consciousness would be appreciated.

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Quick introduction...

2007-06-01T01:37:23Z

Hiya, just wanted to introduce myself and whatnot...the name's DeVille, and i'm a performance artist based in charlotte, nc, and specialize in original grand guignol repetoir with undertones of weimar era cabaret. I've been obsessed with La Theatre du Grand Guignol ever since i was a little kid...hell, i even took french in school just so i could read the plays. Andre de Lorde is a personal hero of mine, as he essentially was the horror master of his day (in the world of theater, that is)...well, just wanted to say hello and such (i'm totally new to the tribe thing)...

Adieu!

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UK's Guignol Theater

2005-07-12T05:53:24Z

Curtains soon close on 'Guignol'
By Hillary Canada
Published: Friday, April 23, 2004

http://www.kykernel.com/media/paper305/news/2004/04/23/Arts/Curtains.Soon.Close.On.guignol-687270.shtml

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(Book) Grand-Guignol: The French Theatre of Horror (Exeter Performance Studies)

2005-07-10T22:17:17Z

(Book) Grand-Guignol: The French Theatre of Horror (Exeter Performance Studies)
by Richard J. Hand

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/085989696X/103-2672326-2401465?v=glance

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Aspects of Theory and Practice (2000)

2005-07-09T15:37:00Z

Aspects of Theory and Practice (2000)
(from "THEATRE RESEARCH INTERNATIONAL")

http://www.grandguignol.com/tri_1.htm

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(ARTICLE) THE GORE AND GLORY OF THE GRAND GUIGNOL

2005-07-04T15:53:37Z

From CALLBOARD Magazine - April, 1996

THE GORE AND GLORY OF THE GRAND GUIGNOL
By Russell Blackwood

A Chinese torture master rips a strip of flesh from his victims naked back. A lunatic gouges out a young woman's eye with a knitting needle. A French soldier's hands are chopped off by the enemy. What's more, all these atrocities and more have been witnessed by thousands of onlookers during a 60 year rein of terror that shocked and stunned Paris. Thankfully, no one got hurt. This murder, mayhem, and mutilation was staged for the enjoyment of ticket buyers at Theatre du Grand Guignol. Indeed, the victims and villains in these gruesome crimes are actors, playwrights, and prop masters who created plays so horrific that a doctor was stationed in the lobby to revive fainting spectators.

Established in 1897, the Grand Guignol quickly gained a reputation for staging one-acts. By far the most notorious was their repertoire of horror plays. The theatre's fame was so great that for many years Parisian guidebooks hailed it among the city's most popular attractions rivaled only by Maxim's, the Louvre, the Eiffel Tower, and legalized brothels. History has remembered this fact and the phrase "Grand Guignol" has become synonymous with over the top bloodletting and gore.

Mel Gordon, currently a theatre Professor at U.C. Berkeley, is one of America's foremost authorities on the Grand Guignol. His book The Grand Guignol -- Theatre of Fear and Terror (Da Capo Press, 1997), chronicles the history, repertoire, and special effects of this unique theatre. Mel has let me in on some of the secrets that artists employed to induce sheer terror in an audience.

The stage trickery of the Grand Guignol was a closely guarded secret. Some of the effects were even patented. Mel says "The secrecy probably had more to with concealing their simplicity of design than a desire to prevent other theatres from using them." Old publicity photos picture oddly proportioned daggers and wounds that are no more than a streak of blood across an actress' neck. Hardly the kind of effects that could frighten an audience. He reminds me that "the audience wanted to believe in what they were seeing, the acting was intense, and there was 20 to 40 minutes of suspense and dread leading up to the bloodletting."

The theatre itself is eerie and foreboding. Built as a convent in 1786, the interior is decorated with grinning cherubs carved into the beams of the vaulted ceiling. The front doors are solid oak and cut with a pseudo-gothic pattern. The building served as a blacksmith's shop, a fanatical preacher's pulpit, and an artist's studio before being converted to a 285 seat theatre complete with a balcony. The twenty-by-twenty foot stage was so close to the audience that one critic joked that you could shake hands with an actor during the show without leaving your front row pew. There's even a confessional booth from which some say you could hear the prayers of nuns as grizzly events were enacted on stage. Sets were often dimly lit with faint hints of red and green light around the proscenium. An orchestration of live sound effects, painstakingly rehearsed for each play, added to the gloom and impending horror.

Blood flowed like water at the Grand Guignol. A heated mixture, half carmine and half glycerin, is the base of the blood recipe. It drips and splatters like fresh blood, but will coagulate after just a few minutes to form scabs. Mel says that in later years, as money got tight at the theatre "Large body wounds were limited to women (smaller costumes to clean) and head wounds for men (less hair to clean)." On the subject of weapons he says "Daggers with retractable blades spurted blood when the blood-filled handles were squeezed." A turkey baster, rubber ball, or an eye dropper could provide a good base for building a blood squirting knife. A knife can also penetrate an arm or leg. Not unlike the old arrow through the head gag, a prop knife can be separated from it's handle by a curved metal clasp that can then be fitted around an actors limb.

Mel has several suggestions on how to gouge out an eye. A female victim can be fitted with a plaster or latex quarter-mask (holding a sheep iris, lactose powder, and blood capsule) which is partly concealed by her hair hanging over that side of her face. The sheep's eye can be popped out of the mask with a knitting needle or even a bare hand. He grins and says "If it's a Veronica Lake hair style and the sheep iris matches her real eye it's a beautiful effect."

Another eye-popping effect is to scoop it out with a spoon. A sheep's eye can be hidden in the hollowed out handle or in a tight fitting sleeve on the handle of the spoon. The actor doing the scooping conceals it in his grasping fist and squeezes the eyeball out of the handle and into the bowl of the spoon. Mel says "Using an animal eye works best because it bounces a bit if it hits the floor."

One method even produces an eyeball skewered on the end of a jack-knife. The retractable blade of the knife moves into the handle which squirts blood when pressed against the victim's face. Affixed to the end of the handle is a piece of adhesive "skin" (latex or lamb skin) with a slit to allow the blade to move through it. As the handle is pressed against the victims eye the sticky "skin" is pressed to the eyelid leaving a gory empty eye socket. When the knife handle is pulled away the blade is released back into position. The actor with the knife squeezes a air pump in the handle and a rubber eyeball on the end of the knife inflates. The eye appears to be impaled on the tip of the knife. Many magic shops sell an inflatable ball and pump mechanism that could work as a base for this prop.

Cutting off a man's hand is easier than it sounds. Stiffen a glove with glue water so it holds it's shape and paint it like a real hand. The actor wearing the glove should still be able to move his fingers a bit. When the hand is chopped off the "chopper" removes the glove and the "chopee" moves his hand up into his cuff which is reinforced with a cardboard tube and fitted with a blood pack. The stiffened glove should hold it's shape perfectly as the unwilling amputee writhes in pain.

Many plays outside of the repertoire of the Grand Guignol call for realistic scenes of murder and mutilation. Look at Shakespeare, for instance. The secrets of the Grand Guignol coupled with a prop master's own skill and ingenuity can provide an arsenal of horrific tricks and turns. The effects can be so startling that it can surpass what we see in movies. After all, our audience witnesses the crime.

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John Zorn on Guignol

2005-07-04T04:40:22Z

Liner Notes to Naked City's Grand Guignol

Decades before our modern tradition of splatter films, the Grand Guignol served up torture, incest, blood lust, insanity, mutilation and death to generations of fervid spectators. But the Grand Guignol is not simply the theater of horror that shocked Paries for 65 years from 1897 to 1962. It is the celebration of the darker side our existence. It has always been with us. It always will be.

Throughout history artists have been obsessed with humanity's Taboos and Phobias, Aristotle, Aeschylus, Shakespeare, Sade, Goya, Poe, Dali, Hitchcock, Irving Klaw, Bacon, Dan Oniroku, H.G. Lewis, Hermann Nitsch, Carcass. Our fascination with Fear, Terror and Evil, like Death itself, knows no racial cultural or religious barriers. It resides in our collective unconsciousness, binding us together with ropes we try, but are ultimately unable to sever. Only through violent trauma, or the convulsive viscera of artistic vision does it rise to the surface, reminding us that, in truth, it has been there all along.
John Zorn

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Former Tourist Attraction of the French Capital

2005-07-04T04:13:55Z

The following article is from "The Straight Dope" website

http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a4_072.html

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What's the story on the Grand Guignol, the original shock theater?
14-Jan-1994

Dear Cecil:

I found an obscure reference to a place called the Grand Guignol in Paris. It said some pretty twisted stuff happened there for the amusement of others. Do you know anything about it? Was it theatrics or the real McCoy (or should I say McCabre)? How do you pronounce Grand Guignol? --Mike McGary, Dallas

Cecil replies:

Well, we can't have you prowling around Paris looking for the Grand Goog-nole, Mike: you say it Gron Geen-yole. Not that you're going to find it no matter how you say it; the place closed in 1962. Too bad. I bet it would have been a trip.

The Theatre du Grand Guignol, for years one of the leading tourist attractions of the French capital, was the classic shock theatre, specializing in productions designed to horrify and sicken. No show was considered a success unless at least a couple audience members fainted or upchucked on their shoes. In its latter years, what with competition from Hollywood horror films and real life nightmares like Auschwitz, the Grand Guignol became pretty campy. But in its day it produced some truly terrifying theatre that explored, admittedly for low commercial purposes, the dark limits of what could be accomplished on the stage.

In some ways the subject matter of the Grand Guignol wasn't all that different from what you can see today in any number of Friday the 13th-type slasher movies. But there were a couple key differences: this was live, in-your-face and sometimes all-over-your-clothes theatre conducted in a disconcertingly intimate space--the place seated only about 285 and the stage measured just 20 by 20 feet. Equally important, the plays, which were short and usually ran three or more to a bill, partook of the queasily amoral outlook that we are pleased to think of as peculiarly French. The characters typically were brutal louts, hapless victims, or both. The guilty often went unpunished. Lovers and friends routinely betrayed one another. For comic relief the producers might throw in a sex farce featuring the lineup of seedy characters and illicit affairs you'd pretty much expect in the land of the feelthy postcard--a harmless enough business in itself, but in context adding to the air of Parisian sleaze.

The Grand Guignol's main stock in trade was gory special effects (and they were only that; we're not talking snuff theatre here). In description today the effects seem pretty tame, but remember that they were carried off at close range, with no retakes, using stuff that was scrounged mainly from the drugstore and the butcher shop. Eyeball gougings were perennially popular, animal eyes being especially useful for this purpose because they could be relied upon to bounce when hitting the floor. Then you had your disembowelings, your self-mutilations, your throat slashings, your rapes, your acid thrown in the face, your flesh ripped from the bone ... predictable stuff, I suppose. But in the most effective Grand Guignol plays it was coupled with a shrewd grasp of the psychology of horror plus an over-the-top gallic love of the nutso that can weird you out even today. Historian Mel Gordon, in The Grand Guignol: Theatre of Fear and Terror (1988), recounts some of the plots:

The innocent Louise is unjustly locked in an asylum with several insane women. A nurse assigned to protect her blithely leaves for a staff party as soon as Louise falls asleep. The insane women decide that a cuckoo bird is imprisoned in Louise's head and and one gouges out her eye with a knitting needle. The other crazy women are freaked and burn the gouger's face off on a hot plate.
Two brothers have an orgy with two prostitutes at a lighthouse. The lighthouse beacon goes out and one of the brothers realizes a boat containing their mother is heading toward the rocks. But the drunken lighthouse keeper has locked the beacon door. The brother goes nuts, blames everything on an earlier blasphemy by one of the hookers, slits her throat, and throws her out the window. "The boat with the men's mother crashes against the rocks," Gordon says. "In a religious frenzy, the [brothers] decide to burn [the other prostitute] to death. After pouring gasoline on her, they incinerate her and pray." The end.

And you thought The Texas Chain Saw Massacre was sick.

--CECIL ADAMS

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What is "Le Grand Guignol"

2005-07-03T20:45:52Z

"As used today, the term 'Grand Guignol' (pronounced Grahn Geen-yol') refers to any dramatic entertainment that deals with macabre subject matter and features “over-the-top” graphic violence. It is derived from Le Theatre du Grand Guignol, the name of the Parisian theatre that horrified audiences for over sixty years. The theatre was founded in 1897 by Oscar Metenier, a playwright of the naturalist movement who had previously been associated with André Antoine's Theatre Libre. A typical evening at the Grand Guignol Theatre might consist of five or six short plays, ranging from suspenseful crime dramas to bawdy sex farces. But the staple of the Grand Guignol repertoire was the terror play, which inevitably featured eye-gouging, throat-slashing, acid-throwing, or some other equally grisly climax. Over the years, and under the direction of several different managers, the Grand Guignol theatre flourished, becoming one of the most popular tourist attractions in Paris. By the early 1960’s, however, the Grand Guignol’s formula no longer had the same impact with audiences, and in 1962, it closed its doors. Despite the fact that the Grand Guignol has fallen into relative obscurity, it has had a profound influence on the art of horror performance and special effects."

-from www.grandguignol.com

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