Sade’s play and the performances of the inmates. This was an aspect of the play that, though impossible to translate exactly onto film, created one of the most interesting, and most creative, ways that Brook chose to engage the viewing audience in Marat/Sade; through his use of the many characters’ soliloquies to not only directly address the camera, but, more importantly, to address the viewer as well. In theater, the soliloquy will typically involve a character speaking to themselves or the audience alone, and it is through a twisting of this technique in his film that Brook creates an even greater connection between the inmates on the screen and those watching the movie. Throughout the film the inmates appear impending, harassing the aristocrats Brook has placed within the film, though they are quite safe behind a large facade of iron bars. This technique corresponds to the menacing way that the characters address the camera throughout the performance, and creates the necessary feeling, for the viewers, that no such barrier is available to protect them as they are drawn in uncomfortably closer to the inmates by Brook’s camerawork. We begin to question whether or not the soliloquies, spoken directly into the camera instead of to the protected aristocrats who originally played our ‘part’ of the audience, are still merely just a theater convention, or if the insanity of the performers is used as a catalyst for we, ourselves, to feel threatened directly by what is spoken. We also begin to question whether or not the inmate is even looking at the camera to address the audience, or is simply insane, and addressing the air around them, adding yet another layer to such complex characters. Creating such questions within the audience’s mind also seems to create, for most, the aura of discomfort and skepticism that Brook was aiming to achieve, and reached quite successfully.Though the film version of ...
