When one creates the cinema it is the eye that shudders, not the lens. This fantasia is a room, a white room in which light becomes the ultimate description of a pain whose source is never to be found, a pain that flickers like a child's laugh. When I watch (I mean to say when I am de-loused by) your cinema I am reminded of the saying that all men know life in the same way but each of us has our death differently.

At least I know mine while living.

When one takes in a sensation through the tongue, or the pores, or the anus, one is alive; when one attempts to decipher the wanderings of the saints whilst sleeping in a dark room spun with canned laughter, it is an entirely different matter. What else could you have been thinking at the moment E.T., your extra-terrestrial, that severed hand of thought, that diasporated Jew of conscious annihilation, yearns to return to his brethren?

If the cinema is to survive, it will need more than morphine, electric shock, or testosterone. It will need the humiliation of its own suppurating gangrene. As such, for supply of same, I honor you.

Your cinema reaches into the ether and re-emerges cloaked in cotton candy.

Sincerely yours,

Antonin Artaud