This film is not the reproduction of a dream and should not be considered as such. I will not try to justify its apparent inconsistency with the easy excuse of a dream. Dreams have undoubtedly their own logic. They have their own life even if we can grasp little more than an intelligent and dark truth of this life. This film attempts to capture the darkness of the spirit through images made up only of themselves, images that do not take their meaning from the situation in which they develop, but from a kind of powerful inner need that sends them into the light with undeniable clarity. The human skin of things, the dermis of reality, that’s what the cinema plays on more than anything else. It exalts the subject matter and shows it to us in its profound spirituality, in its relationship with the spirit it descends from. Images are born, they are deduced from one another as images. They impose an objective synthesis that is more penetrating than any abstraction, creating worlds that have no need of anyone.

Antonin Artaud, Oeuvres complètes, Gallimard, 1978