La Mise Hors Scène Screen Memory

Regarding mise-en-scène, in Antonin Artaud’s letter to theater critic, Benjamin Crémieux, Artaud candidly expressed that “mise-en-scène itself” could act as a safeguard to "another language". Reading this today, it reflects well upon Jacques Rancière’s Les sorties du Verb. In Jean-Francois Lyotard’s essay, L’Acinéma (1973), Lyotard expands mise-en-scène to become motions inside and outside the borders of frame, creating a re-discussion about reality and truth using the concept of “la mise hors scène”. It invites the readers to use their own various perceptions to compensate for the scenes outside of the text, prompting them to reconstruct a performance in their own minds. From the aesthetic perspective of “la mise hors scène”, this paper discusses how in some works of Taiwanese theater reportage and people’s theater, the history and writing re-translate within the body, dispatching the body back into the body as an expression of historical writing. Then, “screen memory” is served to “recover” covered-up history as a "self-presentation" approach to imaging. Finally, this paper examines the re-translation of words, the redistribution of cultural location, and how images files can be “watched and read”.