Antonin Artaud (1896–1948) was a French poet, playwright, director and film actor. He was an early member of the French surrealist movement, credited as writing one of the first surrealist films, La Coquille et le clergyman (The seashell and the clergyman; dir. Germaine Dulac, 1928). He hoped that the new art form of cinema would induce the shock needed to produce radical thought. From 1926 to 1928, Artaud ran the Alfred Jarry Theatre, along with Roger Vitrac. Disappointed that cinema failed to realize his hopes, he returned to live performance, founding the Theatre of Cruelty in 1935. Spending the war years in asylums, he suffered prolonged electroshock treatment. After his release, he recorded To be Done with the Judgment of God, a (banned) radio play/noise performance, and died in 1948. Artaud's books include The Theatre and Its Double (1938; English trans. 1958) and Les Tarahumaras (1955; published in English as The Peyote Dance, 1976), which records his experiences in Mexico. Many of his essays on cinema are collected in an anthology of his works, Antonin Artaud: Selected Writings (ed. Susan Sontag, 1976).

Cinema exalts matter and reveals it to us in its profound spirituality, in its relations with the spirit from which it has emerged.