Claude Faraldo’s Themroc (1973) occupies a singular position in the history of cinema. It is a film that refuses almost everything we expect from the medium: no intelligible dialogue, no conventional narrative arc, no music in the traditional sense; only the cacophony of urban life orchestrated into what one critic has called a “destructive crescendo.” The film presents us with a world that has been stripped of meaning in the conventional sense and invites us to consider what remains when language, narrative, and social order are systematically dismantled. The film tells the story of a Parisian house painter, played by Michel Piccoli, who after an incident at work undergoes a radical transformation. He abandons his job, returns to his apartment, bricks up the front door, and tears down the wall facing the courtyard, transforming his home into a cave open to public view. He rejects clothing, takes his sister as his lover, and gradually inspires his neighbors to join him in what becomes a primitive communal existence. The authorities are called in, but the rebellion spreads rather than subsides. Police officers are hunted, roasted on spits, and eaten. The film ends with the image of an arm waving through a bricked-up hole, a gesture of defiance that remains despite all attempts at restoration. The Abolition of Language The most immediately striking feature of Themroc is its complete rejection of intelligible speech. Throughout the film’s 106-minute running time, characters communicate only through grunts, growls, howls, barks, and gibberish. It is a film in which language itself is subjected to a radical critique. Faraldo’s decision to eliminate intelligible dialogue was deliberate and politically motivated. As he explained, he wanted to “cock a snoot at language, because language is a social barrier too.” This statement reveals a profound insight. Language is also a mechanism of exclusion, a system that determines who can speak and who must remain silent, what can be said and what must remain unsaid. By refusing to use language in the conventional sense, Faraldo creates a film that is, in principle, accessible to anyone regardless of their native tongue. But more importantly, he exposes the ways in which language functions as an instrument of social control. The film’s abandonment of language has been understood as an appeal to what one critic has called “a pre-linguistic sensitivity.” Shouts and groans, the argument goes, “are not necessarily forms of barbaric expression: sometimes they simply evince the inadequacy of language faced with the impelling urgency of wants and dreams.” This observation points toward a philosophical claim of considerable importance. Language, for all its power, is also a limitation. It forces our experiences into predetermined categories, imposes structures on what might otherwise remain fluid and open, and substitutes conventional meanings for direct experience. The film’s use of non-linguistic vocalization can be understood through the lens of what Mikhail Bakhtin called the Grotesque Body. Bakhtin described this as a body that “is not separated from the rest of the world [but rather] outgrows itself, transgresses its own limits.” The Grotesque Body is defined by its openness, its permeability, its refusal to accept the boundaries that civilization has imposed. In Themroc, the abandonment of language is precisely such a transgression. It opens the body to direct expression, free from the mediating structures of linguistic convention. Faraldo’s rejection of language also carries political implications that extend beyond the individual. In the aftermath of the failed uprisings of 1968, political discourse in France had become increasingly dominated by orthodox Marxist rhetoric. Faraldo’s film represents a rejection of this sterile verbosity. By eliminating intelligible speech, he bypasses the ideological frameworks that had come to structure political debate and appeals to something more fundamental. The film’s critique of modern life is a critique that cannot be articulated in conventional political language because it operates at a level beneath language itself. The Critique of Labor and Alienation Themroc’s rebellion begins at work. The opening scenes of the film depict the monotonous routine of industrial labor: the dreary breakfast, the unwilling obedience to the demands of industry, the repetitive tasks that define the worker’s existence. Themroc is a house painter, a low-skilled worker whose labor requires no creativity, zero initiative, and absence of engagement of his full humanity. He is, as the title character suggests, a cog in a machine. The film’s depiction of labor draws on a tradition of critique that extends from Marx through the Situationist International. Marx argued that under capitalism, labor becomes alienated labor. The worker denies himself. His labor belongs to another. The worker is reduced to a commodity, a thing to be bought and sold, and his humanity is systematically stripped away. Faraldo, who was himself once a factory worker, understood this condition from the inside. His film gives expression to the experience of alienation in a way that theoretical analysis cannot. The wordless grunts and growls of the characters are the authentic voice of workers who have been rendered speechless by the conditions of their existence. Faraldo’s film and Elio Petri’s The Working Class Goes to Heaven feature workers “who struggle to make themselves heard as their language is impacted by the numbing rhythm of factory labor.” Themroc’s response to his alienation is not to demand better working conditions or higher wages. It is to reject work altogether. When he leaves the factory, he retreats to his apartment and begins the process of destroying everything that connects him to the world of labor. He throws his possessions out the window. He smashes his furniture with a sledgehammer. He tears down the walls that define his domestic space. This is a rejection of it in its entirety. The film’s attitude toward labor has been described as “anarchistic nihilism, a rejection of the routine of gainful employment and a celebration of a life driven by pure impulse.” This description captures something essential about the film’s philosophy. Themroc seeks to escape the labor logic entirely. His regression to a primitive state is a radical refusal of the entire structure of modern economic life. Faraldo’s own statement about the film’s purpose reinforces this interpretation. He said that the film would have failed unless it inspired “at least three other workers to get out of the factories.” This is the language of revolution. The Transformation of Domestic Space Themroc’s rebellion takes place primarily in his apartment, a space that undergoes a remarkable transformation over the course of the film. He bricks up the front door, cutting off access from the hallway, and tears down the wall facing the courtyard, opening his living space to public view. The private space of the apartment becomes a public spectacle. The cave that results is a liminal space that challenges the conventional distinction between inside and outside. This transformation of domestic space has profound philosophical implications. The modern apartment is a space of privacy, a retreat from the public world where the individual can escape the demands of social life. But it is also a space of consumption, filled with objects that define the owner’s identity and status. Themroc’s destruction of his possessions and his opening of his apartment to public view represent a rejection of both the privacy and the consumerism that define bourgeois domesticity. The wall that Themroc tears down is a symbol of the separation between public and private that structures modern life. By removing this barrier, Themroc challenges the very distinction between the individual and society. His cave is open to everyone. His neighbors can see him, and he can see them. The voyeurism that begins with his peeping at his boss and secretary becomes a mutual gaze that dissolves the boundaries between selves. The film’s treatment of domestic space can be understood through the lens of what might be called spatial politics. The modern city is organized through a series of spatial distinctions: public and private, work and home, inside and outside. These distinctions structure power relations, determine who can go where and do what, and reinforce the divisions that maintain social order. By breaking down these spatial divisions, Themroc attacks the physical infrastructure of bourgeois society. The neighbors’ response to Themroc’s transformation is significant. Initially shocked, they are gradually inspired by his example. One by one, they begin to demolish their own apartments, tearing down walls and joining Themroc in his cave. The rebellion spreads through example. The film presents this spread of primitive behavior as something almost contagious, a virus of freedom that infects everyone it touches. This communal aspect of the rebellion is essential to the film’s vision. Themroc creates a new form of community, a “caveman commune” in which the old distinctions of family, class, and property are abolished. The neighbors who join him participating in a collective transformation. The film’s final image, an arm waving through a bricked-up hole, suggests that this new community, though besieged, remains defiant. The Transgression of Taboos Themroc also attacks the most fundamental taboos of bourgeois society: the incest taboo and the prohibition against cannibalism. Themroc takes his sister as his lover and later participates in the roasting and eating of police officers. These acts are not incidental to the film’s argument. They are central to its philosophical project. The incest taboo is one of the foundations of human society. Anthropologists from Lévi-Strauss onward have argued that the prohibition against incest is what distinguishes human from animal society, the rule that forces humans to form alliances with other groups and thus creates the structures of kinship and exchange that define social life. By violating this taboo, Themroc attacks the very basis of social order. He returns to a state before the incest taboo, a state that is literally pre-social. The film’s treatment of incest has been the subject of considerable commentary. Some have seen it as a simple provocation, a way of shocking the audience out of its complacency. Others have interpreted it as a critique of the nuclear family, the institution that enforces the incest taboo and reproduces the structures of bourgeois society. Themroc destroys the family itself, taking his sister not as a relative but as a partner in a new form of relationship. The cannibalism in the film carries similar implications. The consumption of police officers is a literal incorporation of the enemy, an act that asserts the absolute dominance of the primitive community over the representatives of state authority. But it is also a violation of one of the most fundamental prohibitions of civilized society, the prohibition against eating human flesh. Cannibalism is the ultimate expression of the rejection of civilized norms, the act that most clearly marks the return to a state of nature. These transgressions have been understood as part of the film’s broader assault on bourgeois values. The police are the state in its most immediate and coercive form. By killing and eating them, Themroc symbolically consumes the power that oppresses him. The film’s transgressions are a logic to Themroc’s behavior, a consistency that suggests a coherent philosophy. He rejects the taboos of bourgeois society not because he wants to destroy for its own sake but because he seeks a form of existence free from the constraints that these taboos impose. The incest and cannibalism means of achieving a more fundamental liberation. Regression as Liberation The central philosophical claim of Themroc is that regression can be a form of liberation. Themroc retreats to an older form of society, a primitive existence that predates civilization itself. The film presents this regression as a gain and as an escape from the constraints of civilization. This argument challenges one of the fundamental assumptions of modern thought: the idea that history is progress, that human development moves from primitive to advanced, from simple to complex, from savage to civilized. Themroc reverses this narrative. It suggests that civilization is imprisonment, that the primitive state is superior, that the cave is a place of freedom. The figure of the caveman has been understood as “an incensed and surreal response to the ‘revolution that failed.’” After the defeat of the uprisings of 1968, the possibility of progressive political change seemed remote. Faraldo’s film responds to this situation by abandoning the idea of progress altogether. If the future offers no hope, then perhaps the past does. If revolution cannot move forward, perhaps it must move backward. The film’s regression is not, however, a simple return to some imagined state of nature. Themroc is a violent, sexually aggressive figure who does not hesitate to use force to achieve his ends. The film presents primitive state as a state of liberation, but liberation is not the same as peace or harmony. The freedom that Themroc achieves is a freedom from constraint, not a freedom from conflict. The film’s attitude toward regression has been described as a celebration of “a life driven by pure impulse.” This phrase captures something essential about the film’s philosophy. Themroc does not think about what he should do. He does what he wants. His actions are not guided by moral principles or social conventions but by immediate desire. This is a philosophy that the film presents as having its own validity. The question of whether Themroc’s regression represents a genuine liberation or merely a different form of imprisonment is one that the film leaves open. The final image, an arm waving through a bricked-up hole, suggests defiance but also confinement. The cave has become a prison as well as a refuge. Themroc is free from the constraints of bourgeois society, but he is trapped in his apartment, surrounded by authorities who seek to destroy him. The Politics of the Body The body is central to Themroc in ways that distinguish it from more conventional political films. Themroc’s rebellion is physical. This emphasis on the body can be understood through the lens of the concept of biopolitics, the idea that modern power operates through the regulation and control of bodies. The factory disciplines the worker’s body, forcing it into repetitive motions that destroy its vitality. The apartment encloses the body, separating it from others and confining it to a private space. The family regulates the body’s desires, channeling them into acceptable forms. Themroc is a film about the revolt of the body against these forms of control. The film’s embrace of the body has been described as “bodily emancipation, which is the acknowledgement and prioritization of needs over duties.” This formulation captures the philosophical core of the film. Modern society is structured around duties: the duty to work, the duty to obey, the duty to conform. Themroc rejects these duties in favor of needs: the need for food, for sex, for freedom. The body’s needs become the basis for a new form of existence, one that is not organized around the demands of production and consumption. The film’s treatment of sexuality is particularly significant in this context. Themroc’s sexual relationship with his sister is not presented as a romantic attachment but as a physical need. He takes her. The It presents it as a fact, a manifestation of the body’s demands that cannot be denied. This is a vision that the film presents with uncompromising honesty. The film’s politics of the body also extends to its treatment of violence. Themroc does not merely resist the authorities. He attacks them physically, hunting police officers and consuming their flesh. This is the violence of predation. Themroc has become an animal, and animals hunt. The Failure of the Revolution and the Possibility of the New Themroc was made in the aftermath of the failed uprisings of 1968, a period of political defeat and disillusionment for the French left. The film responds to this situation not by abandoning the project of liberation but by reimagining it. If the revolution cannot succeed through political means, perhaps it can succeed through other means. If the future offers no hope, perhaps the past does. If the state cannot be overthrown, perhaps it can be escaped. The film’s vision of liberation is, however, deeply ambiguous. Themroc achieves a kind of freedom, but it is a freedom that comes at a terrible cost. He has abandoned his humanity in the conventional sense. He has become an animal, a creature of pure impulse. The film presents the choice and leaves us to decide. The film’s ambiguous ending reinforces this sense of uncertainty. The final image, an arm waving through a bricked-up hole, suggests defiance but also imprisonment. Themroc is still fighting, but he is also still trapped. The revolution has not succeeded. The old order has not been destroyed. The new order, if it can be called that, is confined to a single building, surrounded by enemies. The film offers a vision of resistance that is honest about its limitations. The question that the film leaves us with is whether this resistance is worth undertaking. Themroc’s rebellion is futile in any conventional sense. He cannot defeat the state. He cannot transform society. He can only create a small enclave of freedom, a space where the rules of bourgeois society do not apply. The film suggests that even this limited freedom is worth pursuing, that the act of resistance is valuable in itself regardless of its outcome. This is, in the end, the film’s most profound philosophical claim. Freedom is something that must be constantly enacted, constantly defended, constantly recreated. Themroc’s rebellion is an act of defiance that refuses to accept the given order of things. The film tells us that we must find our own way, that we cannot accept the paths that others have laid out for us.