Camus and Film

Abstract

Compared with other writers of his generation, Camus had relatively little to say about movies. Even though he close to actress Maria Casares, even though he began working on a screen adaptation of La Princesse de Cleves for Robert Bresson, (1) even though Jean Renoir proposed to make a film version of The Stranger (this, years before Visconti's 1967 version), Camus never wrote for film journals and never theorized his relation to film. He was, at best, ambivalent about medium and, at times, openly hostile to it. According to Dudley Andrew, in 1949 Camus may even have convinced Gallimard to stop funding prestigious Revue du cinema, one of very few journals in postwar France that treated cinema as a serious art form. Camus, Andrew concludes, was simply not interested in films. (2) And yet, movies constantly appear in Camus's writings, from early essays of L'Envers et l'Endroit, through The Stranger, to long comical description of a day spent at movie theater in Camus's posthumously published The First Man. As critic Vincent Gregoire has written, movies appear discretely, in small doses and quite often in margins of Camus's work, but they are everywhere. (3) In this essay, I look at Camus's often contradictory relation to cinema in an attempt to add to our understanding of relation between aesthetics and politics in his work. Looking at what Camus had to say about movies may help us to better understand Camus's relation to aesthetic forms in general, and, more specifically, it may shed light on how aesthetic hierarchies still very much at work in twentieth-century France may have participated in way Camus approached questions of mass culture, poverty, and colonial space. I want to start with an early example from L'Ironie, a short text published in L'Envers et l'Endroit, collection of essays that Camus wrote in 1935-36 when he only twenty-two. These essays have as their backdrop a number of cities in North Africa and Europe--Algiers, Naples, Prague--and take shape of a series of short meditations on poverty, existential isolation, and what Camus calls absurd simplicity of world. (4) The text titled L'Ironie tells story of a group of young people who visit an old woman who is isolated and dying, her life entirely turned to God. At one point, young people decide to go to movies: Pour prolonger cette reunion, on decida d'aller au cinema. On passait justement un film gai. Le jeune homme avait etourdiment accepte, sans penser a l'etre qui continuait d'exister dans son dos. (40) This, as far as I can tell, is first mention of cinema in Camus's work, and it generates a crisis. The movies very quickly become opposite of everything narrator values: thought, meditation, constant contemplation of death. The young man in story realizes that cinema is a form of distraction and of absentmindedness, a facile happiness. And Camus uses a rare hyperbole to describe dilemma: Lui se sentait place devant le plus affreux Malheur qu'il eut encore connu: celui d'une vieille femme infirme qu'on abandonne pour aller au cinema. (41) This somewhat excessive conclusion--going to movies becomes the most horrible Misfortune young man has ever experienced--can be attributed to an author who is still green. But there is something else at work in this short text. L'Ironie, a story in which Camus establishes tone and some of themes that will recur throughout his career, is also an attempt to situate his writing in opposition to cinema as a form of popular entertainment. From Camus's very first writings, cinema is an agent of social cohesion and of mass distraction. It is technology that turns individual's gaze away from contemplation of poverty and death, these two realities that remain at center of Camus's writing. …