Dreaming a cinematic dream: Jean Cayrol's writings on film

Abstract

Dreams, whose nature is cinematic, provide a fundamental link between Jean Cayrol's work in literature and his work in cinema making his novels, scripts and films, as well as his film and literary criticism, into an almost organic totality in which the same aesthetic ideas circulate. Cayrol's reading of his experiences in concentration camps, his dreams in particular, puts his writing apart from that of other Holocaust writers and reinforces his membership in the nouveau roman group marked by its active engagement with cinema. His conception of dreams as cinematic also points to surrealism as one of the most important elements to shape his creative imagination. Cayrol is unique among the nouveaux romanciers in extending his work in cinema beyond scriptwriting and directing into film criticism. The literary underpinnings of his conception of cinema outlined in Le Droit du regard challenge the phenomenological dogma of the fifties Cahiers du cinéma and foreshadow the linguistic turn in the mid-sixties, making Cayrol's writing on cinema a perfect reflection of the contemporary trends in film criticism.