Philip Watts CAMUS and FILM

Camus and Film Philip Watts CAMUS AND FILM ompared with other writers of his generation, Camus had relatively little Cto say about the movies. Even though he was close to the actress Maria Casarès, even though he began working on a screen adaptation of La Princesse de Clèves for Robert Bresson,1 even though Jean Renoir proposed to make a flm version of The Stranger (this, years before Visconti’s 1967 version), Camus never wrote for flm journals and never theorized his relation to flm. He was, at best, ambivalent about the medium and, at times, openly hostile to it. According to Dudley Andrew, in 1949 Camus may even have convinced Gallimard to stop funding the prestigious Revue du cinéma, one of the very few journals in postwar France that treated cinema as a serious art form. “Camus,” Andrew concludes, “was simply not interested in flms.”2 And yet, the movies constantly appear in Camus’s writings, from the early essays of L’Envers et l’Endroit, through The Stranger, to the long comical description of a day spent at the movie theater in Camus’s posthumously published The First Man. As the critic Vincent Grégoire has written, movies appear discretely, in small doses and quite often in the 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 This article is republished from Camus Now: The Florence Gould Lectures at New York University, vol. 12, ed. Thomas Bishop and Coralie Girard (New York: Center for French Civilization and Culture, New York University, 2011) 11–22. The Romanic Review thanks Tom Bishop for allowing this republication. A French translation was published in the journal Contreligne and is available online at <http://www.contreligne. eu/2013/09/camus-et-le-cinema1/>. 1. In May 1954, Camus started writing a screenplay based on La Princesse de Clèves for Robert Bresson. In a letter to René Char, Camus complains about the work: “Ça m’abrutit, tant c’est dérisoire. Mais j’avais besoin de cet argent, que je gagne bien, en toute justice.” Camus worked on the project for a month until he broke things off, stating that Bresson was “un fou maniaque.” Camus was enthusiastic about the novel, not the adaptation. Albert Camus and René Char, Correspondance 1946–1959 (Paris: Gallimard, 2007) 121. My thanks to Philippe Roger for this reference. 2. Dudley Andrew, André Bazin (New York: Columbia UP, 1978) 159. 3. Vincent Grégoire, “Le Rôle et l’importance du cinéma dans les œuvres d’Albert Camus,” French Review 75.2 (2001): 328–40. The Romanic Review Volume 105 Numbers 1–2 © The Trustees of Columbia University 134 Philip Watts of the relation between aesthetics and politics in his work. Looking at what Camus had to say about the movies may help us to better understand Camus’s relation to aesthetic forms in general, and, more specifcally, it may shed light on how aesthetic hierarchies still very much at work in twentieth-century France may have participated in the way Camus approached questions of mass culture, poverty, and the colonial space. I want to start with an early example from “L’Ironie,” a short text published in L’Envers et l’Endroit , the collection of essays that Camus wrote in 1935–36 when he was only twenty-two. These essays have as their backdrop a number of cities in North Africa and Europe—Algiers, Naples, Prague—and take the shape of a series of short meditations on poverty, existential isolation, and what Camus calls the “absurd simplicity of the world.”4 The text titled “L’Ironie” tells the 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, the young people decide to go to the movies: Pour prolonger cette réunion, on décida d’aller au cinéma. On passait justement un flm gai. Le jeune homme avait étourdiment accepté, sans penser à l’être qui continuait d’exister dans son dos. (40) This, as far as I can tell, is the frst mention of cinema in Camus’s work, and it generates a crisis. The movies very quickly become the opposite of everything the narrator values: thought, meditation, the constant contemplation of death. The young man in the story realizes that cinema is a form of distraction and of absentmindedness, a facile happiness. And Camus uses a rare hyperbole to describe the dilemma: Lui se sentait placé devant le plus affreux Malheur qu’il eût encore connu: celui d’une vieille femme infrme qu’on abandonne pour aller au cinéma. (41) This somewhat excessive conclusion—going to the movies becomes “the most horrible Misfortune” the 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 the tone and some of the themes that will recur throughout his career, is also an attempt to situate his writing in opposition to the cinema as a form of popular entertainment. From Camus’s very frst writings, cinema is an agent 4. Albert Camus, “Entre oui et non,” L’Envers et l’Endroit (Paris: Gallimard, Éditions de la Pléiade, 2006), Œuvres complètes I, 51. Unless noted, all references to Camus’s writing are to this edition. Camus and Film 135 of social cohesion and of mass distraction. It is the technology that turns the individual’s gaze away from the contemplation of poverty and death, these two realities that remain at the center of Camus’s writing. It is not excessive to say that Camus’s writing career begins under the sign of a very specifc anxiety about cinema, the anxiety of being distracted from a contemplation of the “absurd simplicity” of life by un flm gai, by an aesthetic form that Walter Benjamin, writing at the same time as Camus, called a work of art “consummated by a collectivity in a state of distraction.”5 Typical of Camus’s early work is the scene from “L’Été à Alger,” written in 1937 and published as part of Noces, in which Camus writes about the neighborhood movie house’s little candies with romantic inscriptions. Here is how Camus describes the scene: Dans les cinémas de quartier, à Alger, on vend quelquefois des pastilles de menthe qui portent, gravé en rouge, tout ce qui est nécessaire à la naissance de l’amour: 1. des questions: “Quand m’épouserez-vous?”; “M’aimez-vous?”; 2. des réponses: “À la folie” ; “Au printemps”. Après avoir préparé le terrain, on les passe à sa voisine qui répond de même ou se borne à faire la bête. À Belcourt, on a vu des mariages se conclure ainsi et des vies entières s’engager sur un échange de bonbons à la menthe. Et ceci dépeint bien le peuple enfant de ce pays [. .] Mise à part la joie des sens, les amusements de ce peuple sont ineptes. Une société de boulomanes et les banquets des “amicales”, le cinéma à trois francs et les fêtes communales suffsent depuis des années à la récréation des plus de trente ans. Les dimanches d’Alger sont parmi les plus sinistres. (121–22) There are two ways to understand this passage. The frst as a sympathetic, if somewhat chastening, portrait of the residents of Belcourt and Bab-el- Oued and of their passion for life, their moral code, their headlong rush into sensual pleasure. But while the passage could be read as a hymn of sorts to the working-class Europeans of Algiers, there is also an anxiety about the life they lead, about a life made up of easy pleasures, work, marriage, and death, what Camus calls an unrefecting life based on “facile happiness.” In this opposition between refection and pure pleasure, cinema again stands in for the nonthinking life. The way this brief scene is constructed, cinema is precisely what sets this unrefecting life in motion. It is the movies and their suggestive candies that lead to our downfall. You go to the movies, you eat a 5. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969) 239. 136 Philip Watts candy, you fall in love; the next thing you know, you’re married, you’re thirty years old, and your life is over. These early scenes from L’Envers et l’Endroit and from Noces are a prelude of sorts to the famous scenes from Camus’s The Stranger, where the same opposition between cinematic frivolity and existential seriousness plays out. I’m thinking, of course, about the scene in which Meursault goes to the movies the day after his mother’s funeral. In the space of twenty-four hours and a few pages, Meursault returns from the funeral, meets Marie Cardona, spends the day at the beach with her, and then goes to the movies with her, to see a flm with Fernandel, which Meursault characterizes as “drôle par moment et puis vraiment trop bête” (152). What is striking in this passage from The Stranger is the commingling of death and the distraction from death, of Meursault’s mourning and Fernandel’s comedy. Critics, prompted by Camus’s own statements, have generally interpreted this scene as one more instance of Meursault’s inability to play by the rules of his society—only a character who rejects social codes could go to a comedy the day after his mother’s funeral.

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