Sartre by Himself: Film as Biography and AutobiographyAuthor(s): Gerald HonigsblumSource: The French Review. Special Issue, Vol. 55, No. 7, Sartre and Biography (Summer, 1982),pp. 123-130Published by: American Association of Teachers of FrenchStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/487507 .

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THE FRENCH REVIEW, Vol. 55, Special Issue, No. 7, Summer 1982

Sartre by Himself: Film as Biography and Autobiography

by Gerald Honigsblum

N THE PRIME OF LIFE, SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR claims that Sartre ranked film "almost as high as literature," ' and that the two lifelong friends

enjoyed the new art form with great enthusiasm. Almost apparently does not count. Sartre devoted precious little attention to film theory, while focusing relentlessly on the problem of image and literary imagination. 2 How can we reconcile the lifelong enthusiasm on the one hand and the lack of critical reflection on the other? This question can be answered by situating film in the larger biographical and autobiographical enterprise and by identifying the contradictions that film theory may pose vis-h-vis Sartre's own concepts of image-making. The film Sartre by Himself stands as the very example of this paradox, a curious mix of biography and autobiography.

When Philippe Sollers states that "biography is an urgent task," he may partially explain the maniacal impulse of so many celebrated public figures to write the story of their lives. Whether it be a Richard Nixon, or a Henry Fonda, or a John Gacy, as different as they are, they all seem to graduate from the public limelight to the pantheon of the book, a passage legitimated by a genre in particular harmony with twentieth-century ideology. In the case of the latter, no sooner was he behind bars and under psychiatric

1 Simone de Beauvoir, The Prime of Life, trans. by Peter Green (New York: Lancer Books), p. 44.

2 Sartre wrote sketchy notes on theatre and cinema, reprinted in Sartre on Theatre, documents assembled by Michel Contat and Michel Rybalka, translated by Frank Jellinek (New York: Pantheon Books, 1976). His views are limited to com- parisons between the theatre and film. Similarly, the key passage on film in The Words is a counterpoint to the previous generations' first experience of the theatre. Aside from screen adaptations and several reviews, the only substantial piece on film dates back to a commencement address to the graduating students at the Lycee in Rouen where he taught in 1931. It was later published under the title of "L'Art cinemato- graphique" and appears in Contat/Rybalka's The Writing of Jean-Paul Sartre, Volume II, trans. by Richard McCleary (Evanston; Northwestern University Press, 1974). The original title, "Le Cinema n'est pas une mauvaise ecole" is a telling one. Sartre en- courages his students to probe into the nature of this new art which they readily enjoy but which is deceptively complex: "go admire this supple yet unbending chain of images, this subtle knot wound through events packed full of meaning and de- termined by both mind and nature..." - implying that space and time are neither mutually exclusive nor one and the same.

123

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124 FRENCH REVIEW

observation than his attorneys were allegedly negotiating the rights to his story and the rights to - the movie version.

This somewhat cynical assessment does however point to excesses in the practice of biography: famous or infamous men and women have become proverbially the subject of biographical accounts the success of which is often measured by whether or not a film version was to follow. To wit, Abbie Hoffman's Abbie Hoffman, which appeared in 1980 just before his conviction, is derisively subtitled "Soon to be a major motion picture." Conversely, some box-office hits can be measured by the popularity or sheer existence of the book version they have inspired: Jaws stands as a major example. Still other films, based on novels, plays, or biographies, have in fact awakened curiosity in the original written work, which for one reason or another evoked little interest before the release of the film: The Lacemaker, for instance.

The dynamic between film and book which informs a substantial part of film theory raises particular questions in the area of biography and auto- biography and is exemplified by works such as Astruc and Contat's Sartre by Himself. In fact, recent releases of so-called "literary" films make this a fertile area of study. I am referring to such films as Stevie in which Glenda Jackson portrays a successful English poetess recounting her life to an endearing aunt who barely understands her, hardly hears her, but deeply loves her. An even narrower scope is proposed in My Dinner with Andrd, which limits the scene to a restaurant table at which two interlocutors engage in a sustained conversation, in an attempt to retrace what Sartre calls the "trajectory" of a life.

Sartre by Himself was filmed in 1972 and stands as a unique documenta- tion of one of this century's best known thinkers. It is unique for its archival value in that it preserves the only significant visual and oral/aural account of Jean-Paul Sartre, aside from occasional newsreels about the philosopher's declarations and activities, and the two very brief appearances he made in a 1967 film about Saint-Germain-des-Pres (Disorder at Twenty by Jacques Baratier). The issue of whether or not Sartre by Himself is a good film ac- cording to various standards of criticism becomes secondary since it is and will be the one and only available film on Sartre. (Luckily, about six hours of footage edited out have been preserved in the archives of the Institut National de l'Audiovisuel.) Sartre by Himself can easily be designated a low-budget film, with a camera and crude recording equipment competing for space in Sartre's living room. The effect, however, is not so much one of inferior mise- en-scene, but one of immediate intimacy and of explicitly focusing on the act and fact of filming rather than the film itself.

Intimacy and genuineness remain the dominant mood. Sartre is surrounded by his friends, including Simone de Beauvoir, to whose flat the scene some- times shifts. They ask him questions which they have heard him answer before and they listen to his answers with attentive faces which the camera pans from time to time. To this extent, the "script" has been rehearsed for years. And yet, one cannot deny the spontaneous quality which Sartre exhibits, the

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SARTRE BY HIMSELF 125

disarming ease with which he responds, the lack of pretention in his manner and delivery which border at times on the unintelligible in their quotidian rapidity.

Philippe Lejeune, one of today's most probing scholars of Sartre and biography, concludes that despite its archival value, the net effect of the Q & A format, occasionally punctuated by newsreels and other corny illustra- tive devices, is one of a parody. "Ces id6es d'illustrations sont si simplistes et conventionnelles, si maladroitement r6alisees, que le spectateur soulag6 en arrive 't conclure qu'il s'agit d'une parodie d'un film sur un grand homme. La r6alit6 de la parodie est la, mais, helas, l'intention manque."

I agree only partly. There is no doubt that filmic conventions abound, but it would be unfair to expect that Sartre by Himself should or could parody the legend of a celebrated individual the way The Words did. In the latter, Sartre was in control of a meticulous prose, in the former, director Astruc's camera controls the composition: the subject is not a professional actor who could interpret a role. Sartre is in fact purely a subject and the candid shots we witness in their quasi-naive setting bring us as close to the man as any other device. He states in the press-book: "le film est une autobiographie faite un peu de chic. I1 se peut que ga soit plus interessant pour me connaitre parce que c'est tout a fait spontane." 4

Speaking openly of his "neurosis of literature" he comments on the relative merits of the two autobiographical works (book and film): "I wrote The Words and later a sequel which will never be published. Both these works represent an effort on my part to understand my life up to that point. It was in that context that I wrote my autobiography, which I might add, interests me less today... I mean the problem interests me less. What does interest me more is the autobiography such as it is being presented in this film, that is to say, the trajectory of an intellectual from the day he was born in 1905 to the present. And more significantly, the trajectory of one intellectual." 5

Sartre makes an unequivocal statement. The film in question is more responsive to his notion of autobiography than The Words whose studied prose bids farewell to literature and contrasts sharply with the relaxed con- versational style of the autobiographical film.

If Sartre by Himself can be considered, as it has been by many, a sequel to The Words, it is not because one picks up where the other leaves off, but rather because the medium itself promotes the immediacy of the "per- forming" Sartre as an alternative to the remoteness of the fictionalized Sartre. The scene of the boy portraying young Jean-Paul reading on the floor is disruptive in this context, and is one instance where parody seems intentional.

3 Philippe Lejeune, Obliques No. 18-19, pp. 113-14; also in Je est un autre (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1980).

4 Ibid., p. 114. 5 Sartre by Himself, trans. Richard Seaver (New York: Urizen Books, 1978), p. 88.

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126 FRENCH REVIEW

Stanley Cavell contrasts the stage actor and the screen performer by saying that "the actor's role is his subject for study, and there is no end to it. But the screen performer is essentially not an actor at all: he is the subject of study and a study not his own (that is what the content of photograph is, its subject). On screen the study is projected, on stage the actor is the projector." 6 Sartre the character in The Words is similarly endowed with the role bestowed on him by Sartre the author, whereas Sartre on the screen is a genuine subject of study whose performance is projected for all to witness. In The Words, Sartre acknowledges his early experience of film and makes prophetic statements about his life and film:

... I wanted to see the film as close up as possible. I had learned in the equalitarian discomfort of the neighborhood houses that this new art was mine, just as it was everyone else's. We had the same mental age: I was seven and knew how to read; it was twelve and did not know how to talk. People said that it was in its early stages, that it had progress to make; I thought that we would grow up together. I have not forgotten our common childhood: whenever I am offered a hard candy, whenever a woman varnishes her nails near me, whenever I inhale a certain smell of disinfectant in the toilet of a provincial hotel, whenever I see the violet bulb on the ceiling of a night-train, my eyes, nostrils, and tongue recapture the lights and odors of those bygone halls; four years ago, in rough weather off the coast of Fingal's Cave, I heard a piano in the wind.

Though impervious to the sacred, I loved magic. The cinema was a suspect appearance that I loved perversely for what it still lacked. That streaming was everything, it was nothing, it was everything reduced to nothing. I was witnessing the delirium of a wall; solids had been freed from a massiveness that weighed on me, that weighed even on my body, and my young idealism was delighted with that infinite contraction. At a later time, the transpositions and rotations of triangles reminded me of the gliding figures on the screen. I loved the cinema even in plane geometry. To me, black and white were the supercolors that con- tained all the others and revealed them only to the initiate; I was thrilled at seeing the invisible. 7

Of all the animated prose in The Words, few if any passages match the account of Sartre's experience of the cinema. The synesthetic recall of this boyhood experience is expressed in a verbal spell which gives the text a spontaneity approximating that of Sartre by Himself. Unless Sartre exaggerates the impact of the new medium on an impressionable youngster, we are led to conclude that the deep bond between Sartre and film was sealed forever in the virtual darkness of the movie hall and that the two were destined to grow up and grow old together, and fated to meet again 60 years later. At age 67,

6 Stanley Cavell, The World Seen (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), p. 28. 7 J.-P. Sartre, The Words, trans. by Bernard Frechtman (New York: George Braziller, 1964), pp. 122-23.

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SARTRE BY HIMSELF 127

reading and writing, the two constituents of The Words, became severely curtailed by near blindness and Sartre turned increasingly to dialogue and authorized the Astruc/ Contat film.

As we noted, Sartre says little else directly about film, after having claimed the fledgling medium as an older brother of sorts. Contat and Rybalka point out that "the few film criticisms he has written show that he has, if not a misunderstanding, at least a somewhat dated conception of film art... [that] Sartre's relationships to the movies - which would be worth a more thorough study - have been both ambiguous and unfortunate." 8 Actually, that magical moment of "all reduced to nothing," the moment when he took delight in "seeing the invisible" turned into an obsession throughout his career as a novelist, playwright, critic, and philosopher. The first two philosophical treatises of Sartre are on the imagination: L'Imagination (1936) is his first published work; L'Imaginaire (1940) further explores the nature of image and the imaging mind. La Nausde is sandwiched in between these two works.

In the first work, translated as Imagination: A Psychological Critique, he begins to develop a theory of the imagination, by investigating the nature of a photograph of friend Pierre who lives in Berlin. Pierre is paradigmatically absent. His image is not immanent: it cannot be construed as a thing with properties similar to those of externally perceived objects. Rather it is an act, "a consciousness of something." And thus "bound up with the freedom of consciousness since, when the conscious mind imagines, it disengages itself from what is real in order to look for something that isn't there or that doesn't exist. And it was this passage into the imaginary that helped me understand what freedom is." 9

Imagination, however, is not without its paradoxes. Paul Ricoeur un- derscores the ambiguity of Sartre's thesis by pointing out that the theory of image cannot be uncritically extended to fiction, as Sartre does, and that the image of Pierre could be either the consciousness of the real Pierre or the mental conjuring of Pierre. 10 Ricoeur goes on to retrace the characteristics of the image in L'Imaginaire (Psychology of the Imagination) and to show that "inasmuch as relation between absence and unreality still is not clarified, it is difficult to ascribe to two different classes of phenomena (image and fiction) the magic of the quasi-presence and the spontaneity of fiction." 1

Paradoxes such as these have become a staple of Sartre's writing, from the mutually exclusive dynamic of being and nothingness, to the relation between the in-itself and the for-itself, to the contradiction of the fellow- traveler of the Communist Party coexisting with the elitist bourgeois. The spirit of contradiction sets the tone of the film as Sartre is first shown deliv-

8 Michel Contat and Michel Rybalka, The Writings of Jean-Paul Sartre. Vol. I, trans. by Richard C. McCleary (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974), p. 601.

9 Sartre by Himself, p. 26. 10 Paul Ricoeur, "Sartre and Ryle" in The Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre (Open

Court Press, Ill., 1981), p. 173. 11 Ibid., p. 174.

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128 FRENCH REVIEW

ering a lecture on the subject of the bourgeois intellectual (himself) engaged in a seemingly endless study of Flaubert, a writer committed to the "fatal" world of the imaginary.

This brings us to two questions raised by Astruc and Contat's film: 1) why after thirty some years of reflection on the role of the image and the imagina- tion does Sartre limit his remarks on cinema to the few we have collected? and 2) have Contat and Astruc succeeded in making Sartre by Himself more than a mere documentary?

To answer the first question, we must return briefly to Sartre's own analysis of the image. The photograph of Pierre is the analogon which is the physical object serving as a support for the image, which image has the character of nothingness. The same applies to the family of image: caricature, portraits, etc., to the work of art, more problematically to a symphony, and through the "magic of fascination" to fiction. What then would be the nature of the analogon for film? It is not the celluloid frames on a reel produced by an automaton unmediated by man. Our experience of film is not in the projection booth but on the screen. What is projected on the screen is an illuminated field resulting from light shining through a so-called negative. The white screen itself cannot function as an analogon the way the object photograph does. It then would follow, in Sartre's own terms, that film is nothingness. However, when Sartre describes the phenomenon of film he has recourse to a metaphoric language: "that streaming... all reduced to nothing, the delirium of a wall." If the cinema of 1912 was primitive and Sartre loved it for what it lacked, the advent of sound and color has not altered film's nothingness; and the metaphorical quality of Sartre's passage about film in The Words attests to the impossibility of an analogon for film. Could Sartre's philosophical treatise have identified an analogon for film? What can be said about the numerous photographs when they appear on the screen? What has happened to their analogon? It is altogether possible that film theory would have schematized Sartre's philosophy, that it would have seen philosophy as sche- matization. Philosophy therefore acts as a metaphoric enactment of a life (growing up with image).

Film is an index of the impossibility of understanding nothingness, as opposed to understanding being. The experience of film, like the recourse to metaphoric language to describe the image, is therefore both a biographical and an autobiographical index of the intellectual and his opaqueness. In a newly published interview with Sartre, Oreste Pucciani, upon reminding Sartre that in L'Imaginaire, perception and imagination are mutually exclusive, gets the following response: "Yes, but that was too radical. In the 'Flaubert' I have tried to point out that they are often combined, and I have there outlined another theory of the imagination. In this sense it is possible that certain practical totalities include imaginary elements. I have not reflected on that, but it is possible." 12 Sartre managed to avoid focusing philosophically on this

12 Interview with Sartre, reprinted in The Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre, p. 47.

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SARTRE BY HIMSELF 129

century's dominant medium, uniquely capable of simultaneously spatializing time and temporalizing space, as claimed by Panofsky. He in essence admits the impasse and confesses to growing absurd.

This brings us to our second question. Sartre by Himself is not exactly a documentary. It contains documents - photographs and various newsreels of the war years and revolutions - and these follow a special kind of regres- sive-progressive methodology in the three-hour film. It is a film of Sartre, not by Sartre, and thus could rate as a biography. And yet, Sartre speaks extemporaneously of himself in statements uttered by himself, a clearly auto- biographical mode. Furthermore, he is obviously not by himself, as only the English title could ambiguously suggest, but in the company of others whose regard is cast on him at a time when his own was failing, and in anticipation of a broader viewing public. Why should this filmic realization be appropriate to a man whose life was devoted to writing, and to a large extent biographical and autobiographical writing? It shows Sartre "literalizing" himself but in a metaphorical process which is the medium itself in which the two lines, the literal and the metaphorical, are collapsed, just as space and time, perception and imagination, biography and autobiography are neither mutually exclusive nor one and the same.

Astruc's concept of the camdra-stylo suggests film as a new kind of writing, not unlike that found in the modern novel. He is certainly mindful of this characteristic trait of film and, in the treatment of his subject, he provides us a rich dynamic among the four language skills on the one hand (speaking, listening, writing, and reading), and viewing on the other. The film repeatedly exemplifies what Frank McConnell calls the "spoken seen," through the art of conversation, public readings, and voiced-over readings of passages from Nausea and The Words. The act of reading is as crucial as the content of the passage read. Once we adopt that mode of viewing, the otherwise seemingly corny episode of the handwritten definition of contingence serves as a bridge between conventional writing and the new cinematic writing. Sartre attached enormous importance to the act of writing itself. "11 me semble que l'acte d'fcrire, de faire des lettres par des delies, des pleins, des arrondis, etc., c'est la forme de la pens e, ga la rend." 13

It all points to the notion of film as a semiotic technology. McConnell states the following: "to the revolutionary, history-making fissure between spoken and written language, it [film] adds a second fissure, the fissure between language as words and language as the collision between words and the inarticulate matter.., we may now observe that film as writing is the writing of Cartesian space itself. Far from being a non or anti-literary medium, it becomes the most radical of literatures." 14 I do not wish to co-opt the radical

13 Entretien avec Michel Sicard, Obliques, No. 18-19, p. 18. 14 Frank D. McConnell, The Spoken Seen: Film and the Romantic Imagination

(Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), p. 62.

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130 FRENCH REVIEW

Sartre by Descartes, but rather explore the seemingly inexplicable resemblance between the cinema and the intellectual.

Sartre in fact fully acknowledges his Cartesian philosophical lineage and asserts that the cogito is both a basic dictum and a methodology for him. (In the film he makes a comical slip of the tongue "I am therefore I think" which he quickly corrects in an answer to Pouillon.) Astruc is sensitive to this tenet and claimed in a 1948 essay (quoted by McConnell) that "a Descartes of today would already have shut himself up in his bedroom with a 16mm camera and some film, and would be writing his philosophy of film: for his Discours de la Mdthode would today be of such a kind that only the cinema would express it satisfactorily." 15 The locked bedroom is Astruc's modern equivalent of lone- liness, which is a crucial element of Descartes' philosophy. Again, Frank McConnell in a revealing analysis points out that "the central autobiographical passage in the Discourse, at the end of the third section, has a striking relevance to the art of film. There, immediately before launching into his famous restructuring of the world from the central principle of cogito, ergo sum, Descartes narrates how, looking for a scene in which to conduct his intensive and isolating experiments in introspection, he settled upon the de- finitive landscape of modern privacy and isolating materialism, the city: 'I have been able to live as solitary and withdrawn as I would be in the most remote of deserts.' " 16

Similarly, the "trajectory of one single intellectual" begins with a cityscape, not just Paris, but Paris undergoing urban renewal, Pompidou-style, as the voice-over commentator solemnly declares. "He - Pompidou - had decided as had Napoleon III before him, to change the face of Paris." 17 The shots of the Montparnasse tower still under construction, casting its shadow on Sartre's nearby apartment, would be corny indeed, without their deep echo of the Cartesian modern city and its isolating nature within which the existential hero seeks to communicate with other minds through an imperiled language.

Therein lies much of the success of Sartre by Himself. A precocious seven- year old, already capable of reading, once encountered cinema, his non-speaking older sibling. As they conjoined again sixty years later, Sartre, no longer able to read or write, yields to the magic of film and of the "spoken seen," and stars in the "practical totality" where perception and imagination, initially mutually exclusive are combined, in fact.

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

15 Ibid., p. 62. 16 Ibid., p. 46. 17 Sartre by Himself, p. 5.

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