Sartre and Cinema: The Grammar of Commitment

I. Medium of Exchange

Even before his release from prison camp at Baccarat, Jean-Paul Sartre was worried about money. At first, there was a backlog of funds being held for him at Nouvelle Revue Française--"12,855 francs; I said: twelve thousand eight hundred fifty-five francs." ¹ Although that would be enough to hold him and Beauvoir for some time, Sartre had to face again the prospect of earning a living by teaching. Once back at the lycée, and in between prayers for Allied bombing raids that would at least interrupt his classes (QM 264), he adopted a twofold strategy. First, he determined to make a great deal of money as quickly as possible by writing screenplays for Pathé. Second, during the window of financial opportunity this afforded him, he would ratchet up his own literary production, intensifying his self-exploitation through the use of amphetamines.

In the summer of 1943, when he was finishing the first draft of the screenplay for The Chips are Down (Les Jeux sont faits) he received a payment of FF37,500, with the promise of more to come. "So there is a strong chance," he wrote Beauvoir. "Truly we'll be able to say piss off to the alma mater" (QM 256). Although The Chips are Down was accepted, it was not until In the Mesh (L'Engrenage) (see figure 1) was also taken by Pathé that Sartre and Beauvoir were on "easy street." ² Still, the strategy was largely successful, and in its wake, critics have ignored Sartre's early work on the cinema, assuming it was little more than a way out of the academy. (The Freud Scenario, fifteen years away, has been an exception.) The strictly pecuniary motives behind Sartre's first screenplays combined with his later disavowals to erase them from the critical radar. He stressed that The Chips are Down was not "existentialist," and he ordered his name removed from the credits for The Proud Ones (Les Orgueilleux) (as he later but more publicly did on Freud). As for In the Mesh, it was never produced, and the publication of its screenplay in 1948, at the height of the Sartre boom, went largely unnoticed. All in all, as his bio-bibliographers Contat and Rybalka put it, "His relationships with the movies have been . . . unfortunate because almost all the adaptations of his works or original scripts have been, according to an expression which is no doubt excessive but is Sartre's own, lamentable failures." ³

The critical neglect notwithstanding, the mid-forties were a period when Sartre's longheld affection for movies--"we love the cinema" he declared in his first public lecture ⁴ --joined his novels, philosophy, political essays and work for the legitimate theater in a multimedia assault. And like other elements of the Sartre enterprise, he surrounded the screenplays with criticism, some journalism and repeated attempts at a theorization. I want to focus on that last aspect here, tracing out a notion of repetition or iteration that itself recurs in Sartre's cinematic writing of the forties. What he makes of repetition--grammatically, narratively, politically--constitutes, I argue, one of the places we can best understand the movement from ontology (Being and Nothingness, 1943) to cultural politics (What is Literature?, 1947). Sartre's episodic writing for and about film reveals a shift from attention to film as a medium to its political-narrative possibilities and then to the production system behind it. The writing about film, however, does more than merely shadow the overall path of Sartre's concerns. In these avowedly extraneous efforts Sartre accomplishes the transitions between the major zones of his theoretical concerns and formulates what might have been a decisive account of the relationship between the artist and the work had he been able to take it to heart. Finally, this complex negotiation with film sheds fresh light on the lingering assumption that Sartre "avoids" "the problem of language" in...