Cinémalraux: essai sur l’œuvre d’André Malraux au cinéma by Jean-Louis Jeannelle (review)

Jean-Louis Jeannelle’s latest book is a companion work to his earlier monograph, Films sans images (Paris: Seuil, 2015; see French Studies, 70 (2016), 287), about the ‘cinematic inadaptations’ of André Malraux’s La Condition humaine. The ambitions of this new study are much larger in scope and should interest a readership beyond Malraux specialists. Jeannelle breaks new ground for Malraux scholars, expertly synthesizing previous scholarship on Malraux’s relationship to cinema, and opening new lines of enquiry. In addition, he demonstrates that Malraux’s various engagements with cinema as a novelist, essayist, screenwriter, filmmaker, theoretician, cultural minister, and patron of the arts reveal him as a crucial intellectual who theorized audiovisual technologies and the relationship between cinema and literature. Chapter 1 reconsiders the long-remarked cinematic qualities of Malraux’s novels, showing how they are not a simple question of influence, sympathy, or equivalence between the two media, but rather the result of a preoccupation with narrative time and images that Malraux shared with other twentieth-century writers and filmmakers. In Chapter 2, Jeannelle examines Malraux’s only completed film as writer and director: the adaptation of his 1937 novel L’Espoir (1945). Here, Jeannelle argues that the film represents an early example of post-war conceptions of cinematic modernism in its focus on sensation and image rather than action and narrative. In Chapter 3, Jeannelle complicates received ideas about Malraux’s divisive relationship with the filmmaking community during the 1960s through a nuanced assessment of Malraux’s contributions to cinema during his time as cultural minister. Jeannelle turns in Chapter 4 to Malraux’s Antimémoires in order to study what he calls, following Musset, ‘scénarios dans un fauteuil’ (p. 152), or screenplays written to be read rather than transposed to the screen, as a way of arguing for the persistence of Malraux’s interest in the ‘farfelu’ (p. 153), found in his early writings from the 1920s. Chapter 5 studies the relationships between Malraux’s post-war writings about art history, especially his notion of the imaginary museum, and films about art, including films adapted from his writings and others by Henri-Georges Clouzot and Alain Resnais. The final chapter, which also functions as a conclusion, charts Malraux’s virtual filmography, taking into account the adaptations and inadaptations of his writings. Jeannelle ultimately concludes that Malraux’s diverse body of work requires a mode of ‘entrelecture’ (p. 227) that enables the connections between novels, screenplays, and film projects to come into view. Jeanelle’s book extends André Bazin’s famous thesis about cinema’s impurity into a practice of intermedial reading for artists and intellectuals, such as Malraux, who refused to limit their consumption, production, and promotion of culture to a single medium or dominant mode. The book is remarkable for its attentiveness to the details of Malraux’s writings and biography, and for the striking ways it connects these details to larger trends in French cultural history.