Sartre by Himself: Film as Biography and Autobiography

Author(s): Gerald Honigsblum

Source: The French Review. Special Issue, Vol. 55, No. 7, Sartre and Biography (Summer, 1982),
pp. 123-130
Published by: American Association of Teachers of French
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/487507 .
Accessed: 22/05/2014 07:38
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
.
American Association of Teachers of French is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend
access to The French Review. Special Issue.
http://www.jstor.org
This content downloaded from 147.46.33.59 on Thu, 22 May 2014 07:38:23 AM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
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
This content downloaded from 147.46.33.59 on Thu, 22 May 2014 07:38:23 AM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
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
This content downloaded from 147.46.33.59 on Thu, 22 May 2014 07:38:23 AM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
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.
This content downloaded from 147.46.33.59 on Thu, 22 May 2014 07:38:23 AM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
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.
This content downloaded from 147.46.33.59 on Thu, 22 May 2014 07:38:23 AM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
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.
This content downloaded from 147.46.33.59 on Thu, 22 May 2014 07:38:23 AM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
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.
This content downloaded from 147.46.33.59 on Thu, 22 May 2014 07:38:23 AM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
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.
This content downloaded from 147.46.33.59 on Thu, 22 May 2014 07:38:23 AM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
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.
This content downloaded from 147.46.33.59 on Thu, 22 May 2014 07:38:23 AM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions