a child Sartre had appreciated, speaks to its moral duties: the victory of
virtue over vice, of heroism and justice over cowardice and villainy. The
scenarios resemble some of La Fontaine’s fables: the moral is only
implicit but even the blind can discern it without effort.
One senses in the spirit of this short essay not only the resonance
that Sartre felt for this new art form, but also the great esteem in which
he held it. Beauvoir once observed that Sartre considered the seventh
art almost on a par with great literature.^3 So it was in the most solid
pedagogical spirit (though not without a soupc ̧on of innocent malice)
that the junior member of the faculty took it upon himself to deliver his
initial major address on the topic of the movies.
Published subsequently as a school brochure, “Motion Picture Art”
repeats and develops many of the points made in Sartre’s previous essay,
but it does so in a spirit of collegiality, even conspiracy with the students
in the audience. After conceding that their parents’ generation will not
appreciate or even experience much of the promise of this lively art, he
addressed the students, referring to the films as “your art.” It is the very
plebeian nature of the movie house – people talk, laugh and eat there –
that offends the “refined” classes and, in no small part, attracts Sartre’s
loyalty. He cited Anatole France, not one of his favorite authors, who was
so enamored of the theater, to the effect that “The motion picture
materializes the worst ideals of the masses...The end of the world is
not in the balance, but the end of civilization is.”^4
This and what follows exhibit his basic thought and will figure in
his remarks on cinema and theater in later years (seeST 58 – 76 ). Sartre
briefly underscored several points made in the previous essay. The aim of
the arts of movement is to enable us to “feel” the irreversibility of time –
that same necessity and “free” inevitability that formed the background
of Sartre’s childhood experience of contingency as he left the theater.
Science can conceptualize that experience, Sartre admits, but it cannot
reproduce it. And we can barely sustain an extended encounter with the
experiences of tragedy or fate. As Sartre reflects: “there is something
fatal in melody. The notes composing it crowd in upon and govern one
(^3) Prime 54.
(^4) Michel Contat and Michel Rybalka (eds.),The Writings of Jean-Paul Sartre, 2 vols. (Evanston,
IL: Northwestern University Press, 1974 ),ii: 55 ; hereafter Contat and Rybalka, with volume
and page.
The movies without apologies 49