476
PARTISAN REVIEW
de Berg. The technique reminded me of our Ballet Theatre, a perpetual
struggle against-away from-traditional ballet movement. The one
point I wish to make about all this, since you cannot see the ballet
itself, is the extraordinary concentration of talent Paris can put into a
manifestation of this kind, even under present depressed conditions.
There are two things you will be able to see, however, provided Holly–
wood and the French government come to an agreement on the distribu–
tion of American films in this country (the French propose to cut the
number of licenses to be granted to American films in France in order
to protect the French film industry; Hollywood replies by refusing to
release any films here at all; the result is that the French are crying
vainly for our films, and American distributors are refusing to show
French productions) : these are
L'Espoir,
a fragmentary film document
on the Spanish Civil War, conceived and filmed by Andre Malraux,
and
Les Enfants du Paradis.
The latter is a
grande machine,
composed
of two epochs, each of which is a full-length film: the whole is rather
disjointed and frequently badly paced, but informed with a simple
genial-by no means new-idea : a typical romantic theme, a story of
star-crossed lovers, becomes by a kind of involution a film
about
roman–
ticism, so that the reconstitution of the period (in costume, scenery, his–
torical personages etc.) and the deliberate choice of certain stock romantic
characters (the Byronic desperado-poet, Lacenaire, the femme fatale
with one pure love in her life etc.) serve a double purpose-they are
the conditions and the protagonists of the action, and a commentary on
it. The result is a curious rich irony which is felt as a function of the
delicacy and melancholy insight with which the two levels are held
together.
Your proposal that I give you some account of existentialism is em–
barrassing, for this movement seems to have attracted to itself everything
that is most
aliv~
and original in the newer French literature, with the
result, that existentialism is pervasive, subtly nuanced, difficult to define:
rather an element of the Parisian air than a clearcut doctrine. Which,
of course, gives all the more urgency to your curiosity. But please
understand that I don't propose to go to the heart of this matter in a
few chiseled paragraphs and that whenever, in the next few months, I
am moved to discuss young French writers-even such rare and solitary
birds as Queneau, Gracq and Genet-I shall be likely to situate them
with reference to this movement, which seems to be truly central in
Paris now. A few weeks ago, as Paul Valery lay upon his death-bed, Paris–
ians were reading (in
Confluences)
Julien Benda's vigorous attack on
the anti-intellectualist spirit in modern French letters. The indefatigable
Benda is concerned in this article with far more than the existentialist
movement, which he considers only as the latest symptom of a deep–
rooted disease. Benda's chief targets are writers of his own generation:
