(Merci au traducteur David Walker)
Jacques Demange, The 2025 version of L’Étranger, by François Ozon. The adaptation and the working of time.
This latest transposition of Camus’s novel to the big screen prompts a reflection on the relations between the written word and the filmed image with regard to different temporal problematics. How to film time? How to capture its movement? Between the function of dual framing and the problematics of becoming, these questions take on an essential form in Ozon’s film, and invite us to re-read Camus’ text in the light of new perspectives at the intersection of philosophy and politics.
Christophe Longbois-Canil, Camus, art-critic.
Albert Camus did not write much about art although he was always preoccupied with artistic questions. On the basis of certain texts, mainly written between 1934 and 1939, it is possible to circumscribe the way in which the Algerian writer understood art, whether from a stylistic, methodological or aesthetic point of view. Contrary to the majority of critics of the time, his approach to art derived from a classical tradition revived through contact with romanticism and which reveals intimate convictions mingling aesthetics and politics. Close to the ideas developed in L’Homme révolté, for Camus art is a revolt, a way of contemplating and fully inhabiting the world.
Nathalie Debrauwere-Miller, The actor : paradox of the intruder.
For Camus, theatre extends beyond a simple art form to become an existential space in which the human condition is replayed. This study analyses the figure of the actor, whose body and voice give concrete form to thought. Starting with ‘La Comédie’ in Le Mythe de Sisyphe, the rôle of the actor is envisaged as a tragic but necessary ‘intruder’; a bridge to truth and an ethical conduit, he is caught up in the paradox of being at one and the same time himself and another, embodying lasting realities in the ephemeral. Thus the stage becomes a site of lucid split personality, combining otherness, revolt and solidarity. This essay shows that the power of theatre lies in the fertile contradiction, at the intersection of philosophical abstraction and the sensual experience of scenic being, a point which reveals a thought born of the tension between the body offered up, the voice projected, and consciousness awakened.
Nathalie Debrauwere-Miller, « El actor : la paradoja del « intruso » »
En la obra de Albert Camus, el teatro trasciende la simple forma artística para convertirse en un espacio existencial donde se representa la condición humana. Este estudio analiza la figura del actor, cuyo cuerpo y voz materializan el pensamiento. A partir de «La Comedia» en El mito de Sísifo, el papel del actor se considera como un «intruso» trágico pero necesario; transmisor de la verdad y mediador ético, se ve envuelto en la paradoja de ser simultáneamente uno mismo y otro, encarnando en lo efímero realidades duraderas. El escenario se convierte así en un lugar de desdoblamiento lúcido, que mezcla alteridad, rebelión y solidaridad. El ensayo muestra que la potencia del teatro reside en este fértil contrasentido, en la encrucijada entre la abstracción filosófica y la experiencia sensible de la vida escénica, donde se revela un pensamiento nacido de la tensión entre el cuerpo expuesto, la voz proyectada y la conciencia despierta.
Malo Maleszka, “Accepting a whole-hearted Misunderstanding”. Staging the self in the letters of Casares to Camus.
The enthusiastic reception of the correspondence between Albert Camus and Maria Casarès did not dwell on the actress’s writing, which was sometimes appreciated but rarely debated. This paper analyses Casarès’s letters to Camus as pragmatic acts of communication, but also as original literary works. Behind her repeated denial of any literary ambition, Casarès excels in the variation of registers, from the most prosaic remarks to lyrical outbursts, often within the same letter. In her correspondence with the writer, she constructs a theatrical persona, entirely focused on a single audience: her lover, who is also her director. Beyond their forbidden love, the letters reveal a close artistic relationship, which does not replace passionate declarations, but rather overlaps with them. From the offstage setting of the epistolary text, Casarès narrates the performances of the plays to their author, kept away by illness, in a staging of herself that blends interpreter and character, lover and playwright. Casarès’s fidelity to Dora from Les Justes becomes a way of transposing her fidelity to Camus onto the stage and into the text, in order to renegotiate their separation. Camus’s theatrical work thus becomes an interpretative matrix applicable to the actress’s writings, which oscillate between self-writing and the fictionalisation of the epistolary relationship.
Christian Phéline, « The trams run in the streets, all the same.” Characters confronting community life.
Travelling by tram is often evoked by Camus, whether as a metaphor for the destiny of most people, or in a more realist manner as in the account of the Sunday that Meursault spends in Belcourt, or of Jacques Cormery’s daily return journey to and from the lycée. The observation of the town and its inhabitants signifies in the first case an indifference to ordinary habits, whereas for the other, an initiation into social and ethnic otherness or his burgeoning virility, and his anguish as a link to his mother might be stretched thin.
Marcelle Mahasela, Albert Camus’s Provence. A staging post or a land called home ?
Numerous colloquia and publications investigate the relationship between Camus and a given territory: Camus and America, Camus and Europe, Camus amidst the Resistance in the Massif Central, Camus and the Mediterranean, where distinctions are drawn between the numerous shorelines bordering this sea and its lands: Spain, Italy, Greece, Algeria, – while the regular presence of Provence is not highlighted. What does this region represent for the young Camus who discovered it in the twenties and thirties through books and art before regularly residing there, making frequent return journeys to the capital? On this territory comprising diverse spaces from the sea to the mountains where circulate an intense light and a powerful wind, small flocks and a few free men, he rediscovers the enduring soul of Antiquity. His notebook entries, his correspondence and his works portray through successive brush-strokes the landscapes and the villages teeming in the Provençal countryside, where he says he receives and accepts the offering of calm and equilibrium.