Educational Media Reviews Online

Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre are iconic, if controversial, figures in twentieth-century French intellectual circles. Their works explained and demonstrated existential themes of free will and individual anxiety, often through explicit or disguised autobiographical content. They wrote fiction and non-fiction: he was a philosopher, novelist, biographer, literary and political critic, author of plays and screenplays; she wrote novels, autobiographies, essays on politics and feminism, and was a philosopher who wrote on ethics. Their relationship was complex, intriguing and certainly unconventional, beginning in 1929 and continuing until his death in 1980. They were at times lovers but always confidants who depended on each other for personal and scholarly affirmation. They did not collaborate but worked side by side and read and critiqued each others’ work. The intellectual underpinning of their bond was always strong enough to overcome the unconventional and often unseemly interrelated personal and intellectual relationships and affairs they had together and with others. Indeed, they made a pact that they would always be free to love others but that they would tell each other everything. From what we know from their writings and since the publication of their letters after their deaths, apparently they did.

Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir is a one-hour documentary that promises to take viewers behind the scenes of one of the most dynamic and intriguing intellectual relationships of the twentieth century. De Beauvoir was right when she called it a “time capsule,” since it is only now, thirty-eight years after it was made for Radio-Canada and at the 100-year anniversary of Sartre’s birth, that it is released on video. It is a glimpse of the famous existentialist couple for their fans, more than an analysis of their thinking or an objective view of their lives. Having refused similar invitations from French television, this was their first filmed interview together and they say they agreed to do it out of friendship for their readers and the two interviewers: both long-time admirers, Madeleine Gobeil, Canadian journalist and later academic, who had corresponded with de Beauvoir since she was fifteen and would remain a close friend until de Beauvoir’s death in 1986; and Claude Lanzmann, best known today for Shoah, his powerful and controversial film on the Holocaust, who was then a collaborator on Sartre and de Beauvoir’s journal, Les temps modernes, and a former lover of de Beauvoir. It is crafted to portray Sartre and de Beauvoir as politically committed intellectuals--with images of their desks cluttered with letters, papers and manuscripts (and Sartre’s cigarette lighter). It also provides some insights into Sartre and de Beauvoir as they reach their sixth decade and, perhaps, want to together answer critics and voice for posterity their reflections on their writings and their activism.

From the vantage point of 1967, at the age of sixty-two, Sartre talks about the contradictions intellectuals face between theory and political action. He lays out his beliefs that the role of the intellectual is to be an activist as well as theorist and articulates his anti-imperialism, his opposition to American interference in Vietnam and his participation in the Russell Tribunal. In a later segment, he responds to critics who refer to him as a relic to a past age and no longer relevant for present-day France, noting with satisfaction that he is still considered the last of the great thinkers of the nineteenth and even his own century. Sartre explains his refusal of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1964 from within the context of his theoretical construction that seeks to discard individual traits, talents and distinctions and argues that only by being “anyone” can a person speak for all. Other sources have attributed his refusal of the prize to his rejection of a bourgeois recognition that would put him within the middle class mainstream.

Simone de Beauvoir is initially cast in the role of guide to the physical traces of their past. We tour her apartment, “a museum of her life.” When she says that “artifacts and souvenirs are meant to preserve the present” we think that perhaps this film can be viewed as meant for just that. She then leads Madeleine Gobeil on a tour of the neighborhoods where she and Sartre grew up and the cafés in St-Germain-des-Prés where they and the Existentialists spent their days meeting and working during and after the Second World War. The documentary also attempts to connect us to their personal lives and their routine of working everyday separately but then meeting, talking and working together daily. They have done this for more than thirty-five years. It is only marginally successful at this. It is when asked about her most important sociological, political, and philosophical study, the groundbreaking The Second Sex (1949), and the condition of women that de Beauvoir becomes especially animated. She passionately articulates an anti-capitalist analysis of the oppression of women. Her response, though, is time-bound because she asserts that the women’s movement was not gaining ground in the 1960s. With the benefit of hindsight, we now realize that she was too pessimistic and that deeper forces were bringing change and that in the following year the events of May 1968 would help accelerate the process. She, like Sartre, became politicized after the war, but only in the 1970s, after this interview, did she become fully engaged in the feminist movement.

De Beauvoir is also given the opportunity to respond to critics who dismiss her work because she is “incomplete” since she never had a child and thus not fully qualified to address women’s emancipation, criticisms too sexist to be uttered today. She demolishes the assertion and defends that there are many ways for women to live their lives that are “natural”: and that one must feel unfulfilled to feel incomplete—she does not. She reflects that her life has been successful, but that as she enters older age that she, like anyone, is never completely satisfied. Then, tellingly, she says, “In youth you simply want to be somebody, then eventually you realize you are that somebody and nothing else.” Sartre, who is not as forthcoming, says he wasn’t concerned about happiness, he just wanted to do something important and now the public must decide his relevance. He recognizes, though, that “…old age brings impossibilities.”

Apart from these not very illuminating insights, the value of the film for contemporary students is regrettably limited. Certainly it offers rare footage of Sartre and de Beauvoir together along with moments of interaction between the two: black-and-white images of each of them chain-smoking, coughing and answering questions cogently whilst clearly being a little put out with the whole process (the camera catches de Beauvoir surreptitiously looking at her watch). But the interviews reveal little or nothing that was not known at the time. Its interviewers do not probe for they are admirers of both rather than independent journalists. Its timing is also unfortunate: the interview would likely have been different had it been made a year later in 1968 following Sartre’s largely unsuccessful attempt to play a role in May events in Paris. This documentary, then, is a prisoner of the circumstances that created it and viewers expecting to learn about Sartre and de Beauvoir’s relationship will be disappointed: images of them walking the streets of Paris together is no substitute for a discussion of how they influenced each other’s work. The film, in fact, hides more than it reveals. It has one scene with Sartre and his secretary, who is also his recently adopted daughter, playing the piano. The scene ostensibly shows Sartre’s love for music; it hides—but still manages to suggest despite itself—their previous sexual relationship. Besides, these interviews passively accept the commonly held idea that Sartre was the greater philosopher and intellect of the two—a depiction that de Beauvoir herself insisted upon (she called herself his disciple) throughout her life. But scholarship after their deaths and based on their letters suggest a greater influence on his work—in particular on Being and Nothingness (1943)—than was previously thought, and she has come to be regarded as a great thinker and philosopher in her own right. It is telling, then, that de Beauvoir, author of the feminist classic, The Second Sex, accepted a position in Sartre’s intellectual shadow.