Educational Media Reviews Online

This brief documentary about Albert Camus begins with portions of his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957, and then goes back to 1938 Algeria, where Camus’ journalism career began, slowly tracking forward through his move to France during World War II and his joining of the French Resistance, and his various writings during and after the war (novels, essays, translations of plays), to arrive back at the time of his Nobel Prize again. The documentary uses extensive and effective black-and-white footage of the man, where he lived in Algeria and France, and other footage of the political situations he lived through and was often outspoken on. Dramatic readings of letters to friends and other philosophers and writers are employed to good effect alongside color shots of Algeria and France now. Interviews with Camus scholars and a few of his friends, as well as a few people who worked directly with Camus at a newspaper, give an impression of the ripple effect his columns and articles made at the time. All this is standard documentary fare. A nice standout in the documentary are the extensive quotations from various articles by Camus, which do illuminate his clear thinking, precise language, and deep convictions.

However, the narration behind the images is done is second-person, addressing Camus as “you” and resulting in the disturbing effect of making the documentary seem more like an episode of “This is Your Life” instead of a film trying to introduce Camus to a modern audience. Reinforcing this impression is the decision to not present his most well-known works (The Plague, The Stranger, The Myth of Sisyphus.) as anything more than a sentence or two of dry summary, with no thematic discussion outside how they were informed by his first career as a journalist or how they advanced his status in literary society. This makes the film completely limited to an audience which already knows about/has read Camus’ work, excising any usefulness for anyone below a college level, and even then not for a general audience. While excellent in presenting Camus as a strong-minded and courageous journalist in his day, the documentary doesn’t make an effort to explain why Camus is an important figure to journalism, or to literature, overall, or what relevance Camus has to journalism or literature today. It is concerned with the biographical history of a unique, gifted man living in dangerous times, but with a very limited biographical history that assumes its audience is already well aware of why the man is unique and gifted.