Studies in French Cinema Volume 6 Number 1 2006 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/sfci.6.1.

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Dreaming a cinematic dream: Jean Cayrols writings on film

Dorota Ostrowska University of Edinburgh Abstract
Dreams, whose nature is cinematic, provide a fundamental link between Jean Cayrols work in literature and his work in cinema making his novels, scripts and films, as well as his film and literary criticism, into an almost organic totality in which the same aesthetic ideas circulate. Cayrols reading of his experiences in concentration camps, his dreams in particular, puts his writing apart from that of other Holocaust writers and reinforces his membership in the nouveau roman group marked by its active engagement with cinema. His conception of dreams as cinematic also points to surrealism as one of the most important elements to shape his creative imagination. Cayrol is unique among the nouveaux romanciers in extending his work in cinema beyond scriptwriting and directing into film criticism. The literary underpinnings of his conception of cinema outlined in Le Droit du regard challenge the phenomenological dogma of the fifties Cahiers du cinma and foreshadow the linguistic turn in the mid-sixties, making Cayrols writing on cinema a perfect reflection of the contemporary trends in film criticism.

Keywords
Jean Cayrol Alain Resnais surrealism dreams Cahiers du cinma Holocaust

When Jean Cayrol wrote a commentary for Alain Resnaiss documentary Nuit et brouillard/Night and Fog (1955), he was already an established poet, novelist and an editor of a special Seuil collection crire, where he launched the careers of Philippe Sollers, Marcel Pleynet and Jean-Pierre Faye among others. Nuit et brouillard was a film about revisiting Auschwitz, which in 1955 resembled an empty theatre where the bloody performance of the Second World War had ended. The film revives the memory of the past in black and white archival images which are punctuated by the commentary of Jean Cayrol, himself one of the survivors of the horror. Cayrols next involvement with film was a script written for Resnaiss film Muriel ou le temps dun retour/Muriel, or the Time of Return (1963), which can be seen as a sequel to Nuit et brouillard (Cayrol 1963c). The Cayrol-Resnais duo argued that the nature of the survival of atrocity remains the same whether one survives the Second World War or the Algerian War. The memory of Holocaust survivors, or that of young French soldiers returning home from Algeria, buries the images of the violence they witnessed and experienced as either victims or oppressors, and thus language is necessary to dig them up and expose them. Like a tight rope, words connect the past and the present, shape floating images into
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1. Cayrol made short films: On vous parle (1960), La Frontire (1961), Madame se meurt (1961), De tout pour faire un monde (1963), La Desse (1966), Do not disturb=Prire de ne pas dranger (1969) and one full-length feature Le Coup de grce (1965).

sentences, cast them into testimonies and finally bring relief, perhaps even peace, to the minds of their keepers. It was Roland Barthes, writing about Cayrols novel LEspace dune nuit, who pointed out the therapeutic role played by first-person narration, or simply the voice in Cayrols prose (Barthes 1954: 151). The effort to articulate, which the existence of the voice implies, was seen as an expression of the will to move on the crucial moment in the life of camp-survivors, for whom to survive the drama is to live life after the drama (Barthes 1954: 151). The voice narrates the experience of breaking out of the hypnotic spectacle of memories or dreams unfolding in the mind of the camp survivor. At the same time, it is also the basis for a more fragmentary, loose, subjective and impressionistic type of narrative with which Cayrol experimented not only in literature but also in cinema. Cayrols desire to engage with cinema as Resnaiss scriptwriter and eventually a film-maker in his own right, as well as his critical writings on cinema in Le Droit du regard, suggest that the visual medium was particularly important for forging post-Holocaust aesthetics.1 It is because for Cayrol, just like for Christian Metz, cinema and dreams are related signs. For this reason, it is not surprising that Cayrols literary project outlined in Lazare parmi nous has its visual basis in dreams whose nature is cinematic. In The Imaginary Signifier, Metz argued that cinemas signifier (images accompanied by sound and movement) inherently confers on it a certain affinity with the dream, for it coincides directly with one of the major features of the dream signifier, imaged expression, the consideration for representability, to use Freuds term (Metz 1982: 124). Just like Cayrol, Metz also pointed out the narrative function which was a shared feature of the signified in both cinema and dreams (Metz 1982: 125). In many ways then, Cayrols writings about dreams and cinema make them precursors for the arguments developed by Metz in The Imaginary Signifier. In the context of Cayrols own uvre, dreams provide a fundamental link between his work in literature and his work in cinema, making his novels, scripts and films into an almost organic totality in which the same aesthetic ideas circulate.

Between surrealism and new novel

In his critical writings Jean Cayrol envisioned a new type of literary art, which he called the romanesque lazaren. Outlined in two texts Rves lazarens and Pour un romanesque lazaren, which were published in 1950 under the title Lazare parmi nous, the romanesque lazaren proposes new formal solutions to express prisoners dreams and the memories of those who survived. In Pour un romanesque lazaren Cayrol compared a hero of his novels, a concentration camp survivor, to Lazarus, who was miraculously raised from the dead and given a second chance to live. Cayrol focused on the condition of the survivors and their readaptation to post-war reality. Their story was as paradoxical as that of Lazarus who died, was resurrected and carried on with his life. Sidra DeKovan Ezrahi points out that
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Cayrol represented dreams as a source of escape, which provided the last refuge, for the Hftling a kind of maquis to which he [the prisoner] could retreat and find familiar echoes of love, of freedom, and of happiness (Ezrahi 1980: 61). This positive twist present in Cayrols representation of camp dreams distanced him from other testimonial writers who as concentrationary realists represent dreams as a world which has been contaminated by the horrors of present reality (Ezrahi 1980: 61). On the basis of survivors testimonies, Cynthia Haft argues that for most of them dreams were not a relief but rather a source of increased anxiety, as they continued to dream about the horrors of the camps which they had to face alone (Haft 1973: 1234). For Cayrol-prisoner dreams were the source of hope, while for Cayrol-survivor they became the origins of a conception of art that extends across literary fiction and cinema. This creative use of the prisoners experience, and their dreams in particular, puts Cayrols writing apart from that of other Holocaust writers and reinforces his membership of the nouveau roman group. Rves lazarens traces the development and transformation of the dreams experienced by prisoners in concentration camps. As their condition worsened, their dreams changed, taking on different forms, which Cayrol calls rves cellulaires (prison-cell dreams), rves concentrationnaires (camp dreams), rves de salut (dreams of salvation), rvesprojets (dreams about projects), and rves post-concentrationnaires (post-camp dreams). The dreams and memories described by Cayrol in Rves lazarens resemble internal films screened in the prisoners consciousness, which captivate them in the same way that cinema spectators are gripped, enchanted or terrified by film images. The realism of these dreams and memories sometimes prevented the prisoners and survivors from engaging with outside reality and led to even more acute alienation and withdrawal on their part. The necessity of challenging the realist representation of dreams forms the basis for Cayrols critique of the ontological myth of cinema, which emerges in his discussion of the rves lazarens. The romanesque lazaren is an attempt to convey the condition of the prisoners/survivors caught between the external reality of the camp and the internal reality of their minds. It also describes the alienation and distance from external reality of someone who is absorbed by the visual spectacle unfolding in his/her mind (Cayrol 1964: 214). Cayrols choice of dreams as origins of his romanesque lazaren reveals the influence of surrealism. This link is clearly spelled out by Daniel Oster who claimed that Lazare parmi nous was the book in which ndr Bretons A Surrealism became the prisoners daily experience (Oster 1973: 31). The Cayrolian conception of dreams as a fusion of surrealist and cinematic elements was in part a result of influences that shaped his artistic imagination since the very beginning. Although Cayrol was never an active member of the surrealist movement, because, born in 1911, he was much younger than its founders, he was exposed to surrealist poetics from very early on and pointed to surrealism as one of the major influences on his creative
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career. In his autobiography he identified this summer mourning of which spoke the Surrealist poem in his youth as the creative inspiration of Lazare parmi nous (Cayrol 1982: 104). For Daniel Oster, Cayrols poetic imagination is evocative of that of Paul Eluard, in particular his poetic treatment of the night (Oster 1973: 23). Writing about Cayrols novels, which were the creative realization of the programme outlined in Pour un romanesque lazaren, Carlos Lynes compares his prose to a surrealist rcit (Lynes 1962: 186). The cinematic metaphor is no less pervasive than the surrealist one in Cayrols universe. The writer compares creating a literary work to editing a film and claims that he possesses a cinematic state of mind and is an author who carries within himself his personal cinema where he confides his secrets and makes his confessions (Cayrol 1963a: 55, 60). Cayrols artistic vision was thus shaped by a combination of surrealism and cinema, and for this reason the surrealist engagement with cinema could be seen to foreshadow the arguments Cayrol elaborated in Lazare parmi nous. The enthrallment with cinema which Cayrol and surrealists share is present in the identification between dreams and cinema, which is obvious in Cayrols description of rves lazarens. Evocative of painting, music, colour and movement, the dreams are seen as a thrilling symphony whose totalizing effect could only be achieved in cinema, a medium considered to be a synthesis of all arts. The shreds of memory, the song, the old melodies, laments, even the most forgotten fragments would come back in prisoners dreams and contribute to the effect of verisimilitude achieved by the dreams and the creation of the palpable and piercing universe (Cayrol 1950: 40). Dreams would also develop an alternative temporal dimension, which would relate them to cinema the art of time par excellence. The chronological time of the prisoners daily routines and activities was challenged by their dreams, which belonged to a different temporal sphere. Cayrol describes this as this abrupt revelation of the untimely time which was preserved and turned into stone in his dreams which eternalized his being (Cayrol 1950: 18). The description of a dream of Breughels painting, Les Dessous dune table, whose elements began to move in the course of the dream, makes implicit references to the history of the visual arts, especially to the account presented by Andr Malraux, who argued that with cinema western visual art fulfilled its dream of representing movement (Malraux 1996: 410). Although Cayrols dreams have these cinematic characteristics, they are never openly labelled as cinematic. This suggests that Cayrols relationship with cinema might have carried some seeds of frustration, the bitter aftertaste of the surrealists love-hate relationship with the silver screen. As a dream lived in a state of physical wakefulness, cinema seemed to be the source of the purest surrealist experience (Beaujour 1965: 58). For a while, cinema appeared as an alternative to nineteenth-century realist art, the novel in particular, sought by surrealists. Some of the surrealist texts were turned into films: Antonin Artauds La Coquille et le Clergyman/The
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Seashell and the Clergyman (1927), filmed by Germaine Dulac, and Robert Desnoss poem which provided the basis for Man Rays LEtoile de mer/The Starfish (1928). Unfortunately, the difficulty of funding films and the realization of how technical and tedious the actual process of film-making was in comparison to the dream-like freedom offered by film-watching, eventually led to the surrealist disenchantment with cinema and to something of a paradox. Although cinema was supposed to liberate the surrealists from the constraints of literature, in fact it perpetuated the growth of literature as the surrealists produced a plethora of literary texts, mostly scripts and poetry inspired by cinema (Virmaux 1965: 114; Hammond 1978: 5). As these texts were never made into films, some critics, like Virmaux, referred to them as paper cinema (Virmaux 1965: 114). Cinema-inspired dreams in Cayrols Lazare parmi nous could be also seen as belonging to this long line of paper cinema. Just like the surrealists writings about cinema, these dreams ended up having an immediate impact on literary rather than on cinematic art. If Cayrol in some senses looks back to surrealism, he also looks forward to writing practices of the 1950s. Writing belonging to the romanesque lazaren does not engage in any social and psychological portrayal of the characters (Cayrol 1964: 217). Its narrative is not driven by plot, but is marked by numerous descriptions, and special importance is given to objects, which convey the emotional burden of the novel (Cayrol 1964: 219, 2267). In Le Degr zro de lcriture, Barthes continues this argument when he mentions Cayrol among the writers of les critures neutres, for whom the investigation of form is a central concern (Barthes 1953: 910, 30). In other words, Cayrols work displayed all the characteristics of what had by now become the clichd definition of the nouveau roman, such as rejection of plot, the importance of objects and descriptions, and experiments with pronouns linked to an unorthodox treatment of characters whose social and historical origins were unimportant. It was not just this formal investigation into the nature of fiction, but also Cayrols involvement with cinema, which links his career to that of other nouveaux romanciers, especially Alain RobbeGrillet and Marguerite Duras.

, Le Droit du regard, cinema and literature

Cayrols engagement with cinema extended beyond the well-documented creative work of Robbe-Grillet and Duras, and included a unique piece of film criticism, Le Droit du regard, which he co-authored with Claude Durand in 1963. In Le Droit du regard, Cayrol establishes the critical parallel between cinematic images and dreams and translates the romanesque lazaren into the critical language of cinema. This resulted in the aesthetic conception of cinema being underpinned by his ideas about the novel. The literary view of cinema not only connected Cayrol with contemporary film criticism, but also took the Cahiers du cinma ideas to a whole new level by questioning the phenomenological concept of cinema, first proposed by Andr Bazin. As a result, Cayrols criticism prepared the ground for the linguistic-inspired arguments of Christian Metz in the sixties.
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In Le Droit du regard, Cayrol and Durand compared the work of a filmmaker to that of a poet. Cayrol revealed that for him poetry always remained his central interest, whether he was making films, writing poems or prose. He was in the poetic state whether it regarded a novel or cinema (Cayrol 1963a: 58). This suggests that his identity as a writer defines all his works, be it films or novels, as literary endeavours. This literary identity of Cayrol-film theorist, as well as his role in shaping the French cultural scenes in the fifties, are instrumental in orchestrating a linguistic turn in film criticism in mid-sixties. It is important to note that Cayrols arguments were accepted by film critics because his input was regarded as part of a long-standing tradition in French film criticism whereby writers and poets were involved in shaping cinematic aesthetics. In fact, Durand and Cayrol evoke this tradition when they argue that, as film-makers, they were finally able to realize some of the creative dreams of poets and writers such as Nerval and Diderot (Cayrol & Durand 1963: 334). This comparison between the work of a film-maker and that of poets suggests that the latter had already envisioned or dreamt of cinema even before it was invented. Thus understood, cinema is less a new art than an art that has already existed in anticipation. This also implies that Cayrols films are the expression of a certain fantasy of cinema created by writers and poets. At first sight, such a connection between cinema and literature recalls Georges Sadouls argument about the origins of cinema in Histoire gnrale du cinma, which was endorsed by Andr Bazin, and which provided a basis for the ontological myth of cinema outlined in Le Mythe du cinma total (Bazin 1997). According to Bazin, Sadoul believed that the idea of a realistic representation including movement and colour existed long before the technological means were invented to express it (Bazin: 1997: 19). However, Cayrols fantasy is of a different nature, as it is not based on technological advances, but on the creative imagination of artists. This fantasy perhaps predetermines his understanding of cinema to such a degree that he imposes his vision of cinema upon his films. As a result, a completely new type of film and a new type of art could be created, which was infused with a literary idea of cinema and enhanced by it. Thanks to their literary origins, such films could not be treated as pure cinematic works in the way Cahiers critics would have liked. Cayrol describes the characteristics of a new formal language, which can be found in his films. He emphasizes the fact that text and images are interdependent, and that it is by merging the visual and the verbal that new formal structures can be created. Cayrol argues that the text-image relationship is like a metaphor because it is about a transformation of the languages, their union into one immediately understandable and evident (Cayrol & Durand 1963: 91). The reference to this new language as metaphoric is significant because it establishes a degree of equivalence between visual and verbal elements. The vision of the formal structures of cinema implies that literary narrative can become cinematic, not by
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employing the same narrative strategies, but by transforming verbal means into visual ones and vice versa. This seems to erase any essential difference between cinema and literature. Monologues, dialogues and commentaries are at the centre of Cayrols interest in cinema, because they are crucial for creating different temporal dimensions of cinema. Silent cinema is not capable of conveying the actual temporal dimension of the images, which is the time when the recording took place. It is the commentary which makes cinematic temporality more complex and varied because it actualizes images by bringing out the meaning they had for the participants in the recorded events. At first glance, Cayrols view of the cinematic image coincides with that of Gilles Deleuze, for whom the past and the present of the image coexist within the image: the past does not follow the present that it is no longer, it coexists with the present it was (Deleuze 1989: 19). The major difference between Cayrols and Deleuzes concepts of the image is introduced by sound. To put it in Cayrols words, an image cannot be more than the present state of the past: only the language can conjugate (Cayrol & Durand 1963: 20). For Cayrol, commentaries can also re-establish the human aspect of images that show some inhuman and terrifying scenes (Cayrol & Durand 1963: 93). His faith in the clear intentions of the commentary writer is derived from his own experiences both as a prisoner and as an artist. Nevertheless, it is worthwhile to pinpoint some obvious dangers a commentary might entail. The commentary might be able to restore or to emphasize some elements of the images, but it must be remembered that it is mostly selective in nature. It is a particular story that the commentary conveys, a particular perspective on the events that it presents. For this reason, it inevitably compromises some elements of the cinematic images, which it does not highlight. Sometimes, the commentary brings to the attention of the spectators only those elements of the image it is able to convey. This is aptly demonstrated in Chris Markers Lettres de Sibrie/Letter from Siberia (1958), where the same image of a tractor driving down a Siberian road is presented with three different commentaries. The result is that each time the meaning of the image changes, which in the case of Markers film has political and ideological underpinnings; the image of a Soviet worker is at stake here. This example demonstrates that the question of the relationship between text and image is not just an aesthetic or formal question, for it also raises ethical, political and historical issues. It is the complexity of Cayrols project in Nuit et brouillard and Muriel which highlights the interdependence of aesthetics on the one hand and politics, and history on the other with such intensity and diversity. There seems to be at least one way in which the reductive danger associated with the relation between commentaries and images, and the propagandistic potential of the language can be minimized. This is through ensuring the authenticity of commentary on the basis of the identity of the commentary writer. It was Cayrols profile as a committed writer closely
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associated with Les Temps modernes and writing for his age the lazarean age which are the parameters within which the authenticity of Cayrols work in Resnaiss Nuit et brouillard and Muriel should be understood. Jean Cayrols writing has all the immediacy and intensity Jean-Paul Sartre believed to be features of committed literature. Cayrol is unique in that he does not write about the Holocaust experience, which would mean writing about the past, but about the present, the way to live now and here, after returning from the camps. Cayrols writing seems to have its absolute truth within the age and thus it is different from other post-holocaust writing (Sartre 2001: 248). Sartre says that contemporary writing such as Cayrols is an emanation of intersubjectivity, a living bond of rage, hatred or love among those who produce it, and those who receive (Sartre 2001: 248). Such a view of art captures the very essence of the Romanesque lazaren, which was to be the way for a concentration camp survivor to reach out into the world and establish the means of communication with the others. At the heart of the Romanesque lazaren there is a desire for a profound change in the present condition of those who, like camp survivors, live on the margins of the society unable to integrate or participate. In other words, at the centre of Cayrols aesthetics there is a moral imperative that is the raison dtre of his poetry, novels and films. Thus the identity of the scriptwriter appears to be crucial in defining the meaning of the images, a conviction about cinema that Cayrol shares with Alain Resnais. Both of them desired to push the formal boundaries of cinema. Cayrol envisioned cinema as an expression of dreams, the invisible and the unconscious. He emphasized cinemas ability to capture the temporal dimension of the human mind, its dure. It was in particular the workings of the creative imagination that Cayrol and Resnais wanted to convey which consequently made their films self-referential. They agreed that documentaries about painters could be most suitable to achieve such a goal. Resnais realized this objective in his art documentary about the art of Van Gogh (1948). Cayrol, like Resnais, believed that montage was the method of achieving in cinema the effect he envisioned, because montage is an invention of a reality different from the world on the level of the concept (Cayrol & Durand 1963: 57). Montage offers cinema an opportunity to change or to transform existing reality in the most fundamental sense, that of concepts or more widely ideology. This transformation is related to the distancing role of art and its capacity to create a sense of estrangement from familiar objects (Cayrol & Durand 1963: 77). Resnaiss Muriel and Nuit et brouillard clearly shared Cayrols commitment to formal experiment which was linked to an ethical project concerned with a more truthful representation of war. In Tmoignage et littrature Cayrol points to the dangers of what can be called the mediatisation of the concentration camp experience, which led to images of the concentration camps becoming increasingly commercialized. Cayrol feared that, as a result, their authenticity would be compromised, if not
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irrevocably lost as a concentration camp will become an image, a fiction, a fairly tale (Cayrol 1953: 575). Cayrol was concerned that the representation of the concentration camp experience was being reduced to a number of clichd images. Resnaiss views echoed those of Cayrol when he remarked that the images of war crimes and concentration camps were becoming banal. This danger was his motivation for becoming involved in artistic projects about the Second World War and the Algerian War (Resnais 1963: 9). Resnais ended up justifying his formal experiment in the same way Cayrol did by ensuring the authenticity of his work on the level of the commentary and on the level of the images. The film-maker agreed to make Nuit et brouillard on the condition that the script was written by a true camp survivor. Like Cayrol, Resnais emphasizes the importance of the commentary for the signification of images. For him, in Muriel, Bernards confession gives meaning to the images of Algerian war atrocities. It is with words that he evokes an image of Muriel. In the film where Resnais said that Muriel appeared among ink stains we only know Muriel through Bernards story but never actually see her on screen (Resnais 1963: 9). In Nuit et brouillard the commentary gives meaning to the formal experiments of the film by exploring relationships between different types of images. The images of the past (in black and white) and of the present (in colour) are juxtaposed. Cayrols commentary not only actualizes the past images with his commentary, but also breaks the seamless representation of the camps as they are at present (Resnais cited in Insdorf 1989: 40). Resnais also implies a great degree of coincidence or overlap between the images and the commentary, which reveals his allegiance to Cayrols interpretation of the relationship between text and image. For him, there is no great difference but simply a deep connection between the confession and the images, because the dramatic force of the confession comes from the images which are calm and thus oppressive (Resnais 1963: 9). Resnais accepts the Cayrolian terms for the translation of the visual into the verbal. This was a position accepted by some Cahiers critics, but not by others, and their positions demonstrate the tensions within the journal with regard to the status of the literary.

Cahiers and the problems of auteurism

The Cahiers critics, as we mentioned above, chose to ignore the degree to which Resnaiss own understanding of cinema was marked by his literary collaborators. Instead, they emphasized the visual aspect of his films as the mark of Resnaiss authorship. Jean-Louis Comolli and Franois Truffaut focus on Resnaiss visual style, arguing that it has an essential quality that can be identified in all his films. In this, they echoe the arguments about mise en scne implicit within the politique des auteurs. For Truffaut, Nuit et brouillard captures some unique aesthetic quality of cinema, and for this reason Nuit et brouillard is the film and all others are nothing but film scraps (Truffaut 1956: 30). In Comollis opinion, Muriel is Resnaiss most
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beautiful film; the only one; and others, if you wish, are nothing but a draft, a sketch, an ad (Comolli 1963c: 30). Resnais is credited for the final shape of the film, while the role of the scriptwriter, Cayrol, is ignored. As Comolli explains, the script is not capable of giving the same richness and complexity in the presentation of the characters, their lives and goals, as the film does in its final version (Comolli 1963c: 30). Furthermore, Comollis reading of Bernard, the central character Muriel, as Resnaiss alter ego further diminishes the role of the scriptwriter, and makes Resnais responsible not only for the visual, but also for the verbal element of the film (Comolli 1963b: 25), as it is Bernard who tells the story to accompany the images of Algerian war crimes. Comolli was contesting new trends present in the Cahiers which were already being expressed by such critics as Michel Delahaye, who described Muriel as diachronic, analytical, paradigmatic, structural and thus modern (Delahaye 1963: 42). It was the same Delahaye who had supported Cayrol a few years earlier. After the release of the first short film, which Cayrol directed with Claude Durand, On vous parle (1960) Michel Delahaye published an artistic profile of Cayrol in the Cahiers du cinma (Delahaye 1960: 52). The article consists largely of quotations from Cayrol explaining the terms of his involvement with cinema. Delahaye could safely give voice to Cayrol, because the writers conception of cinema coincided with that upheld by the 1950s Cahiers critics with their politique des auteurs and the Nouvelle Vague film-makers. Cayrol uses Cahiers rhetoric about the auteur to explain his project in cinema. This project is a quest for beauty, which takes time to emerge and achieve its full effect. Only a cinema auteur, unconcerned with the waste of time and resources but determined to find his/her own style, can succeed in unearthing latent beauty through images. Delahaye reminds us that Cayrol boards the cinema train on the same ticket as the whole Nouvelle Vague group with no experience required boldly written on it. He belongs to those who prove that cinema nowadays is no longer just for experts, it also belongs to inventors who invent reality using cinematic means (Delahaye 1960: 52). Cayrol already a film-maker and a scriptwriter for Resnaiss films was recognized by some of the Cahiers critics as a kindred spirit. The warm welcome Cayrol had received as a film-maker in the Cahiers du cinma contrasted with Comollis uncompromising attack on Cayrol as film critic a few years later. Comolli judged Le Droit du regard as useless, beyond stupidity and condemned the book as this absurd and scornful effort to reinvent mise en scne (Comolli 1963a: 30). The only reason for such attack appears to be the underlying argument in Le Droit du regard, which, as we have seen, made explicit the connection between the conception of cinema promoted by the Cahiers and literature. The argument of Le Droit du regard was understood as an attempt on the part of writers to reveal the central taboo of the Cahiers critical discourse its literary roots leading to this badtempered counter-attack.
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Comollis deliberate overlooking of Cayrols impact on the development of Resnaiss creative vision, and his attack on Le Droit du regard, clearly function to deny the importance of writers in cinema and the presence of literary elements in film criticism at a time when criticism was belatedly moving to embrace modernist forms in cinema while drawing on structuralist and semiotic discourses. Paradoxically, both of these discourses had their origins in linguistics (and more generally literature) in the same way that the politique des auteurs was inspired by literary models and driven by the ambition of film critics to obtain for cinema the cultural status and recognition enjoyed by literature. As I argue elsewhere, one of the main features of Cahiers criticism was an explicit effort to distance it from literary models (as can be seen in the denial of the role of the scriptwriters in Truffauts well-known 1954 article (Truffaut 1954), but evoking these models implicitly by appealing to the vision of the director as an auteur, a camera as a pen, a film as a personal diary, etc. (Ostrowska 2002; Truffaut 1954; Astruc 1948). Hence, the responses to Muriel and earlier to Cayrols documentary films and to his book of film criticism are marked by these tense and complex relationships that film criticism entertained with literature. References
Astruc, A. (1948), Naissance dune nouvelle avant-garde: la camra-stylo, cran Franais, 144, p. 5. Barthes, R. (1953), Le Degr zro de lcriture, Paris: Gallimard. (1954), Jean Cayrol: LEspace dune nuit, Esprit, 8, pp. 1502. Bazin, A. (1997), Le Mythe du cinma total, Quest-ce que le cinma?, Paris: Cerf, pp. 1924. Essay first published 1958. Beaujour, M. (1965), Surralisme ou cinma, Surralisme et cinma (1) tudes cinmatographiques, 3839, pp. 5763. Cayrol, J. (1982), Il tait une fois Jean Cayrol, Paris: Seuil. (1950), Les Rves concentrationnaires, Lazare parmi nous, Paris: Seuil, pp. 1566. Essay first published 1948. (1953), Tmoignage et littrature, Esprit, 4, pp. 57578. (1963a), La littrature, aujourdhui V, Tel Quel, 13, pp. 5060. (1963b), Muriel: Alain Resnais et Jean Cayrol en questions devant leur film Venise, Les Lettres franaises, 993, p. 9. (1963c), Muriel: Cin-roman, Paris: Seuil. (1964), Pour un romanesque lazaren, Les Corps trangers, Paris: Union Gnrale dEditions, pp. 199229. Essay first published 1950. Cayrol, J., & Durand, C. (1963), Le Droit du regard, Paris: Seuil. Comolli, J.-L. (1963a), Le Droit du regard, Cahiers du cinma, 145, pp. 2930. (1963b), Les Malheurs de Muriel, Cahiers du cinma, 149, pp. 2034. (1963c), Muriel ou le temps dun retour, Cahiers du cinma, 148, pp. 301. Delahaye, M. (1960), Cayrol, Cahiers du cinma, 111, p. 52.

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 (1963), Deux ples dune modernit, Cahiers du cinma, 147, p. 42. Deleuze, G. (1989), Cinema 2: The Time-image, London: Athlone. Ezrahi, S. D. (1980), By Words Alone: The Holocaust in Literature, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Haft, C. (1973), The Theme of Nazi Concentration Camps in French Literature, The Hague: Mouton & Co. Hammond, P. (1978), The Shadow and its Shadow: Surrealist Writings on Cinema, London: BFI. Insdorf, A. (1989), Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lynes, C. (1962), Jean Cayrol, in J. Cruickshank (ed.), The Novelist as Philosopher: Studies in French Fiction 19351960, London: Oxford University Press. Malraux, A. (1996), Esquisse dune psychologie du cinma, La Nouvelle Revue Franaise, 520, pp. 419. Essay first published 1946. Metz, Ch. (1982), The Imaginary Signifier, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Oster, D. (1973), Jean Cayrol, Paris: Seghers. Ostrowska, D. (2002), Parallel paths to self-discovery: a comparative history of the critical discourses of the nouveau roman and the Nouvelle Vague 19511967, unpublished thesis, University of Oxford. Resnais, A. (1963), Muriel: Alain Resnais et Jean Cayrol en question devant leur film Venise, Les Lettres franaises, 993, p. 9. Sartre, J.-P. (2001), What is Literature?, London: Routledge. Truffaut, F. (1954), Une certaine tendance du cinma franais, Cahiers du cinma, 31, pp. 1528. Truffaut, F. (1956), Nuit et brouillard, Cahiers du cinma, 56, p. 30. Virmaux, A. (1965), Une promesse mal tenue: le film surraliste (19241932), Surralisme et cinma (1) tudes cinmatographiques, 3839, pp. 10333.

Suggested citation
Ostrowska, D. (2006), Dreaming a cinematic dream: Jean Cayrols writings on film, Studies in French Cinema 6: 1, pp. 1728 , doi: 10.1386/sfci.6.1.17/1

Contributor details
Dorota Ostrowska is a lecturer in film studies in the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures at the University of Edinburgh. She is currently co-editing European Cinemas in the Television Age for Edinburgh University Press. Contact: School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures, University of Edinburgh, George Square, David Hume Tower, Edinburgh, Scotland. EH8 9JX. E-mail: dorota.ostrowska@ed.ac.uk

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Dorota Ostrowska