Found on the Web: Albert Camus

While preparing my philosophy course last fall, I came across (and used in class) this marvelous clip of Albert Camus appearing on French television on January 28, 1959, to talk about the dramatic adaption of Dostoevsky's The Possessed (which I am currently reading in the Pevear/Volokhonsky translation, Demons) that he both wrote and was directing. Camus was legendarily a good man and a charmer, and those qualities come across strongly and very appealingly here. He somehow manages to combine confidence with an unassuming air - notice his slight but bewitching smile, especially when he talks about the interests he shares with Dostoevsky, as if to apologize (but not really) for making the comparison. (At this point, Camus was already and deservedly a Nobel Prize winner, the second-youngest Literature winner ever.) Camus's comments on The Possessed are thoroughly perspicacious, especially his description of the novel's essentially theatrical nature - it really is conceived as a series of "scenes," with definite entrances and exits.

The original production of Camus's adaptation must have been something to see, with 33 actors taking part in a complex action over a 3 1/2 hour evening. In the interview, Camus speaks of having to cut some fifty minutes of text even to get down to that length, but the excised bits are all present (and indicated by brackets) in the printed version. I have the English translation in a volume of Camus's plays, which I plan to read as soon as I finish the Dostoevsky.

The sad part of looking at this video is realizing that less than a year later, Camus would be dead in an automobile accident on January 4, 1960.