Albert Béguin's Reception of German Romanticism in L'Âme romantique et le rêve (1937) and French Ontological Film Theory (1940s-1950s)

Abstract:

In the late 1930s, literary critic Albert Béguin traced the poetics of Symbolism and Surrealism back to German Romanticism, in his influential doctoral dissertation L'Âme romantique et le rêve. Essai sur le romantisme allemand et la poésie française (1937). The understanding of poetry as a genuine means to acquire knowledge, as developed by the German Romantics, proved extremely influential in French poetics from the 19th century onwards. The central thread of this approach is its 'revelationism', i.e. the idea that the artwork does not merely copy exterior reality, but reveals its hidden sense. Due to the popularity of Béguin's work, and because of certain biographical details, it is interesting to examine the influence his doctoral dissertation had on French 1940s-1950s ontological film theory. The way in which, most eminently, the film critic André Bazin, yet also the filmmaker Robert Bresson, understood cinema has much in common with the revelationist poetics of German Romanticism. Furthermore, Béguin's review of Bresson's Journal d'un curé de campagne (1951) established an influential 'symbolist' reading of the filmmaker's oeuvre. This reading was not only adopted by Bazin, but seems to have left its mark on Bresson, too. The scope of this transfer can be better grasped by situating this movement within the legacy of German Romanticism.