Baudelaire Makes His Cinema

Authors

  • André Guyaux Sorbonne Université, Paris

Keywords:

Baudelaire, theatre, cinema, actors, dramatic scripts, adaptation

Abstract

This paper proposes a cross-interpretation of Baudelaire’s links with the world of theater. On the one hand, it is about the writer’s fascination with the world of the stage, the actors and actresses he knew or whose acting he commented in his literary reviews, or his attempts to write plays. On the other hand,  things are also looked at from the other side of the coin, providing valuable insights into how Baudelaire was regarded by the theater professionals he  encountered throughout his career. The article argues that Baudelaire did not complete any play projects due to both procrastination and the infusion of  theatrical elements into other dimensions of his writing. In fact, Baudelaire was dreaming of a theatre too modern to be materialized on stage in the  conventions of the nineteenth century, but at the same time he was shifting the boundaries of artistic representation towards a new art, which was to be the seventh: cinematography.

Author Biography

André Guyaux, Sorbonne Université, Paris

ANDRÉ GUYAUX is Professor Emeritus of French Literature at Sorbonne University. He has worked mainly on nineteenth-century poets, particularly Baudelaire and Rimbaud. He is the author of a book devoted to the first fortune of Les Fleurs du Mal: Baudelaire. Un demi-siècle de lectures des “Fleurs du Mal” 1855-1905 (Presses de l’Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2007; second edition, revised and expanded, 2025) and of another book on a similar topic Le Paris de Baudelaire (Éditions Alexandrines, 2017). He edited Fusées, Mon cœur mis à nu et La Belgique déshabillée (Folio, 1986) and Fusées, Mon cœur mis à nu, Notes sur “Les Liaisons dangereuses” et autres fragments posthumes (Folio, 2016). He has also directed the new edition of Baudelaire’s Œuvres complètes in the prestigious collection Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (2024).

Published

2025-01-19

How to Cite

Guyaux, A. (2025). Baudelaire Makes His Cinema. Studia Universitatis Babeș-Bolyai - Dramatica, 69(2), 51–60. Retrieved from https://dramatica.ro/index.php/j/article/view/321