Drawing on Jean-Paul Sartre's concepts of being-in-itself and being-for-itself, this article examines how war reduces soldiers to cogs in a war machine and transforms individuals into soldiers whose sole function is to fight, thereby reducing them from what Sartre terms free beings-for-themselves to limited beings-in-themselves. However, despite such attempts to impose constraints on human freedom, individuals can still exercise their freedom through acts of choice. I will examine two films set during World War I, Wooden Crosses (Raymond Bernard, 1932) and Paths of Glory (Stanley Kubrick, 1957), to explore the problem of radical freedom in existentialism. This article ultimately suggests that Sartre's existentialism enables a reading of war films that recognises that individuals assert their freedom and shape themselves even under the most constraining circumstances.
In this article I consider the films of Whit Stillman through the lens of existentialism to highlight ideas around freedom in contemporary society. I concentrate on the films of the Doomed Bourgeois in Love trilogy, Metropolitan (1990), Barcelona (1994) and The Last Days of Disco (1998) to show that these films offer us sympathetic understanding of a privileged class who struggle with questions of purpose, identity and absurdity in a world that seems to have no meaning. Jean-Paul Sartre's conception of nothingness underwrites the possibility of radical freedom and Stillman's films show how such freedom might look in the real world. I also offer a novel way of considering the difference between Sartre and Albert Camus's conceptions of the absurd.
This article explores how the film Mr. Nobody (2009), directed by Jaco Van Dormael, illustrates key concepts of Sartrean existentialism. The film exemplifies an existential condition through the character of Nemo Nobody (Jared Leto), whose life unfolds across multiple possible futures. His indecision and avoidance of choice reveal existential anguish and bad faith. The film's structure, which fragments time and narrative, mirrors the weight of responsibility inherent in every decision. Through detailed examination of key scenes and choices, I argue that the film not only illustrates Sartrean thought but also deepens it by dramatizing philosophical dilemmas in a concrete, affective form. Ultimately, Mr. Nobody affirms that freedom, though distressing, is inescapable and constitutive of human existence.
Mia Hansen-Løve's film L’Avenir depicts a philosophy teacher, Nathalie Chazeaux, undergoing a serious existential crisis. Her husband Heinz ends their long marriage, her mother dies, and her book series is cancelled. Rather than despairing, Nathalie continues to pursue her projects and claims to be experiencing total freedom for the first time. Simone de Beauvoir contends in The Second Sex that in considering women's emancipation, we should not take happiness to be the aim, as it is a confining emotion. Instead, using the perspective of existentialist ethics, we should aspire to freedom. I examine how Beauvoir's distinctions between happiness, independence and freedom illuminate L’Avenir and how L’Avenir's portrayal of Nathalie's life crisis enhances understanding of their potential. We might see Nathalie as an example of what Beauvoir calls the independent woman and possibly even a free woman able to live without her ex-husband. I argue that closer analysis of the film does not support the view of Nathalie as completely free and happy. She herself says that older women are not valued, and she is harassed. Furthermore, the songs of lost love in the final scenes and the last shot of her living room with no-one in sight suggest her situation is ambiguous and that her Stoicism belies a loneliness and dread of the future.
This article reads Weekend at Bernie's (Ted Kotcheff, 1989) as not merely a throwaway farce, but an elucidation of the ways in which the logic of late capitalism both cultivates and relies on what Jean-Paul Sartre terms bad faith. Situated within this context, the film crystalises neoliberal logic through a highly specific rendering of 1980s corporate culture, from which the central conceit of the plot emerges: the absurd spectacle of a dead man dragged around, his corpse manipulated and posed to sustain the illusion of life. I triangulate the concepts of bad faith, death and neoliberalism by reading Weekend at Bernie's as a commentary on the cultural logic of late capitalism.
This article argues that the popular perception of Sartrean existential bleakness permeates French Exit (Azazel Jacobs, 2020), and its publicity, and yet Iris Murdoch's take on Sartre emerges as the film's overriding perspective. I propose that the film stages an encounter between Sartrean and Murdochian understandings of existentialism. The film is about a cold, cynical, widowed woman, who is longing for death to solve all her problems. She is in a state of paralysis, ignoring reality, and emotionally dominating her son, who is similarly inert. Neither of them seem concerned with creating meaningful lives, and – when faced with the shame of their impending penury – they run away to Paris. In the capital city of existential ennui, however, their inertia is invaded by people who represent their pasts, presents and futures, ensuring that they are not able to stay alone wallowing in their familial purposelessness. Protagonist Frances Price learns to see beyond her egocentrism and to release her son to pursue love. Murdoch's vision of our loving interconnectedness trumps Sartre's commitment to our suffering at the judgement of others.
In this article I propose that films typically described as existential are not only concerned with classical existential themes – alienation or anxiety, solitude and despair – but with affective states that Matthew Ratcliffe calls “existential feelings” or “feelings of being.” These terms designate various bodily feelings – the bodily feeling of being, of existence, of belonging - that express a relationship towards the world understood as a space of possibilities. To explore this idea, I turn to a discussion of Ingmar Bergman's Silence of God trilogy, comprising Through a Glass Darkly (1961), Winter Light (1963) and The Silence (1963), and explore negative existential feelings that underlie more familiar existential moods or emotions such as anxiety or dread. This consideration of the important role of existential feelings in the work of a canonical existentialist auteur opens new ways of understanding existential moods in contemporary cinema.
Existentialist philosophy, in particular the work of Franz Fanon and Jean-Paul Sartre, was crucial to early postcolonial theorising and, as demonstrated in the work of Brendan Hokowhitu, continues to be an important perspective for understanding Indigenous postcolonial experience. Existentialism is a valuable tool in the on-going attempt to gain clarity about the nature of racist oppression and ways of overcoming it. We focus on two films by Warwick Thornton: Samson and Delilah (2009) and Sweet Country (2017) that together form a study of an Indigenous existentialism, and in contrasting ways illustrate both the difficulty of, and possibility of, emergent transcendent agency in postcolonial environments.
This article reexamines Jean-Paul Sartre's early theory of emotion in light of his reflections on ego, consciousness, language and narrative, clarifying his often-overlooked but critical conception of magic. I first show how magical emotional consciousness transforms the instrumental world by disrupting deterministic logic and then trace a parallel reversal in The Transcendence of the Ego, where spontaneity is displaced onto the ego and its states. I argue that these forms of magic converge with Sartre's concern about narration and expression – how meaning is retroactively conferred on events and how representation both reveals and degrades lived experience – thereby sharpening Sartre's enigmatic suggestion that the social world itself has a magical structure. To assess and concretize these claims, I turn to Lucrecia Martel's The Headless Woman (2008), whose protagonist's headlessness uncannily illustrates, yet also puts pressure on, a Sartrean account of emotional transformation as conscious but unreflective, as purposive yet spontaneous. I show that Martel's attention to framing echoes Sartre's suspicion of language's hold on things, exposing the limits of expressive mastery and thereby revealing the stubborn autonomy of objects and others. The film thus illuminates how emotional magic implicates freedom, bad faith and social complicity.
This article examines Megalopolis (Francis Ford Coppola, 2024) as a cinematic enactment of existential imperfection – where failure is not merely depicted but structurally embedded through narrative collapse, temporal disjunction and the erosion of authorial coherence. Drawing on the existential philosophies of Albert Camus, Søren Kierkegaard and Samuel Beckett, alongside critical frameworks from Trinh T. Minh-ha, I argue that Coppola does not simply risk failure but that he formalizes it as a philosophical operation. Through close analysis of recursive structures, visual dissonance and mise-en-scène destabilization, the article explores how Megalopolis renders revolt, paradox and collapse as aesthetic logic. Yet the film also interrogates the ethical limits of this wager: when failure is mediated by auteurist discourse, it risks becoming stylized spectacle rather than ontological exposure. Rather than framing Megalopolis as a misunderstood masterpiece or failed epic, I position it as a contested site where cinematic imperfection confronts the limits of sincerity and philosophical legibility in contemporary screen-philosophy.
This article makes a case for Hirokazu Kore-eda as an existential director. By reading his film Nobody Knows (2004) against Sartre's anti-essentialist existentialism, I will show that the film disabuses us of several Sartrean doctrines and reorients us towards an existential education in Kore-eda's cinema. Contrasting the despair and disappearance of Keiko, a Sartrean existentialist heroine par excellence, with the development of Akira, Nobody Knows moves us away from the freedom and transcendence in Sartrean existentialism and emphasises the formation of the self and the growth in self-knowledge through navigating the division between existence and essence. Portrayed by suggestive dialogue, tactile close-ups, and spontaneous performances, this existential education is advanced through a series of mirror images that invite comparison and reflection. The film peaks in a tragic wisdom before death and opens the transformed self to community.
France's leading existential phenomenologists Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre both wrote extensively about literature and rather less about film. Concentrating on Beauvoir and especially on a lecture she gave at a televised event in Paris in December 1964, I ask whether the lecture, “What Can Literature Do?”, can also apply to the medium of film, answering this question in the affirmative. It then considers the resulting Beauvoirean film theory alongside a contemporary French film, Alice Diop's Saint Omer (2022), analysing the film's visual style as is required by reading the theory alongside its fictional presentation of real events. Diop is one of France's few successful black female directors and since the two protagonists of Saint Omer are also black women, the article concludes by asking what the writings of Frantz Fanon have to offer to an existentialist screen theory seeking to build the racialisation of looking into the spectatorial dynamics of film.
This article argues that Jean-Paul Sartre's writings on existentialism and political praxis illuminate the critical decolonial work of Djibril Diop Mambéty's cinema. The article analyses Touki Bouki (1973), Hyenas (1992), Le Franc (1994) and The Little Girl Who Sold the Sun (1999) in terms of Sartre's notions of bad faith, praxis and his critique of bourgeois humanism. This Sartrean reading of Mambéty's cinema foregrounds the relevance of the philosopher's thinking for decolonial film analysis. In drawing out the existentialist dimensions of Mambéty's film-philosophy, the article links the filmmaker's critiques of neocoloniality and universal humanism to adjacent conversations in Africana existentialism and Black studies.
This article examines Éric Rohmer's cinema through the perspective of existential reflection, showing how his films engage with morality, faith and chance in everyday life. With particular attention to Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche, I trace how these perspectives unfold across his major cycles. In the series of films known as the “Six Moral Tales” (1962–1972), Rohmer's protagonists embody a Kantian concern with self-imposed moral law, testing principles against desire and circumstance. In the later “Comedies and Proverbs” (1981–1987) and “Tales of the Four Seasons” (1990–1998), this framework widens: characters confront contingency and coincidence, evoking Kierkegaard's notion of faith as a leap beyond rational proof and Nietzsche's affirmation of chance as necessity. Through chance encounters and games of probability, Rohmer transforms ordinary experiences into existential moments, showing freedom not as certainty but as a negotiation between desire, chance and belief.
In 1961, Stan Brakhage made Sartre's Nausea for a public television introduction to existentialism hosted by Sartre scholar and translator Hazel Barnes. Brakhage later returned to that work, editing and intervening on a copy of it to make Black Vision (1965). We argue that despite Brakhage's ambivalence towards Sartrean existentialism, these works illuminate Sartre by demonstrating important continuities between hypnagogic consciousness and nausea. We additionally argue that Brakhage was likely the most appropriate filmmaker for adapting Nausea, owing to his careerlong grasp of how the experience of radical contingency could permeate not only individual consciousness, but also the filmmaking medium itself.
Inspired by the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre, this article approaches Todd Field's Tár (2022) as an existentialist satire, in which humour is borne out by a conflict between bad faith and the way in which people can miss the truth about themselves by self-delusion. Commonly classified as a psychological backstage drama, many of the scenes in Tár rely on darkly humorous delight, deliberatively indulging in vindictive attitude that clashes with our basic moral feelings. This article analyses the aesthetic-affective conflicts in Tár manifesting themselves along the axis of seeing and being seen, as much of its protagonist's efforts are defined by how she wants to appear in the eyes of others and her sense of self based on narcissistic delusions. But she cannot control the field of vision organized by the others’ perceptions, and as soon as Tár starts recognizing herself in these various perceptions, her mental stability dissolves while her disavowed guilt takes the upper hand. The final part of the article discusses the ethical implications that result from the film positioning the spectators within the very experience of a morally inscrutable character.
