Documentary albert camus biography

‘There is no sun without shadows, and it is essential to know the night,’ the words of Albert Camus, a writer whose exploration of the absurd nature of the human condition made him a literary and intellectual icon. Camus was born in Algeria but is celebrated in France as one of its great twentieth-century novelists and philosophers. His first publishing success, The Stranger, focused on the absurdity of existence but in his later works, including The Plague and The Rebel, he developed his thoughts on the human instinct to revolt.

But who was Albert Camus? How far were his ideas shaped by his Algerian upbringing and by the turbulent political times he lived through in the 1940s and '50s? Bridget Kendall explores these questions with three Camus experts: Nabil Boudraa, Algerian professor of French and Francophone Studies at Oregon State University, Eve Morisi, professor of French at Oxford University and Samantha Novello, research fellow in Political Philosophy at Verona University.

(Photo: Albert Camus Credit: Kurt Hutton/Getty Images)

Open­ing with a child­hood sto­ry from his life, the doc­u­men­tary above, Albert Camus: The Mad­ness of Sin­cer­i­ty, tells us that the philosopher/journalist/novelist’s first love was “the howl­ing and the tumult of the wind.” It’s a beau­ti­ful image for a writer who con­front­ed the pain, joy, and con­fu­sion of human exis­tence with­out the ready-made props of reli­gious belief, nation­al­ist alle­giance, or ide­o­log­i­cal con­for­mi­ty. Camus’ “mad­ness of sin­cer­i­ty” pro­duced endur­ing work like The Stranger, The Plague, The Rebel, The First Man, and The Fall and won him a Nobel Prize in 1957.

His con­vic­tion also cost him friend­ships as he turned away from mass move­ments and pur­sued his own path. It was a cost he was pre­pared to bear. As he would write in The Fall in 1956, “How could sin­cer­i­ty be a con­di­tion of friend­ship? A lik­ing for the truth at all costs is a pas­sion that spares noth­ing and that noth­ing can with­stand.”

After the wind, of course, Camus had many more loves, and many lovers. A few of them appear above, along with Camus’ daugh­ter Cather­ine and son Jean to dis­cuss the great themes of his work in

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