Baudelaire fait son cinéma

Abstract

Baudelaire Makes His Cinema. 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.