The Cinematic Style in André Malraux's Work: Radicalization and Metamorphosis

• Grant number: 25/11401-3
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate
• Start date: October 01, 2025
• End date: September 30, 2029
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Literature - Modern Foreign Languages
• Principal Investigator: Alexandre Bebiano de Almeida
• Grantee: Guilherme de Almeida Gesso
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

This doctoral project aims to study the internal developments of the cinematic style in André Malraux's fictional work, as well as the transformations of this style in the various screenplay drafts that attempted-albeit unsuccessfully-to adapt La Condition humaine (1933), the writer's most celebrated novel, for the screen. In the first stage, the research seeks to determine to what extent L'Espoir (1937) retains or alters the main features of the cinematic aesthetic developed in the earlier novel. The working hypothesis is that this later work displays a deepening of cinematic influence-a movement that, as Christiane Moatti (1995) suggests, was a direct result of Malraux's collaboration with Sergei Eisenstein when the two artists were planning to bring La Condition humaine to the screen. In a second phase, the objective is to investigate how the screenplay projects transform the original source, thereby highlighting dimensions of cinematic language that had previously been overlooked. In this sense, while Malraux often emphasized the discontinuous and external aspects of film form-basing his visual style on techniques such as montage and découpage-the screenplays by James Agee, Han Suyin, Costa-Gavras, and Michael Cimino may follow different paths, engaging in a renewed process of metamorphosis. (AU)