Stan Brakhage, Jean-Paul Sartre and Existentialism: Cinema de trop

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.