What Can Cinema Do? Saint Omer and French Existentialist Disclosure as Film Theory

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.