MARGINAL NOTES ON EROTICISM IN THE CINEMA André Bazin NO ONE would dream of writing a book on eroticism in the theater. Not, strictly speaking, because the subject does not lend itself to reflection, but because these reflections would al be negative. Certainly this is not true of the novel, since one whole section of literature is founded, more or less explicitly, on eroticism. But it is only a sector of it, and the existence in the Bibliotheque Nationale of a section known as "hell" points up the fact. It is true that eroticism now tends to play an increasingly important role in modem literature, and novels are full of it, even the popular ones. But aside from the fact that one should doubtless attribute this spread of eroticism largely to the cinema, eroticism remains subject to moral notions of a more general nature which compel us to treat the spreading of it as a problem. Malraux, who among contemporary novelists has assuredly most lucidly expounded an ethic of love based on eroticism, ilustrates equaly perfectly the modem, historic, and thus relative nature of such a choice. In short, eroticism tends to play a role in contemporary literature similar to that of courtly love in medieval literature. But no matter how powerful its myth, and no matter what future we may foresee for it, eroticism has clearly no specific connection with the literature of the novel in which it appears. Even painting, in which the representation of the human body might well have played a determining role, is only accidentally or second arily erotic. Licentious drawings, engravings, prints, or paintings constitute only a genre, a variant coming under the same heading as bawdy writing. One could make a study of the nude in the plastic arts but, though one doubtless could not overlook the transmission thereby of erotic feelings, these stil remain a subordinate and secondary phenomenon. It is of the cinema alone that we can say that eroticism is there on purpose and is a basic ingredient. Not the sole ingredient, of course, for there are many films and good ones that owe it nothing, but a major, a specific, and even perhaps an essential one. Lo Duca 1 is right, then, to see one of the constants of cinema in this phenomenon: "For half a century the sheet covering the movie screen has borne like a watermark one basic motto : eroticism." But it is important to know if the ubiquitousness of eroticism, however general, is only an accidental result of the free capitalist play of supply and demand. Needing to attract customers, the procedure would naturally have turned to the most effective stimulus: sex. One might advance in support of this argument the fact that the Soviet cinema is indeed the least erotic in the world. 1 Lo Duca, Erotisme au cinema, Jean-Jacques Pauvert, 1956.