  Despite this intimate connection with cinema, the enthusiasm that is apparent in the early texts receded in the background after his discovery of phenomenology in 1933, following his study year in Germany (de Beauvoir 1962, 231). After that date, cinema no longer features as an important art form in his aesthetic writings. Indeed, in a 1958 conference, Sartre explicitly ranks theatre above cinema because it “has more freedom,” as “a film depicts men who are in the world and are conditioned by it,” whereas “theatre presents action by a man on the stage to men in the audience, and, through this action, both the world he lives in and the performer of the action” (Sartre 1976, 60–61). In other words, theatre is the true art of freedom in situations. Similarly, in later years, de Beauvoir explicitly ranked the novel over cinema for its capacity to “materialise the presence of human beings to human beings” (de Beauvoir quoted in Francis and Gontier 1979, 200). As with the Nouveau Roman, Sartre and de Beauvoir were quite reserved towards the Nouvelle Vague, the new French cinema of the 1960s (ibid.).