  In the case of Sartre, this is all the more surprising given the intimate association of Sartre with cinema at many points in his life. Several passages in de Beauvoir’s and Sartre’s autobiographical writings attest to their shared enthusiasm for the new art (Sartre 1964). The profound influence of film on the young Sartre is well documented in his early writings, where he demonstrates great sensitivity towards the formal and political potentialities of the new medium, in contrast to most of the French intelligentsia of the time (Sartre 1924, 1931). Indeed, these early texts credit cinema with precisely the same capacities of expression that are later granted to theatre, such as the capacity to present action, the necessary yet ambiguous necessity of engagement and the capacity of artistic expression to represent the masses to the masses. Literary criticism has established to what extent Sartre attempted to reproduce in literary form the techniques employed by cinema in the representation of time, space and internal states of consciousness, and specifically how such an influence was crucial in his first major work, Nausea (Johnson 1984).