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The bureaucratic beyond: Roger Caillois and the negation of the sacred in Hollywood cinema

2003; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 32; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/0308514032000045771

1469-5766

Gary Genosko,

French Urban and Social Studies

In a short paper written in the early 1950s, ‘The representation of death in the American cinema’, Roger Caillois theorized the representation of the afterlife in America through the Hollywood cinema of the late 1930s and 1940s. Caillois maintained that the American afterlife is fundamentally bureaucratic and represents a prolongation of the world of the living. This prolongation is understood as a negation of the separation of the sacred and the profane domains in favour of a desacralized, profane pan-bureaucracy. Caillois’s essay is read in the context of a sociology of the sacred in the tradition of the Collège de sociologie, with special attention given to his descriptions of how the sacred tends to wane in ordinary life and to his hybrid methodological strategies. The films Caillois used as evidence are critically reviewed and the Hollywood invasion of French film markets in the 1940s and 1950s is developed as a critical historical context for grounding Caillois’s claims about American ‘originality’: the negation of the sacred dimension of the afterlife, the power of cinema to replace oral tradition in collective life, and the consequences of a powerful, ‘exported’ mythology that negates the sacred.