Sartre's Nausea

Narrative Synopsis

This film has never been in distribution, and it’s arguably not a true Brakhage film, as it was made as a commission for a 1961 public television program on KRMA-TV in Boulder (but aired nationally), called Self Encounter: A Study in Existentialism, created and hosted by Hazel Barnes, an acclaimed scholar on the subject. This film was featured in an episode entitled “To Leap or Not to Leap”, originally broadcast on April 19, 1961. I’ve included Sartre’s Nausea in the main body of the filmography because despite its origin as a commissioned work to be incorporated into a show on existentialism, and even having no main title or credit on the film, Brakhage came back to this piece a few years later and used it to produce his 1965 film Black Vision. Black Vision was made by Brakhage from the print he had struck of Sartre’s Nausea, re-editing it and embellishing it with ink and scratching.