Absurdist Cinema, Television, and Adaptations around the World

Thus far, efforts to reveal and establish the interconnections between cinema and the absurd have been scarce. Nevertheless, the absurdist scholar would be able to suggest the existence of absurdist elements—aesthetic forms as well as notions—in films across all genres. The first thing that we discover when we begin to explore the terrain of absurdist cinema and television is that there are at least three manifestations of absurdism that should be considered: film and television adaptations of plays, novels, and short stories commonly labeled absurdist; films that depict explicitly absurd situations; and films that may be understood as capturing absurdist metaphysical tensions and exploring ways of coping with these tensions. The films’ fictional thought experiments, I argue, are sometimes even more successful in conveying the challenge of absurdity and in testing possible responses to it than any abstract philosophy could ever be. When films illustrate, whether with a touch of the ridiculous or with complete sincerity, conditions of absurdist friction and various ways of coping with these conditions, their interpretation as such may throw light on the experience of the absurd. Not only can these films demonstrate and reaffirm the absurdist reality, they also develop and challenge our current understanding of it and sometimes even call it into question. Intriguingly, one filmic genre that seems to both expand and question Camus’s metaphysics in substantial ways is science fiction film.