(Algiers, February 1967. Anna Karina and Marcello Mastroianni on the set of "The Stranger", a film by Luchino Visconti based on Albert Camus's novel .)
L’Étranger (1967), released in English as "The Stranger", is Luchino Visconti’s film adaptation of Albert Camus’s 1942 existential novel. Shot on location in Algiers, it stars Marcello Mastroianni as Meursault, a detached French-Algerian who commits an apparently motiveless murder on a beach and faces trial not just for the crime, but for his refusal to perform grief or conform to social expectations.
Anna Karina plays Marie, his lover. Visconti, known for opulent period dramas like 'The Leopard', took a restrained approach here to match Camus’s spare prose, but critics still found the film too lush and lyrical for the book’s alienated tone. Released five years after Algeria won independence from France, the production was politically charged, since Camus himself was a pied-noir whose views on the war raised controversy.
Production & Style
Visconti fought hard to get the rights from Camus’ widow. He wanted Alain Delon for Meursault but ended up with Marcello Mastroianni, who had to strip away his usual charismatic,' La Dolce Vita' persona to play someone emotionally blank. Visconti insisted on shooting in Algeria despite the political tension post-independence because Camus’ novel is inseparable from the Algiers light and heat. Cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno gave it a bleached, sun-drunk look, harsh midday glare, whitewashed walls, and blinding beaches that physically explain Meursault’s famous “it was the sun” defence.
Key Differences From the Novel
Camus wrote in flat, almost affectless prose to show Meursault’s alienation. Visconti couldn’t replicate that tone visually, so he leaned into sensuality: the textures of sand, water, Marie’s dress, the courtroom sweat. Critics like Pauline Kael argued this made Meursault look sympathetic rather than absurd. Visconti also softened the colonial context. The Arab man Meursault kills is barely named or developed, just like in the book, which later drew postcolonial critiques of both Camus and the film.
Reception & Legacy
The film premiered at Venice in 1967 to mixed reviews. European audiences respected Mastroianni’s restrained performance; he won Best Actor at Venice, but many Camus readers felt it missed the book’s philosophical punch. In the U.S., it barely registered. Over time, it’s become a “beautiful failure”: not the definitive ' Stranger ', but a fascinating document of two things: 1) 1960s art cinema trying to adapt unfilmable literature, and 2) Visconti testing how far his baroque style could be stripped down.
During filming, Anna Karina and Mastroianni didn’t speak much off-camera. She was fresh off her split with Godard and deep in the French New Wave world; he was Italian cinema royalty. Visconti reportedly liked that distance; it matched Marie and Meursault’s detached relationship. The 'Paris Match' photographer Georges Menager captured them between takes, because the set was swarmed by the press. Everyone wanted to see how Visconti would handle Camus.
The Turkish Version: 'Yabancı'
In Turkey, Luchino Visconti’s 1967 adaptation is known as 'Yabancı', directly translating Camus’s title, ’ L’étranger ’. The film reached Turkish audiences in the early 1970s, a period when existentialist literature was hugely influential amongst Turkish intellectuals and university students. Camus’s novel had already been translated as Yabancı in 1954 by Vedat Gunyol, and the book’s themes of alienation, bureaucracy, and the absurd resonated strongly in a country navigating rapid modernisation and political tension. Consequently, the film was largely screened in arthouse cinemas and university film societies in Istanbul and Ankara, rather than receiving a wide commercial release. Turkish critics at the time praised Marcello Mastroianni’s detached portrayal, arguing that it captured the “ provincial clerk " sensibility that many Turkish readers had projected onto Meursault.
The Turkish version itself was not dubbed but subtitled, preserving Mastroianni’s original Italian dialogue alongside the French-speaking courtroom scenes. This choice maintained the film’s sense of linguistic and cultural displacement, which mirrored the novel’s colonial Algerian setting. For Turkish viewers, Yabancı became inseparable from Camus’s text in intellectual discourse, often taught in literature departments alongside the novel. Whilst it never achieved mainstream popularity, the film retains a cult status amongst Turkish cinephiles and existentialist circles. To this day, Yabancı is referenced in Turkish criticism as a benchmark for philosophical adaptations, noted for its uncompromising tone and fidelity to Camus’s bleak, sun-drenched vision of the absurd.
Francois Ozon’s Version of ' L’Etranger' (2024)
François Ozon’s black-and-white adaptation of Camus’s 1942 novel, filmed in 2024 with Benjamin Voisin as Meursault, returns L’Étranger to the screen with deliberate austerity. Shooting in monochrome strips Algiers of its postcard heat and instead renders it as a landscape of stark shadows and moral ambiguity, emphasising the novel’s themes of alienation and the absurd. Ozon’s decision to keep the story in its original colonial setting has reignited debate in France over Camus’s portrayal or omission of Algerian identity.
The film arrived amid renewed scrutiny of how L’Étranger sidelines the Arab victim, who is nameless and voiceless in both book and film, at a time when France is still reckoning with the legacy of the Algerian War of Independence that ended in 1962. By leaning into the novel’s discomfort rather than softening it, Ozon forces contemporary audiences to confront the political silence at the heart of Camus’s existential masterpiece, asking whether Meursault’s detachment can still be read as purely philosophical in a post-colonial context.
.What Camus Had Said About Filming His Novel
Camus died in 1960, 7 years before Visconti’s version, so he never saw it. But he did talk about adaptation. He was sceptical it could be filmed. In 1958 letters, he told producers the book’s power came from style: the flat, first-person, and present-tense voice. “The cinema will necessarily make Meursault either sympathetic or monstrous,” he wrote. “He is neither.” He feared an actor’s face would add psychology that isn’t in the text. He rejected American offers. Several Hollywood studios wanted it in the 1950s. Camus said no because they wanted to add a love story, a clear motive, or a redemptive ending. He told Gallimard: “They want to explain Meursault. The point is that he cannot be explained.” His one condition: "If it was ever made, it should not betray the “dry light” of Algeria. He didn’t want romance or tragedy. He wanted the indifference of the world to be physical: heat, light, and sea salt. Visconti actually honoured that part, even if he added too much beauty. Visconti’s film failed by being 'too cinematic', exactly what Camus feared.
While Mastroianni’s performance was praised, the film is now remembered more as a striking visual artefact of 1960s European art cinema than as a definitive take on Camus.
( Avtar Mota )
