Proust and Cinema, or Luchino Visconti's Search
By Chesney, Duncan McColl
PUBLICATION:Post Script VOLUME/ISSUE:Vol. 23, No. 2
PUBLICATION DATE: Spring 2004
PAGES: 48-55
Il est absurde de s'indigner des degradations subies par les chefs-d'oeuvre litteraires a l'ecran, du moins au nom de la litterature. Car, si approximatives que soient les adaptations, elles ne peuvent faire tort a l'original aupres de la minorite qui le connait et l' apprecie; quant aux ignorants, de deux choses l'une: ou bien ils se contenteront du film, qui en vaut certainement un autre, ou bien ils auront envie de connaitre le module, et c'est autant de gagne pour la litterature.
Andre Bazin, "Pour un cinema impur" (1)
Andre Bazin's early insight in defense of film adaptation ought to have spared us a great deal of the critical chatter of which the discussion around Raoul Ruiz's Le temps retrouve (1999) is only the most recent example. It is this very debate, however, that has occupied Proustians and cinephiles alike every time the audacious idea of adapting Proust has surfaced in the film world. A novel and a film belong to two different and equally complex semiotic systems, each with its own semi-autonomous history as well as its own sociological and economic
motivations. Whence, then, the unease at the idea of adaptation of literary classics, especially at a point when film has definitively overtaken the novel as the quintessential mode of cultural expression, reproduction and self-critique? For those who still hold on to the Modernist legitimacy and dignity of the novel Bazin's frank remark seems to speak the awkward truth, even in a stream-lined age of monster media conglomerates whose literary classic film tie-ins serve, like the films themselves, as much to line the coffers of the media moguls as to keep alive the great cultural inheritance of earlier epochs of art.
But perhaps it is not that simple. The main caveat of the critics is that the great Modernist texts--whose import lies at least as much in their technical achievements within the closed, formal systems of their rapidly obsolescing genres as in their reflection of extra-textual deformations in modern society--simply do not allow for straight-forward adaptation the way that nineteenth-century realist novels do. Works by Jane Austen and Giovanni Verga certainly can endure on screen, but Ulysses, Mrs. Dalloway, A la recherche du temps perdu cannot possibly survive the transcription, except at the cost of their essential difference from those earlier forms. There is much more that is false than true in this line of thinking, which in essence reduces either to a mistrust or misunderstanding of film itself, or to an uncritical, idolatrous attachment to certain novels (and often a facile understanding of novelistic form and of semiotics, as if a novel by Jane Austen were somehow uncomplicatedly adaptable--as if the aesthetic, 'ontological,' and semiotic leap weren't just as great as for Proust). How much clearer this becomes when the source for adaptation is not just a modernist masterpiece, but a veritable lieu de memoire, a culturally sustaining myth. Proust's novel is not sacred in France either for its content or for its form. It is irritatingly difficult to read for most people, who, for that matter, never suffer so much from it, since most never even try. It is superficially about jealousy, obsession, perversion, solipsism, homosexuality, masturbation, sadomasochism, vanity, contempt, and monomania. More 'profoundly' it is indeed about love, art, redemption, memory, and so forth--certainly the qualities highlighted in the reader's guides and bac
preparation manuals--but in its status as a cultural icon, both a Mona Lisa and a Nabucco, it is concerned with the endurance and triumph of French culture, despite a persistent feudal order and the exploitation it entails, despite anti-semitism and the Dreyfus affair (serving as well to mend a later period of anti-semitism), despite the collective trauma of the first world war (and the adaptation to the technology that made it so barbarous). It is about having a Shakespeare, with all the prestige and legitimacy that accrues to a culture, to a nation, which could produce such a writer (even if the nation produces the writer negatively, as one of its greatest critics).
I believe this 'ideological' baggage is at the heart of the concern with Proust adaptation as much as the tired old concerns with the technical possibility as such. This is not to suggest that it is obvious how Proust's enormously long, subjectively complicated text should be adapted to the language and commercial constraints of film. It means we have to be very careful in our understanding of Proust's novel--technically, ideologically--as we elevate it as the paragon against which we will judge its adaptations and derivations. This also means
knowing more about the filmmakers and scripts, history and ideology involved in the on-going drama of filming Proust. In what follows I will attempt a brief overview of the history of this drama and a reading of the screenplays and films that have resulted.
In 1962, the French film producer Nicole Stephane acquired the rights from Marcel Proust's niece, Suzy Mante-Proust, to make a film version of A la recherche du temps perdu. After some years and deliberation, Luchino Visconti was decided upon as an appropriate director for the project--a choice that might seem rather necessary to anyone familiar with the two artists' work. Visconti was filming La caduta degli dei (The Damned, 1969) at the time, so the script was begun by a Franco-Italian team including Enzo Siciliano. This proved to be
unacceptable material for Visconti, so in collaboration with his long-time co-author Suso Cecchi d'Amico, (2) Visconti began his own treatment of the novel. In the meantime Visconti made Morte a Venezia (Death in Venice, 1971), and it seems that the bulk of the initial writing and adaptation for the Recherche screenplay was undertaken by Cecchi d'Amico. However, by late 1970 Visconti was able to devote his time to the Proust project. He and Cecchi d'Amico finished the script, and with his long-time art director Mario Garbuglia (Rocco e suoi fratelli and Il Gattopardo) and costume designer Piero Tosi (Senso, Il
Gattopardo), he made extensive visits to Paris and to Proust country (mainly Normandy) to begin planning the film. (3)
The cast slated for the film was to include Alain Delon as the Narrator, Marlon Brando as Charlus, Helmut Berger as Morel, and Silvana Mangano as the Duchesse de Guermantes. A young and relatively unknown actress was envisioned for Albertine, possibly Charlotte Rampling, while Simone Signoret was a possibility for Francoise, as was either Edwige Feuillere or Annie Girardot for Madame Verdurin. It was even rumored that Greta Garbo would come out of retirement for the role of the Queen of Naples! With such a cast, and the same team that was responsible for II Gattopardo (The Leopard), Rocco, Le Notti Bianche, and, minus Garbuglia, Senso (and that would go on to realize Gruppo di Famiglia in un interno (Conversation Piece) and l'Innocente), we can imagine that the film would have been quite a Viscontian tour de force. Unfortunately, the project was postponed in 1971 when Stephane proved short of cash for the increasingly ambitious film (approaching 4 hours in projected length). Visconti, perhaps sensing acutely his own mortality after Morte a Venezia, could not be stalled, and in 1972 began work on Ludwig (1974), apparently postponing his commitment to Proust. This move was interpreted quite differently by Stephane, who
considered Visconti in breach of contract. She then approached director Joseph Losey, who in collaboration with Harold Pinter, agreed to take on, again from scratch, the Proust project. Stephane had been impressed by the Losey and Pinter effort on The Go-Between (1971), and hoped they could realize the project at less expense and with more single-minded
commitment.
Stephane's move naturally made Visconti furious. As a life-long reader of Proust, Visconti had determined to realize the project, though admitting to Cecchi d'Amico that "this will be my last film." Illness during and subsequent to the filming of Ludwig kept Visconti from pursuing the issue. Though he would go on to make two more films, he died before he could ever get back to Proust. Losey and Pinter, with the collaboration of translator and critic Barbara Bray, also took a trip to Paris, Illiers, and Cabourg, and by the beginning of 1973 the screenplay was completed. However, at a length of some 5-1/2 hours and a projected cost of 22 million dollars, the film proved difficult to sell, and once again Stephane was forced to abandon the project. (4)
Stephane's Proust project was never to be realized in its full scope, but she did eventually produce a film of part of the novel, Volker Schlondorff's Swann in Love (1984). Written by Peter Brook, Jean-Claude Carriere, and Marie-Helene Estienne, the film serves mainly to indicate, negatively, what might have been if time, money, and health had allowed either of the more ambitious Proust projects to come to life on screen. I want presently to look more closely at the two Proust screenplays, keeping in mind the Schlondorff film and various other cinematic treatments of Proust, in order to explore the continued cultural importance of la Recherche.
In his defense of 'impure' cinema, Bazin speculates on why filmmakers would resort to adaptation in an era when they no longer need to rely on 'great' literary works to give legitimacy to their nascent art form. The modern novel, it would seem, derives much of its formal innovations from technological developments in modern society, notably the camera and even the moving picture. What does the cinema gain from the relationship? Evidently cultural capital still attends the classics, but the great writer-filmmakers seemed to show that film could legitimately do without cultural props in another medium. However, since all filmmakers are not as brilliant and creative as Renoir or Bergman, they must use material written by others. The merit of this material ultimately must be judged as it functions in the
film, however, not in its fidelity to the source. As the epigraph suggests, this may serve literature or not, but what is important is that Bazin recognized the overwhelming fact of adaptation in film production (5) and did not write off the practice, accepting it for what it is: an unavoidable aspect of contemporary cinema.
Dudley Andrew has extended and focused this discussion of adaptation, describing a typology of the phenomenon. He suggests three modes of adaptation: borrowing, intersection, and fidelity of transformation. Borrowing is simply filming, more or less straightforwardly through dialogue and action, a classic text whose prestige as much as its story is borrowed to structure the film. This is the kind of "high brow" film perennially popular with educated audiences and national award-granting bodies and often taking the form of an elaborate, historical costume drama or epic (for example, David Lean's Doctor Zhivago). Intersection has a different relation to its source, whose "uniqueness ... is preserved to such an extent that it is intentionally left unassimilated" (99). Examples are some of Pasolini's epics (Canterbury Tales, Decameron), Fassbinder's Effi Briest, and, above all for both Bazin and Andrew, Bresson's Journal d'un cure de compagne (1950), where the singularity of the literary source is often very un-cinematographically obtrusive, although this mode is not confined to films which dwell on writing and superficial literariness. "All such works fear or refuse to adapt. Instead they present the otherness and distinctiveness of the original text ..." (100). In other words, they renounce a specific autonomy in their relation to an unassimilated original, and modestly choose to "refract" the source while paying it homage (or while criticizing it).
The third mode, not exclusive of the first two, involves fidelity of transformation: to be true to a literary work within the cinema, which is as much a matter of interpretation as it is of
semiotic translation. This is the question posed by many critics about Proust--how can one be true to the technical/stylistic achievement of the Recherche, but in cinema's own terms. Many, judging this an impossibility, consider such attempts to be a priori failures. Others (for
example Raoul Ruiz), while adhering to the presuppositions of this mode, fearlessly push ahead with a great deal more faith in film. The divisions between these schematic modes are not always clear, but a question is clearly posed by their articulation: what is the relationship between the film work and the literary source, what amount of fear and respect characterizes the adaptation? It is a question that ultimately suggests two unavoidable facts: 1) "the study of adaptation is logically tantamount to the study of the cinema as a whole" (Andrew 103), and 2) all adaptation, like all translation, is first and foremost a matter of interpretation. The first
question opens on to semiotic and sociological studies of the seventh art and its relation to the others arts and media, and cannot at present be pursued in this essay. The second, however, seems particularly well illustrated in the attempts to film Proust.
In his introduction to The Proust Screenplay, Harold Pinter explains: "The one thing of which I was certain was that it would be wrong to attempt to make a film centered around one or two volumes--La Prisonniere or Sodome et Gomorrhe, for example. If the thing was to be done at all, one would have to try to distill the whole work, to incorporate the major themes of the book into an integrated whole" (Pinter ix). Pinter's is the only screenplay I am aware of that boldly accepts this task, although the keywords for his interpretive technique--distillation and incorporation--beg certain questions. Visconti, in an interview in the theatrical journal Il Dramma (March 1971), explains his opposite interpretive presupposition (55):
Those who love Proust know that the Recherche is a finished, perfect world to which nothing can be added, and I do not pretend to exhaust its themes in my film. To tackle the work one must reduce the whole complex and focus simply on the content of the novel. Basically it is similar to a novel by Balzac: the description of a society--French--which changes
and transforms between 1890 and the First World War, with precise facts, and extremely developed characters and episodes. Let us leave aside for the moment the considerations
of the author on
the significance of time and memory. Let us take instead the center of the novel, that is Sodom and Gomorrah, and occupy ourselves with recounting this, naturally keeping the rest in the background.
"Putting aside considerations on time and memory" may seem to some like effectively renouncing the whole point of recreating Proust, but Visconti's argument is that the way into these Proustian concerns is a presentation of the "plot," the events and episodes which do indeed occur and which teach the narrator his lessons about time. Visconti could certainly suggest similar themes with respect to von Aschenbach in Death in Venice while adhering to a relatively straightforward temporal sequence and without a great deal of subjectivizing montage. Naturally these two very different fundamental attitudes towards the Proust text lead to two very different screenplays.
Pinter indeed tries to put everything into his treatment. To do so he relies heavily on montage and discontinuity, temporal disjunction and thematic audio-visual leitmotifs, all in the service of a film very much about destruction through time and redemption through art. He sees the Recherche as a closed totality and wants to represent this totality, totally. He is attentive to the revolution in narrative technique vis-a-vis time and wants to use the camera to make
connections Proust makes slowly and persistently throughout the book--in this case a picture really is worth a thousand words! Visconti, on the other hand, sees the book as a deeply complex and "open" totality, only parts of which come to the foreground in any moment or segment. He therefore sees that totality in the particulars and wants to focus on the very texture of these particulars, on a fragment or fracture of the whole, still trusting that something of Proust will be communicated. "I would not attempt a literary transposition. Obviously certain things will get lost, for instance Proust's musicality. But in exchange, I believe I can, with an image, penetrate into the deep Proustian labyrinth in order to explain a sentiment, a situation, an attitude, a sadness, a moment of jealousy. I will use everything
possible to stay true to Proustian sentiment, not to Proustian style" (Cecchi d'Amico and Visconti 9). So he entirely leaves out Du cote de chez Swann and the famous finale of Le temps retrouve, the "Matinee chez la princesse de Guermantes" that will be so crucial to Raoul Ruiz's Le Temps retrouve. Instead, Visconti would have created a slower, more detailed film of Le Cote de Guermantes and Sodome et Gomorrhe (primarily), focusing on a much more limited number of scenes and characters: Morel and Charlus, rather than, for example, Albertine. Swann is almost entirely absent; Odette and Gilberte are absent. In this way he seeks to recreate "this central block, the depiction of French society of the epoch" (Cecchi d'Amico and Visconti 10). Characteristically, Visconti's fewer and longer scenes invite a slower and more stable camera, a more theatrical unfolding of social events and set pieces, and (presumably) an elegiac mood reminiscent of The Leopard and Death in Venice. With his crystalline time image (according to Deleuze's astute if brief discussion of the director in L'Image-temps), Visconti could have made his own predilections resonate with those of a Proust deeply concerned himself with the image of aristocracy, decay, History, and belatedness (Deleuze, L'Image-temps 124-128).
Among other things, Proust's novel is a tragi-comic depiction of the twilight of the gods. It is the Balzacian recreation of a crepuscular society, the persistent ancien regime that is captured right at the moment of its definitive eclipse by a rising bourgeoisie. Recent sociological studies have brought out the richness of this Proust, one often neglected in the critical literature to date. The ascendant and ultimately triumphant bourgeoisie has often attracted attention, however. Madame Verdurin, Odette, Gilberte (and differently, Morel and Bloch) all represent variations of this rising cultural dominant. This has usually been described with respect to snobbery. As Walter Benjamin noted long ago: "Proust's analysis of snobbery, which is far more important than his apotheosis of art, constitutes the apogee of his criticism of society. For the attitude of the snob is nothing but the consistent, organized, steely view of life from the chemically pure standpoint of the consumer" (209-210). What was unclear to Proust's contemporaries was his distance from this subject position. This has been brilliantly elucidated by Gilles Deleuze in a monograph in which he describes Proust's narrator's search as an apprenticeship to various sign systems--including the worldly--on the way to mastery and, ultimately, redemption through that most complex system, art. This extends another standard understanding of the Recherche as a Modernist experimental masterpiece in the Bildungs- or Kunstlerroman tradition, but rewrites the journey of apprenticeship as a semiotic education. This reading in turn grounds a reconsideration of the role of aristocracy in the
novel (which I pursue at length elsewhere). When the aristocrats are seen not just as silly, affected holdovers from an earlier epoch to be copied and befriended in as far as it advances one's snobbish ambitions, but as complexly coded embodiments of ancient and elite traditions, social-historical works of art whose study rewards the curious observer as much as the study of Elstir's canvases or Vinteuil's or Bergotte's works, then the Recherche becomes a slightly different book. The middle volumes become more important as documents of the necessary and slow formation of the narrator, allowing the insights and epiphanies of the better-known final volumes.
Visconti seems to have been interested in this Proust. His treatment, lacking much of the familial and artistic aspects of the Recherche, focuses on society and class. Its main drama, pushed almost to melodramatic extent, is love (Marcel for Albertine, Charlus for Morel, equally)--in its violent and passionate Viscontian coloration-played out against the backdrop of a waning society, one whose decline is figured through the Baron de Charlus and his nephew Robert de Saint-Loup. It is Charlus' dotage, though, rather than his homosexuality (and Robert's amorous derogation through Rachel rather than his homosexuality) that reflects this decline. In this way aristocracy is combined with homosexuality as a differentiating point of view, one which, in Proust's novel, allows for the subjective insights that lead to artistic redemption. While Visconti hints at this crucial aspect of the novel, he leaves its full development unexplored, according to his above-quoted self-limitation. The hope is that a different aspect of Proust--the Balzacian--will come to the surface, enriched by Visconti's skill with melodrama and his attention to material detail (as exemplified in the justly celebrated dance sequence at the end of The Leopard, suggesting an understanding that costume, gesture, fashion, furniture, and conversation, under scrutiny, tell a story as much as the fore-grounded characters). It is just such details that fascinate the narrator of Proust's novel, and that, along with his successive loves and artistic fancies, constitute the curriculum of his education. (It should also be said that a certain melodramatic aspect to Proust, often lost in the critical focus on jealousy, knowledge, and the obscurity of the object of desire, also thus surfaces with greater prominence.) Visconti's self-imposed limitations thus illuminate ill-understood aspects of the Recherche that are also essential to Proust's project. What risk getting lost in the pace of a more comprehensive adaptation of the book are precisely the details that gradually add up to the complexity the narrator will come to
understand--complexity of sign-systems, of characters and identity, of art works and meaning, and finally of time.
Pinter is not inattentive to this Proust, although his main concern lies more in redemption through memory and art than in society, class, and modernity. (6) He necessarily sacrifices details and the slower unfolding of the search to a more ambitious pace. He makes various Proustian themes more explicit cinematographically. For example, one well-known preoccupation of the Recherche is vision, most famously stated in La Prisonniere: Le seul veritable voyage, le seul bain
de Jouvence, ce ne serait pas d'aller vers de nouveaux paysages, mais d'avoir d'autres yeux, de voir
l'univers avec les yeux d'un autre, de cent autres, de voir les cent univers que chacun d'eux voit, que chacun d'eux est; et cela nous le pouvons avec un Elstir, avec un Vinteuil, avec leurs pareils, nous volons vraiment d'etoiles en etoiles. (7)
Subjective and artistic relativism is thus symbolized through eyes. At one point in his script (right at the end of La Prisonniere when Francoise informs the narrator that Albertine has fled), Pinter inserts the following shots: "345. Marcel's eyes; 346. The eyes of Gilberte at Tansonville; 347. The eyes of the Duchesse de Guermantes in the street; 348. The eyes of Odette in the Avenue des Acacias; 349. The eyes of Mother in the bedroom at Combray; 350. The eyes of Marcel in the lavatory at Combray; 351. The eyes of Marcel" (Pinter 152). All of these shots will have already occurred in the film. The successive objects of desire of Marcel's gaze are thus juxtaposed in their opacity, symbolized by these eyes which each see a totally different universe. The unifying view will be that of the artist that the narrator wants to become, a goal ultimately facilitated by the loss of Albertine who will not live to become the narrator's Odette. Pinter often resorts to this sort of "distillation" technique, which can be very suggestive and meaningful, but which also risks degenerating into caricature.
Schlondorff's film has been criticized along these lines. The co-writer Jean-Claude Carriere describes the interpretive presuppositions of the team responsible for Swann in Love (12):
"feeling ourselves incapable--indeed doubting cinema's very capability--of giving a cinematographic equivalent of the great Proustian stream [fleuve] ... we wagered that in dropping a bucket in this stream, we would find the elements that compose the whole of the current." Unfortunately the bucket came up with the volume of the novel perhaps most suited to adaptation (in its relative separation from other volumes and its third-person narrative structure), but least important in the overall work. Moreover, a decision was made further to confine the project to a 24 hour period, an artificial constraint which causes a good deal of confusion in the story and undermines the slow development and transient truths
characteristic of Proust's book. More importantly, the film betrays even this interpretive presupposition by smuggling in elements of the rest of the book and investing Swann with characteristics of the narrator. Schlondorff thus fails even in the modest terms set at the outset of this limited Proust project. The overall effect is, if anything, anti-Proustian: "It seems that the condensation of the episodes of Swann in Love and the re-injection of elements drawn from elsewhere in the chronology reduced to several hours produces the curious effect that chemistry calls 'precipitation' ... scattered as they really are over the course of the novels duration,' the details accumulate, suggestion thickening into grand strokes. Ambiguity becomes causality, a person becomes a character; the long evolution of Swann, a frenetic flight, the drip-drop of Time, a cataract." (8) It seems that if the Recherche in its entirety is too forbidding an object of adaptation, one should really stay within one's constraints. (As Chantal Akerman does in La Captive (2000), more a work inspired by La Prisonniee than an adaptation of that volume of Proust's novel, but a Proustian exercise nonetheless, and an admirable homage.)
The Recherche may undermine our notions of stable identities, of friendship, of the
objectivity of facts, of canons of art, of dignity and class--and it may do so in sentences that defy classical stylistics and seem to forbid translation or adaptation. But for all its vertiginous novelty, the Recherche is also undeniably slow. Characters and events evolve over great spans of prose and time. There is no one truth about anyone such that she could solidify into a type or a caricature. Films, of course, cannot last tens of hours, as a global adaptation of the novel might demand. (9) Raoul Ruiz has learned from Schlondorff's mistakes and made the boldest attempt to date to depict the instability and flux that characterize Proust's book.
"To my mind, all of the problems which Proust poses are cinematic" (Ruiz, Cahiers 51). So Ruiz justifies his adaptation, contradicting those critics who believe Proust's work unfilmable,
(10) as well as Proust himself if we take at face value the famous condemnation of realism in Le temps retrouve: "Quelques-uns voulaient que le roman fut une sorte de defile
cinematographique des choses. Cette conception etait absurde. Rien ne s'eloigne plus de ce que nous avons percu en realite qu'une telle vue cinematographique." (11) Certainly Ruiz is correct in suggesting that this statement should not be taken as a condemnation of the cinema. It is a crude example in a diatribe against realist technique in the novel, and at any rate likely refers more to photography or the very first moving pictures of the Lumieres and others than to any "cinematographic" procedures. In any case, Proust's thoughts on film arguably have no bearing on his suitability to filmic adaptation in the hands of a worthy filmmaker. Ruiz, undaunted, seeks to find the technical analogies to Proust's innovations in a medium he knows much better and rates much higher. The mode of this adaptation--or "adoption" as Ruiz calls it (Cahiers 51)--is a curious mixed mode, both an exercise in fidelity and a somewhat irreverent intersection or "transposition" (Scarpetta 67). If Proust posits the instability of the subject (and consequently of the object as well) and his sentences undermine standard grammatical expectations in order to affirm this point, then Ruiz will adapt analogically with his camera. Thus the famous shots, as in the recital sequence ("Musical Chairs") of the matinee chez la Princesse de Guermnates where the audience moves on a track while the camera pans back and forth over the guests and the performers, almost nauseatingly suggesting a deep instability of point of view. (This is a technique Ruiz had perfected in earlier surrealist or "magical realist" films such as Trois vies et une seule mort (1997) or Jessie (Shattered Image, 1998).) This sort of extreme fidelity may leave Proust at times almost unrecognizable, but all in the service of a filmic equivalent of Proust's achievement--or as Scarpetta suggests, "a film [that is] cinematographically proustien" (73)--rather than a filmed version of his book.
Here the question becomes the following: if the film leaves behind any simple criteria of fidelity to a source text, on what basis can it be judged? One answer is, purely as film. In this respect Le Temps retrouve fits in quite well with Ruiz's oeuvre, the touchstones of which have been "death, decadence, splitting [dedoublement] ... the ephemeral side of everything" (Ruiz, Avant-Scene Cinema 1). To this list we could add destabilizing shots, an uncompromising resistance to smoothing out contradictions in personality and identity, and an infatuation with tableaux vivants (for example in L'Hypothese du tableau void (1978) and Genealogies d'un crime (1997)) in which "everything in the shot speaks; even that which is imperceptible translates better the character and the situations than that which is said" (Avant-Scene Cinema 1). However, the sheer number of characters brought into scrutiny and the unexplained
significance with which they are invested undermines the autonomy of the film, begging a reference back to the source text.
In interviews Ruiz seems somewhat undecided on this issue, particularly whether one must have read Proust to understand his film. He ultimately opts out with the following: "We must postulate that no one has read Proust, that those who have have forgotten it, and that
everyone, even if he hasn't read it, remembers something" (Cahiers 52). (This seems at the very least more productive than the critic who states that the film is incomprehensible whether you have read Proust or not!) (12) This is to say, Ruiz understands that he is dealing with a lieu de memoire, a sacred text that needs to be undermined in order to be reaffirmed. What results is a fascinating visual extrapolation from Proust, but one that leaves a great deal to be desired. What gets lost? Charlus and homosexuality, aristocracy, lost time, and the work of semiotic apprenticeship that leads to the final epiphanies; in short, the Search.
In a relevant context, Roland Barthes has discussed the misinterpretation of Proust with respect to the device he identifies as inversion--not "sexual inversion" but the long process of misprision and disclosure that characterizes Proust's novel over the course of its development. "In making Proustian inversion into a simple reduction, one sacrifices the complexities of the form and risks to miss the point of the text" (Barthes 329). What risk getting lost--temporality, over-abundance, and surprise--are fundamental to Proust's style and structure. The narrative process, what constitutes the book as Search, cannot be distilled out of its slow progression. Despite Ruiz's admirable efforts, the sacrifice of the search itself in the focus on Time Regained undermines Proust's project, suggesting an interpretation inattentive to the complexities of inversion and apprenticeship.
Time regained without time lost was exactly what Visconti sought to avoid in his treatment. By denying himself recourse to the most pregnant and well-known passages of memory and artistic redemption, Visconti limits the appeal of his Proust--at least with respect to certain interpretive expectations. As has been emphasized for some years now, though, Proust
belongs "between two centuries;" he is both a Modernist and obdurately pre-modern. Many of his predilections and investments--social, artistic, philosophical--belong to the nineteenth century. Visconti, too, is an artist who does not quite fit into his time period (compared with contemporaries like Antonioni or Rossellini). Like Proust, he has a crepuscular side, a lateness that is more profound and perhaps tragic than nostalgia, which in no way precludes
an apparently contradictory modernism. (13) It was his lot--gift or limitation--to see this aspect of Proust, to filter a perceived kindred artist's work through his own subjective predilections in the hope that something might remain of Proust that was not a betrayal to either artist's vision. It is indeed our loss that his film was never made.
Notes
(1) "It is nonsense to wax wroth about the indignities practiced on literary works on the screen, at least in the name of literature. After all, they cannot harm the original in the eyes of those who know it, however little they approximate to it. As for those who are unacquainted with the original, one of two things may happen; either they will be satisfied with the film which is as good as most, or they will want to know the original, with the resulting gain for literature." (93; 65) All translations below are mine, unless otherwise noted.
(2) Writer on every major Visconti film except Ossessione, La terra trema, La caduta degli dei, and Morte a Venezia.
(3) See Abadie and Schwartz which documents the trip through photographs Schwartz took on this speculative trip with Stephane, Cecchi d'Amico, and Visconti.
(4) These details come from an interview with Nicole Stephane in L'Avant-scene cinema as well as the introductions to A la recherche du temps perdu by Suso Cecchi d'Amico and Luchino Visconti and The Proust Screenplay by Harold Pinter.
(5) As Dudley Andrew specifies, "Well over half of all commercial films have come from literary originals" (98).
(6) Of course the Pinter-Losey collaboration did produce several good films more focused on the psychology of class (The Servant, 1963) and of love and jealousy (Accident, 1967), both with homoerotic undercurrents which could open onto more properly Proustian concerns.
(7) "The only true voyage, the only bath in the Fountain of Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to see the hundred universes that each of them sees, that each of them is; and
this we can do with an Elstir, with a Vinteuil; with men like these we do really fly from star to star." (III, 762; V, 343)
(8) Latil Le Dantec 47; see also Powrie.
(9) Unless they are realized for television, like Fassbinder's remarkable 15-1/2 hour Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980), although to date no such attempts have been made for Proust. The main effort to date on television is Claude Santelli's 1971 Du cote de chez Swann (with a young Isabelle Huppert as Gilberte).
(10) See for example, Costanzo.
(11) "Some critics now liked to regard the novel as a sort of procession of things upon the screen of a cinematograph. This comparison was absurd. Nothing is further from what we have really perceived than the vision that the cinematograph presents." (IV, 461; VI, 279)
(12) See Romney.
(13) Edward Said summarizes the situation of lateness with respect to Adorno (207): "the out-of-his-time late nineteenth-century disappointed or disillusioned romantic who exists almost ecstatically detached from, yet in a kind of complicity with, new and monstrous modern forms--fascism, antisemitism, totalitarianism, bureaucracy, or what Adorno liked to call the administered society and the consciousness indusrty ... Adorno--and with him rough
contemporaries like Richard Strauss, [Giuseppe Tomasi di] Lampedusa, Visconti--is unwaveringly Eurocentric, unfashionable, resistant to any assimilative scheme, and yet he oddly reflects the predicament of ending without illusory hope or manufactured resignation."
Works Cited
Abadie, Jean-Jacques and Claude Schwartz. A la recherche de Proust. Paris: Findakly, 2002.
Andrew, Dudley. Concepts in Film Theory. Oxford (UK): Oxford UP, 1984.
Paris: Seuil, 1984.
Bazin, Andre. Qu'est-ce que le cinema (1958). Paris: Le Cerf, 1997. What is Cinema? Trans. Hugh Gray. Berkeley: University of California, 1967.
Benjamin, Walter. "The Image of Proust." Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken, 1968.
Carriere, Jean-Claude. Interview, Avant-Scene Cinema 321-22 (February 1984): 11-17.
Cecchi d'Amico, Suso and Luchino Visconti. A la recherche du temps perdu. Paris: Persona, 1984.
Costanzo, William. "The Persistence of Proust, the Resistance of Film." Literature/Film Quarterly 15.3 (1987): 169-174.
Deleuze, Gilles. L'Image-temps. Paris: Minuit, 1985.
--. Proust et les signes. Paris: PUF, 1964.
Latil Le Dantec, Mireille. "A la recherche du Proust perdu." Cinematographe 98 (March 1984): 45-50.
Pinter, Harold. The Proust Screenplay. New York: Grove Press, 1977.
Powrie, Phil. "Marketing History: Swann in Love." Film Criticism 12.3 (Spring 1988): 33-44.
Proust, Marcel. A la recherche du temps perdu. Ed. Tadie et al. 4 vols. Paris: Gallimard (Pleiade), 1989. In Search of Lost Time. Trans. Moncrieff, Kilmartin, and Enright. 7 vols. New York: Modern Library, 1998.
Romney, Jonathan. "Masque of the Living Dead." Sight and Sound 10.1 (January 2000): 30-33.
Ruiz, Raoul. Interview. Avant-Scene Cinema 482 (May 1999): 1-3.
--. Interview. Cahiers du Cinema 535 (May 1999): 46-52.
Said, Edward. "Adorno as Lateness Itself." Adorno: A Critical Reader. Ed. Nigel Gibson and Andrew Rubin. Oxford (UK): Blackwell, 2002.
Scarpetta, Guy. "Reflexions sur Le Temps retrouve." Positif 463 (September 1999): 66-73.
Stephane, Nicole. L'Avant-scene cinema 321-322 (February 1984): 5-10.
Visconti, Luchino. Interview. Il Dramma 47.3 (1971): 55-58. COPYRIGHT 2004 Post Script, Inc.
No portion of this article can be reproduced without the express written permission from the copyright holder.
