The "Debris of Experience": The Cinema of Marcel Proust and Raoul Ruiz

As the last and most theoretical volume of Marcel Proust's novel A la recherche du temps perdu, Le Temps retrouve would appear to be a very unlikely source of inspiration for a major motion picture. In almost every possible way it resists an adaptation into another artistic medium, particularly since it narrates the discovery of a literary vocation. Le Temps retrouve, more than any other volume, presupposes a familiarity with the plots and characters of all six preceding volumes of Proust's novel and so a cinematic adaption either must trust that the film spectator already knows Proust's work or must incorporate elements from the whole novel into its portrayal of the last volume. Le Temps retrouve contains practically no plot on which to base a dramatic representation, unlike other sections of the novel, such as Un Amour de Swann and La Prisonniere, that have both been more or less successfully adapted into film.(1) Most importantly however, it is in this volume where Proust, or his narrator, aggressively denounces cinema as incapable of portraying the true nature of time. Raoul Ruiz's film adaptation of Le Temps retrouve, in grappling with perhaps the least adaptable of texts, pushes the boundaries of the cinematic form in order to conceive new ways of creating images of time that would rival those of Proust's literary inventions. (2) Proust and Cinema Proust's Le Temps retrouve follows the narrator's discovery that his reliance on a spatial foundation of identity, manifested in his obsession with various places (Balbec, Venice, and Combray), has led him astray from his vocation as a writer of a book about time. Only through an experience and exploration of time can be understand the "essence" of the world and realize the full potential of literature. Naturally, cinema's reliance on spatial imagery as its primary mode of expression along with its dependence on a succession of still images to create the illusion of movement pose an apparent threat to Marcel's newfound cult of time. For the narrator, cinema fails because it relies on what can be captured on film, the simple common denominator of reality that presents itself in the same manner to everyone: "cette espece de dechet de l'experience, A peu pres identique pour chacun." (3) Literature, for Proust's narrator, works through metaphor to mediate perception and memory, bridging time through mental images, as opposed to cinema's visual images. Proust's critique of cinema as a debris of experience, an illusion of reality produced by a seemingly objective machine, echoes debates that emerged at the beginning of cinema and continue today as film theory grapples with the nature of cinema itself in the wake of new technologies for capturing moving images. In his classic work on cinematic adaptation, Novels into Film, George Bluestone shares a similar line of reasoning with Proust's narrator when he proposes that the difference between the two media, cinema and literature, lies in the nature of their images: the film is composed of visual, and therefore spatial, images; the novel of mental images. (4) More fundamentally for Bluestone, film and novel place their emphasis on opposing elements of human experience: "Both novel and film are time arts, but whereas the formative principle in the novel is time, the formative principle of the film is space. Where the novel takes its space for granted and forms its narrative in a complex of rime values, the film takes its time for granted and forms its narrative in arrangements of space." (5) Only the novel, from this perspective, can successfully capture lost time because its narrative modulates the experience of rime whereas cinema is, or appears to be, limited to the mechanized rime of (greater than sixteen) frames per second. (6) As Mary Ann Doane, among others, has shown, the shock of modernity, of a mechanized and monetized temporal experience, is both embodied and thwarted by cinema, since the movie camera produces a mechanical abstraction of lived experience in the service of archiving the image of the present, of time. …