Why Marcel Proust?

The work of Marcel Proust is enshrined in the European pantheon of literature. Everyone has heard of Proust but very few have read his work. Everybody knows the tea-soaked madeleine biscuit episode. Magazines such as The Express or Vanity Fair still use the famous Proust questionnaire to interview celebrities. Proust is alive in the public domain. Proust’s inspiration touches peoples’ everyday lives. We, as admirers of Proust, want to discover the essence of this writer and, through him, the wanderings and intuitions of those things which are the beginnings of self-awareness and the intimate creation of a literary work that is intense, varied, piquant, sorrowful and beautiful. Implicit in A la recherche du temps perdu, Proust challenges us to reflect on artistic creation, on the substance of art inspired by life. Although, this is not a theoretical work. His inner narrative is universal.

A brief summary of A la recherche…

Eager to explore the recesses of his memory, Proust devotes himself to the search for his past. Seriously ill from asthma, he is in seclusion and passes his long periods of wakefulness by recalling the fashionable Parisian society in times past, a trivial world on the surface, privileged certainly, but full of dreams, both complex and varied. The only unifying factor in the novel, is the presence of the first person narrator. No one had ever attempted to retell a man’s life with as much minutiae. This voice surfaces through the darkness of his vigils to form a long soliloquy as whimsical as it is unrelenting.

When the film industry tries to adapt Proust to the screen

In the four corners of the world, a great deal has been written about Proust’s epic work. It is no longer possible to count the bibliographical, biographical or analytical works available on Proust and Recherche. Since the 60s, he has attracted interest from the cinema industry and the leading European directors who have attempted to adapt his work. There are three screenplays of Recherche: Progetto Proust by the great Italian author Ennio Flaiano written for the film director René Clément, Alla Ricerca del tempo perduto that Suso Cecchi D’Amico (Il guattapardo’s scriptwriter) wrote for Visconti, haunted throughout his life by Proust’s Recherche and The Proust Screenplay written by the Englishman Harold Pinter on the request of Joseph Losey. Three films that have never been shot. In the 80s the challenge was finally taken up in Germany by Volker Schlöndorff (Un amour de Swann) using a screenplay by Peter Brook and Jean-Claude Carrière and by Percy Aldlon (Celeste). Another 20 years passed before Proust returned to the screen with Raoul Ruiz’s Le temps retrouvé and Chantal Akerman’s La Captive.

A Proustian revival in theatres

Surprisingly, there is also currently a renewed interest in Proust’s work on European stages: in London, Remembrance of Things Past is at the National Theatre, directed by Di Trevis; in Chicago with Mary Zimmerman’s Eleven Rooms of Proust; in France which is showing the work of Charles Tordjman, Je poussais donc le temps avec l’épaule; and in Germany where the Pole Krzysztof Warlikowski has just produced Auf der Suche nach der verlorenen Zeit as part of Cologne and Bonn’s Theater der Welt.

At the KunstenFESTIVALdesArts 2003, new Proust production

In Rotterdam Guy Cassiers has started the theatrical adaptation of all Proust’s work in four shows which will run until 2004. The KunstenFESTIVALdesArts presents Proust I et II in 2003 and will follow up the programme in 2004 with Proust III and Proust IV (provisional titles).

At the same time, Eric De Kuyper, co-scriptwriter of Chantal Akerman’s La Captive, and adaptor of the theatrical version of Guy Cassiers Proust productions, created Les intermittences du cœur from volume V of La recherche (La Prisonnière) and from Chantal Akerman’s script for La Captive.

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