Marion Schmid

Filming jealousy: Chantal Akerman's La Captive (2000)

Abstract La Captive (2000), Chantal Akermans recent adaptation of Proust, is the last in a series of attempts to transfer Prousts notoriously intricate and complex fictional universe to the screen. Akerman chose to focus the most inward-looking of Prousts volumes: La Prisonnière s highly disturbing tale of obsessive love. The article examines the directors provocative approach to the adaptation of classic literature. Established in an uncertain present, and drawing on earlier cinematic models, the film sets a complex interplay of perceptions and feelings: gaze and image, absence and presence, object and desire, difference and possession. With La Captive, Prousts study of pathological jealousy and unfulfilled desire thus finds a specific resonance generated by the elusive nature of the cinematic image.

Proust’s Choreographies of Writing : A la recherche du temps perdu and the Modern Dance Revolution

Beyond the personal interest Proust took in Ballets Russes productions, what role did the modern dance revolution spearheaded by pioneers such as Nijinsky and Isadora Duncan play in shaping the authors modernist sensitivity? This article explores the manifold resonances between the profound mutation dance underwent in the early decades of the twentieth century and the Recherche, from the emergence of new forms of embodied subjectivity to the interest in polyvalent gender and sexual identities, and, more broadly, a preoccupation with the expressive language of the body. Dance, it will be argued, not only informed reflections on the fluidity of artistic contemplation and the impermanence of theatrical art; it was assimilated into choreographic representations of gesture and the kinaesthetic body. The genesis and publishing history of A la recherche du temps perdu are curiously entwined with another watershed in the history of European modernism, the early twentieth-century modern dance revolution: while the novel’s birth in 1909 – that is, the transition from SainteBeuve narrative to the novel of remembrance – coincides with the dazzling entry of Serge Diaghilevs Ballets Russes on the Paris stage, the publication of its first volume, Du côté de chez Swann, in 1913 is concurrent with the troupe’s most controversial performance, the riotprovoking Sacre du printemps. Like many contemporary artists, Proust enthusiastically embraced the new choreographic language and mixed-media forms of Ballets Russes productions, becoming a regular visitor from the 1910 season onwards. He relished such iconic works as Schéhérazade, Cléopatre, Les Sylphides and L’Oiseau de Feu and is likely to have seen or at least been aware of the more modernist ballets that entered the repertoire in 1912 when the troupe’s star dancer Vaslav Nijinsky took over as chief choreographer. A degree of uncertainty surrounds Prousts presence at the choreographer’s most challenging works, L’Après-midi d’un faune and Le Sacre du printemps, but we can assume that he saw Jeux, Nijinsky’s ‘tableau of modern life’, which bewildered audiences with its angular, 1 Though very short, Nijinskys role as choreographer radically changed the aesthetic of Ballets Russes choreography. He was replaced by Léonide Massine in 1913.

Proust Writing Photography: Fixing the Fugitive in A la recherche du temps perdu

Aine Larkin, Oxford, Legenda, 2011, 212 pp, £45, 978 1 907747 95 3 Over the last decade or so, the influence of photography on Proust has generated considerable critical interest, producing such st...