Thinking Cinema with Proust: 7 (Moving Image)

How can Prousts A la recherche du temps perdu prompt us to re-imagine the cinema? Although no-one goes to the cinema in the novel and its narrator is critical of a merely cinematographic account of reality the proposition of Thinking Cinema with Proust is that the Recherche can provide a powerful catalyst for re-thinking the cinema and that the structural absence of cinema from Prousts novel is rich in implications. Drawing on a complex terrain of intersections and overlaps between the experience of the spectator and that of Prousts narrator and reader the book is focused around a series of motifs - reverie the camera obscura the magic lantern projection gesture and screen memory - which enable a fluid movement back and forth between Proust and film theory.Patrick ffrench is Professor of French at Kings College London.