Word: proust
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...summer weekends, trains, cars and buses converge on the tiny (pop. 3,250) hamlet of Illiers, 73 miles southwest of Paris, and disgorge groups of tourists. Illiers is, in most respects, an unremarkable French village. One thing sets it apart-it was here that Marcel Proust whiled away the timeless summer days of his childhood. Later, he immortalized the town under the fictional name of Combray in his monumental novel, A la Recherche du Temps Perdu (Remembrance of Things Past). Relatively untouched by the modern age, as if it has been locked up for safekeeping against time in the pages...
...literary in method that they practically force viewers to grope for apt novelistic comparisons. His My Night at Maud's was suffused with a Catholic sensibility that evoked thoughts of Mauriac and James Joyce. Claire's Knee, with its themes of memory and desire, had critics remembering Proust. La Collectionneuse (The Collector), the third of Rohmer's irony-laden "moral tales" to reach the U.S., may well get audiences to thumbing their Nabokov...
...most scientists, this reference system, or memory, is one of the most important tools of man's intelligence. Long before the development of molecular biology, Marcel Proust pondered the mystery of memory in Remembrance of Things Past. About a man's own past, he wrote that "it is a labor in vain to attempt to recapture it: all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile. The past is hidden somewhere beyond the reach of the intellect." In Swann's Way, it was a tea-soaked petite madeleine that touched off the hero's long-forgotten childhood memories...
...joint, not an entertainment. Yet Rohmer's mandarin tact edges Claire's Knee close to philosophy. The acting reminds one of water spiders, which manage to stay on the surface by never being still enough to sink. Nestor Almendros' photography, with its floating summer vistas, is Proust's Combray come to life. When Aurora suggests that Jerome has become one of her fictions, he seems so, obeying impulses that originate from a mind...
Claire's Knee is, essentially, an opalescent homage to M. Marcel Proust. As 19th century Russian fiction is supposed to have tumbled from Gogol's Overcoat, modern French films have risen from Proust's Remembrance. Proust's work is clustered with optical allusions, accounts of the distortions of love in the fourth dimension of time. In its way it was the end of a line that could not be continued on the page-that needed the liberation of the camera. Directors such as Karel Reisz (Isadora) and Alain Renais (La Guerre Est Finie) acknowledge their debt...