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  • Modernist Visions: Marcel Proust’s ‘À la recherche du temps perdu’ and Jean-Luc Godard’s ‘Histoire(s) du cinéma’ by Miriam Heywood
  • Áine Larkin
Modernist Visions: Marcel Proust’s ‘À la recherche du temps perdu’ and Jean-Luc Godard’s ‘Histoire(s) du cinéma’. By Miriam Heywood. (Modern French Identities, 50). Oxford: Peter Lang, 2012. viii + 269 pp., ill.

This book is a careful and convincing comparative analysis of Proust’s and Godard’s works, using film theory as a productive framework in order to shed light on the similarities between the two artists’ poetic enterprises. It is clearly structured in four chapters, each of which is built around the application of particular, well-defined features of film theory and philosophy to À la recherche du temps perdu and Histoire(s) du cinéma. Chief among the concepts employed in the first chapter are Gilles Deleuze’s time-image and montage; the latter is here understood in broader terms than those associated solely with cinema: Miriam Heywood argues that, given the use of montage in video and digital [End Page 119] media, the term might refer ‘to any artistic practice that works in (and with) time and which brings together disparate images, sounds, and texts in order to provoke productive interaction in the realm of thought’ (p. 18). Her exploration of the chosen artworks points up the prevalence of ‘imagined images’ in each (p. 64) and the need for simultaneous reading and viewing of them in order to bind these images into chains of meaning. The second chapter examines the spatio-temporal complexity generated by the intertextuality of Proust’s and Godard’s works, and uses Ferdinand de Saussure’s anagram and Julia Kristeva’s conception of intertextuality to show the ambiguity of the boundaries between text and image, past and present, for the two artists. Chapter 3 is a fascinating exploration of sound in both literary and videographic art, and examines noise, voice, and music in turn, demonstrating how both Proust and Godard conceive of sound synaesthetically. The final chapter addresses the plurality of subjectivity in Proust’s and Godard’s works, bringing into play film theories of subjectivity, viewing, and spectator-ship to underline the multiplicity of narratorial perspectives in both works. Throughout, Heywood engages closely and fruitfully with relevant passages from Godard’s eight-part video and from the Proustian narrative, some of which have hitherto been overlooked; it would have been useful if the Proust references had been taken from the four-volume Pléiade edition published between 1987 and 1989 and regarded as the definitive edition of this text. In successfully applying film theory and philosophy to these important works of literary and video art, this book makes a significant contribution to both Proust studies and Godard analysis, and sets up a dialogue between literature, cinema, and video that will prove stimulating to scholars in each of these fields.

Áine Larkin
University of Aberdeen
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