The Proust Screenplay: a la Recherche du Temps Perdu

Pinter and friends take on a daunting task here... Distilling Proust's 7-volume masterwork into a two-hour movie. I've read the whole book, I lead a group that's reading it with me again, so I got it, I loved it, I was visualizing his scene descriptions and quick-flash images. So all I can say is-- Is Julie Taymor or Mira Nair available? And that British costume designer who wins all the Oscars. It wouldn't be that hard, it wouldn't make any money, but boy, would it ever give you Proust-at-a-glance.

Did you finish Swann’s Way? Did you go on to read any more Proust? Once you finish the whole thing, you need to read Harold Pinter’s Proust screenplay. It was written in 1972 and has never been made into a movie. When we read Pinter, in the introduction, saying “If the thing was to be done at all, one would have to try to distill the whole work,” we may be forgiven for thinking of the “Summarize Proust Contest” on Monty Python’s Flying Circus. But Pinter might have beaten the girl with the biggest tits; in a sense it’s all there, but in a way that I can’t imagine making a lot of sense unless one knows the whole novel. The dramatic condensations of Shakespeare are somewhat similar. Of course it’s interesting here in a show more special way, since Pinter is using the proustian idea that a little taste can bring a whole scene or narrative section back. show less

not filmed.
Michael Wood, Times Literary Supplement, June 2nd 1978. "We read The Proust Screenplay with all kinds of things in our mind: Proust, Pinter's reading of Proust; the problem of abridgment, the problem of dramatization, the problem of visualization; the film which might have been made from this script; the script itself as a literary work, words on the page. In permitting and controlling the interplay of these things Pinter has created a small masterpiece of wit and understanding."