ABSTRACT
The First World War signalled the definitive collapse of the system of values founded on positivist certainties and the faith in human progress that had dominated the second half of the nineteenth century. Marcel Proust's writing was characteristic of the emergence of the reflexive-subjective approach that came to inform modernist art practices which renounced the pretence of achieving a transparent representation of the world. Proust, it is often claimed in criticism, had no high opinion of the cinema, whose development coincides with the evolution of his own novel. To many observers, cinematic adaptation, so often defined in terms of faithfulness to a source text, appears like the confirmation of cinema's inferior power of interpretation. On the contrary, reality recorded through a mechanical, photographic process literally imposes its presence on the cinematic image. The cinema of the time-image would then become a cinema of subjectivity and consciousness.
