ABSTRACT
Cinema's capacity for resurrecting the past in the present takes on a particular meaning in Proustian terms. The singularly topical manner in which Marcel Proust's comment evokes the picturing of a changing point of view through a mise en scene in depth and a process of editing shots together, appears all the more cinematic as he talks of the infiltration of the present by the past. In Gilles Deleuze's words: the direct time-image always gives people access to that Proustian dimension where people and things occupy a place in time which is incommensurable with the one they have in space. Proust indeed speaks in terms of cinema, time mounting its magic lantern on bodies and making the shots coexist in depth. It is this build-up, this emancipation of time, which ensures the rule of impossible continuity and aberrant movement. In Andre Bazin's well-known description, cinema embalms the movement of the present 'like the mummy of change'.
