動くプルースト

Kim Willsher “Canadian professor discovers what could be only footage of Marcel Proust” https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/feb/16/canadian-professor-discovers-what-could-be-only-footage-of-marcel-proust


カナダ・ケベック州のラヴァル大学の映画学教授Jean-Pierre Sirois-Trahan氏*1は「カナダ国立映画センター」のアーカイヴで仏蘭西の作家マルセル・プルースト*2が映ったフィルムを発見した。プルーストの動画が発見されたのは初めて。


A Canadian university professor claims to have found the only existing moving picture of French writer Marcel Proust.

The black-and-white footage of a wedding cortège filmed in 1904 shows a brief glimpse of a man in his 30s with a neat moustache, wearing a bowler hat and pearl-grey formal suit, descending a flight of stairs on his own. Most of the other guests are in couples.


Sirois-Trahan says the film is of the marriage of Élaine Greffulhe, daughter of the Countess of Greffulhe, who was one of Proust’s close friends and the principle inspiration for his character Oriane de Guermantes in À La Recherche du Temps Perdu (In Search of Lost Time).
プルースト研究家たちの反応;

Luc Fraisse*3, director of the Revue of Proustian Studies, has no doubt the film shows Proust.

“Because we know every detail of Proust’s life, we know from several sources that during those years he wore a bowler hat and pearl grey suit... It’s moving to say to ourselves that we are the first to see Proust since his contemporaries... even if it would be better if he was descending the steps a little less quickly! It’ll be fine when we have slowed the film down,” Fraisse told Le Point magazine*4.

Sorbonne professor Jean-Yves Tadié*5, another Proust specialist, said he was delighted. “I’ve always thought we’d end up seeing him in a news film. The shape of the face, the approximate way of dressing, all corresponds to him, and the identification seems quite convincing,” Tadié told Le Point.

He added: “I find this discovery very moving, and all the more so because Proust always had an ambiguous relationship with moving images.

“It’s astonishing that nobody has thought to look for Proust in the archives of films of the Greffulhes before... It shows that new discoveries are still possible, even about an author who, it would seem, has already been so minutely studied.”