For L.F.D.A. 02.

Film-maker Véronique Aubouy is a passionate admirer of Marcel Proust’s novel A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, a book she reads and re-reads constantly, and which she has taken as the essential matter of her work, “like a potter his wet clay”. Since October 20, 1993, she has invited people chosen “as a result of chance encounters, journeys, recommendations” to read two pages of Proust’s monumental text under the watchful eye of her camera, proceeding in sequence through the book. Each person is free to choose their own setting, and their own way of reading the text aloud : time becomes a key element in this fragmented reading of Proust, and the succession of readers gives rise to a highly diverse series of portraits, a moving-image panorama of our contemporaries.

Most often a silent, solitary activity, reading here becomes the pretext for a presentation of the “theatre of the intimate”. Today, Aubouy’s Web site – on which she keeps a meticulous record of the chronology of this vast undertaking – informs us that she has reached Part Two of Le Côté des Guermantes, after twenty hours and twenty-eight minutes of film, and seven-hundred-and-twenty-nine readers. Aubouy has calculated that a reading of the complete works of Proust following this procedure would end in 2050, the scope of the project corresponding to the space of an entire human life : that of Véronique Aubouy herself.
[M.A.]

Véronique Aubouy

Since 1993, Véronique Aubouy, documentary and fiction short filmmaker, has been launched in a long-term undertaking. Impassioned by the work of Marcel Proust, she seeks to create in image the reading, through extracts and through following the text, of all of his writings, through various people. More than a theatrical rendering cleverly constructed from Proustian texts, the filmed sequences give rise to an immense sociological portrait which, extending over hundreds of hours, is responsive to the notion so dear to the writer of things past. [M. A.]

Véronique Aubouy was born in 1961.
She lives and works in Paris.

Proust Lu n°699 - Iliès Hasnaoui, Véronique Aubouy 2008