Proust lu: The Conference by Véronique Aubouy

About this Event

Filmmaker and artist Véronique Aubouy will share with us her life-long, grandiose project Proust lu, which developed out of her fascination with Marcel Proust’s masterpiece À la recherché du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time).

Since 1993, Aubouy has asked various readers—both anonymous and famous—to read aloud sections of the novel in front of her camera. Though she follows the chronology of the text, she leaves to readers the choice of place, decor and staging. Singular object in the cinematographic landscape, this unfinished film is an autobiography, a mosaic of portraits and an expression of a period. Proust lu questions time and offers a diversity of perceptions, intimate, universal, past, and current. As of now, the project represents 116 hours, 22 years, and 1,200 readers and the film is expected to be finished around 2050.

For this event, Aubouy will share anecdotes, events and stories that have occurred over the past 22 years of filming. She will also screen excerpts of the film (in French, without subtitles) and share some pieces of the performance and the book she developed from her experience with the film project.

Aubouy is actively continuing to film readers for this project during her current tour of the United States.

About Véronique Aubouy

Filmmaker and artist Véronique Aubouy follows a singular path, strongly influenced by literature and music. She is a creator of documentary films, fictions, performances, video installations, internet extravaganzas and photographs. At the age of 26, she was profoundly moved by her reading of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. The films she has created since are deeply infused by the “Proustian stamp” in their relationship to time and sensation. In 1993, she decided to take on a project around the masterpiece that had inspired her for so long.

In cinema, Véronique Aubouy first directed short films one of which—The Silence of Summer—was selected in the Cannes Film Festival 1993 as part of the category “Un certain regard”. She went on to direct numerous documentary films such as A musician passes, portrait of virtuoso pianist Zoltan Kocsis (2002); I am not an angry man, portrait of playwright Edward Bond (2002); and Bernadette Lafont, une sacrée Bonne Femme, portrait of the French actress and muse of the Nouvelle Vague (2013). Her first non-documentary film, Je suis Annemarie Schwarzenbach, was presented in Berlin Panorama 2015, and has been shown in Paris for six consecutive months in 2015.

She has also written a book with Mathieu Riboulet, À la lecture, about the impact and pleasure of Proust in our lives today, which was published in September 2014 by Grasset.

Find out more about Véronique Aubouy.

This event is presented in conjunction with the Boston Athenæum

This event is made possible thanks in part to the Mosaïque Cultural Fund and Fidelity.