Skip to main content
Disciplines
Automotive Business IT + Informatics Construction + Real Estate Electrical Engineering + Electronics Energy + Sustainability Insurance + Risk Finance + Banking Management + Leadership Marketing + Sales Mechanical Engineering + Materials
Events
DE
EN
Books
Journals
Topic Page
Marketing
Start single access now
Access for companies
EXTENDED SEARCH
Log in
Top
Published in:
Introduction Read chapter Read first chapter

2021 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

7. Chantal Akerman, Marcel Proust, and Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958)

Author : William H. Mooney

Published in: Adaptation and the New Art Film

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Log in

Activate our intelligent search to find suitable subject content or patents.

search-config
loading …

Abstract

Chantal Akerman’s filmmaking is often described as “opaque,” relying on long takes and confining or empty spaces to promote an existential anxiety. So she faces a particular challenge in adapting Marcel Proust’s La Prisonnière, a volume of In Search of Lost Time that is intertwined with the longer novel and equally dependent on its narrator’s voice and verbal sophistication. Ackerman’s primary strategy is to concentrate on the relationship between Marcel and Albertine, renamed Simon and Ariane, conveying their way of being through the mise en scene. To further articulate the complex relationships of Proust’s couple and her own, however, she cites Alfred Hitchock’s Vertigo extensively, thus invoking the fraught relationship of Scottie with Judy/Madeline as a key to deciphering the sadomasochistic tragedy of La Captive.

Dont have a licence yet? Then find out more about our products and how to get one now:

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik"

Online-Abonnement

Mit Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" erhalten Sie Zugriff auf:

  • über 102.000 Bücher
  • über 537 Zeitschriften

aus folgenden Fachgebieten:

  • Automobil + Motoren
  • Bauwesen + Immobilien
  • Business IT + Informatik
  • Elektrotechnik + Elektronik
  • Energie + Nachhaltigkeit
  • Finance + Banking
  • Management + Führung
  • Marketing + Vertrieb
  • Maschinenbau + Werkstoffe
  • Versicherung + Risiko

Jetzt Wissensvorsprung sichern!

inform now

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

Online-Abonnement

Mit Springer Professional "Wirtschaft" erhalten Sie Zugriff auf:

  • über 67.000 Bücher
  • über 340 Zeitschriften

aus folgenden Fachgebieten:

  • Bauwesen + Immobilien
  • Business IT + Informatik
  • Finance + Banking
  • Management + Führung
  • Marketing + Vertrieb
  • Versicherung + Risiko




Jetzt Wissensvorsprung sichern!

inform now
previous chapter From All About Eve (1950) to Clouds of Sils Maria (2014): Adapting a Classic Paradigm
next chapter From Dashiell Hammett to the Coen Brothers’ Miller’s Crossing (1990)
Footnotes
2
Swann in Love (1984).
 
3
Interview, “Proust à l’écran.”
 
4
Kuyper, Frankfurt interview. He is also credited on Je tu il elle (1974).
 
5
See Margulies, “The Politics of Singular,” in Nothing Happens.
 
6
Chantal Akerman. Autoportrait en cinéaste, 128–130.
 
7
Camera Obscura, Interview with Ivone Margulies, 23.
 
8
Camera Obscura, 140.
 
9
2015, The Jewish Museum, New York.
 
10
Margulies, “The Politics of Singular,” in Nothing Happens, 3 (Kindle).
 
11
Camera Obscura, 32 and 51. In this interview with Janet Bergstrom, Akerman’s early collaborator Babette Mangolte recounts how they watched Snow’s film over and over.
 
12
Mangolte interview, Camera Obscura, 45.
 
13
Cited by Foster, 2, along with the alternative point of view of Andrea Weiss.
 
14
Akerman interview, “Proust à l’écran.”
 
15
Critics such as B. Ruby Rich and Margulies take issue with “easy” feminist readings of the film, called by Rich a “subsidiary effect” based on narrative interpretations and “anti-illusionism” that frees the film from the complicity of classical Hollywood cinema in psychoanalytic terms.
 
16
In Margulies’s words, the murder scene “destroys the perfect homology between literalness and fiction, effecting “a switch from the literal to the fictive.” 5 (Kindle). See also Joël Magny for the sense of how the murder shifts audience reception of all that precedes it.
 
17
In various interviews, e.g., from Fluctuat.net, reprinted by Isabelle Price, January 1, 2008. https://​www.​univers-l.​com/​captive_​interview_​chantal_​ackerman.​html.
 
18
“Chantal always wanted to give space to viewers to build their own relationship with the film, to raise questions by themselves, to work…. She wanted to be at the same level as the viewers.” Camera Obscura, 17.
 
19
The desert images were from another project Akerman was working on, inserted among the images of her mother accumulated in the years preceding her death—the emptiness of the desert conveys Akerman’s feeling as she confronts the end of her mother’s life.
 
20
Ill and 90 years old, against all evidence, her mother thinks “she can still make progress.” Ma Mère Rit, 8.
 
21
Though the critic or researcher may find it: in Ma Mère Rit, for example, the partner from whom Akerman is separating is jealous in the manner of Marcel and Simon.
 
22
Akerman repeated this idea in various interviews, e.g., “Proust à l’écran,” August 15, 2009.
 
23
That the composer of Carmen was the first husband of one of Proust’s models for Mme de Guermantes, is most likely an accidental irony. See Caroline Webber, Proust’s Duchesses. New York: Phaidon, 2018.
 
24
“Une bête domestique,” 9. “Elle n’etais plus animée que de la vie inconsciente des végétaux, des arbres…”, 62.
 
25
“Depuis ce jour-là, elle m’avait tout caché,” 50.
 
26
“…le bonheur la remplissait,” 48.
 
27
Recalled from Du côté de chez Swann in La Prisonnière, 73.
 
28
Les cloisons qui separaient nos deux cabinets de toilette… étaient si minces que nous pouvions parler tout en nous lavant chacun dans le nôtre, poursuivants une causerie qu’interrompait seulement le bruit de l’eau, dans cette intimité que permet souvent à l’hôtel l’exiguité du logement et le rapprochement des pieces, mais qui, a Paris ést si rare, 5.
 
29
Ariane mentions reservations about the odor of her vagina; Simon reassures her.
 
30
La Prisonnière, 48.
 
31
Ibid., 101.
 
32
Akerman discusses the relationship in several interviews, for example, “Proust á l’écran,” August 15, 2009.
 
33
La Prisonnière, 137. The translation here is a slightly altered version of the much-revised Scott Moncrieff translation.
 
34
“Comme un historien qui aurait à faire une histoire pour laquelle il n’est aucun document.” La Prisonnière, 137.
 
35
See de Kuyper, or “Proust à l’écran.”
 
36
Emma Wilson writes: “Making her own version of Vertigo in La Captive, [Akerman] repeats a narrative of dizziness and murder, but stretches it out, and makes it opaque, impeding any move to closure and relief.” Afterlives, 97–98. The “murder,” in both films, remains a question of interpretation. I argue that Akerman foregrounds Vertigo in her film in order to make La Captive less opaque.
 
37
Wood, 113.
 
38
See Leitch’s view, in contrast to that of Wood, of Scottie as pathologically incomplete, 205.
 
39
111.
 
40
115.
 
41
Truffaut, 247. In the interview, Hitchcock confirms Truffaut’s observation.
 
42
Truffaut, 248.
 
43
In his interview with Truffaut, Hitchcock speaks of the scene as leading up to sex, the resisting Judy finally “taking off her knickers.” He also speaks of Scottie’s desire in terms of “necrophilia.” 245.
 
44
120. “…sans moi elle ne parlerait ansi, elle subi profondément mon influence, elle ne peut donc pas ne pas m’aimer, elle est mon oeuvre.”
 
45
La Prisonnière, 4.
 
46
Alors, sentant que son sommeil était dans son plein, et que je ne me heurterais pas à des écueils de conscience recouverts maintenant par la pleine mer du sommeil profound, délibérément je sautais sans bruit sur le lit, je me couchais au long d’elle, je prenais sa taille d’un de mes bras, je posais mes lèvres sur sa joue et sur son coeur, puis sur toutes les parties de son corps posais ma seule main restée libre, et qui étais soulevée aussi comme les perles, par la respiration d’Albertine; moi-même, j’étais déplacé légèrement par son mouvement régulier. Je m’étais embarqué sure le sommeil d’Albertine. La Prisonnière, 64. With one minor correction, the English translation is that of CK Scott Moncrieff, and Terence Kilmartin, revised by DJ Enright. New York: The Modern Library, 1992.
 
47
Of Scottie’s aspiration in respect to Madeleine, Wood writes, “…this rejection of life for an unattainable Idea is something fundamental in human nature.” 127.
 
48
“Scottie is at heart a voyeur who, fearing sexual consummation, prefers to avoid intimate and endangering involvements in favor of relationships he can control completely.” 198. “Scottie is not so much destroying his own identity as re-enacting a ritual that dramatizes the self-alienation…. Judy, like Madeleine before her, is simply the agent of the realization that Scottie has never had a self to lose.” 205.
 
49
Tania Modleski argues convincingly that the viewer is manipulated into holding both of these positions, Judy’s as well as Scottie’s. 99–101.
 
Literature
Akerman, Chantal. Autoportrait en cineaste. Claudine Paquot, ed. Paris: Edition du Centre Georges Pompidou/Editions Cahiers du Cinéma, 2004.
Atherton, Claire. “Our Way of Working: A Conversation with Claire Atherton about Chantal Akerman,” Interviewed by Ivone Margulies. Camera Obscura 100, Volume 34, Number 1, 2019.
Beugnet, Martine, and Marion Schmid. Proust at the Movies. New York: Routledge, 2016.
Foster, Gwendolyn Audrey. Identity and Memory: The Films of Chantal Akerman. Carbondale: University of Southern Illinois Press, 2003. Individual essays copyright 1999.
Leitch, Thomas. Find the Director and Other Hitchcock Games. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008.
Leitch, Thomas and Leland Pogue. A Companion to Alfred Hitchcock. New York: Wiley Blackwell, 2012.
Magny, Joël. “Les Rendez-vous d’Anna: Le ‘non’ de l’auteur,” Cinéma Volume 78, Number 239, November 1978: 92–93.
Mangolte, Babette. “With Chantal in New York in the 1970s: An Interview with Babette Mangolte,” Interviewed by Janet Bergstrom. Camera Obscura 100, Volume 34, Number 1, 2019.
Margulies, Ivone. Nothing Happens: Chantal Akerman’s Hyperrealist Everyday. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996.CrossRef
Modleski, Tania. The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory. New York: Routledge, 1988.
Proust, Marcel. La Prisonnière. Paris: Gallimard, 1989.
Schmid, Marion and Emma Wilson, eds. Chantal Akerman: Afterlives. Cambridge, UK: Legenda, 2019.
Spoto, Donald. Spellbound by Beauty: Alfred Hitchcock and his Leading Ladies. New York: Harmony Books, 2008.
Truffaut, François. Hitchcock, revised edition. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983.
Webber, Caroline. Proust’s Duchesses. New York: Phaidon, 2019.
Wood, Robin. Hitchcock’s Films, revised edition. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989.
Metadata
Title
Chantal Akerman, Marcel Proust, and Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958)
Author
William H. Mooney
Copyright Year
2021
Book
Adaptation and the New Art Film

Print ISBN: 978-3-030-62933-5

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-030-62934-2

Copyright Year: 2021

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62934-2_7