While film directors from outside of France have tried to adapt Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu to the screen, these attempts have largely been failures as adaptations, if not entirely as films. Less traditional yet ultimately more successful adaptations of Proust's work and ideas, such as Chantal Ackerman's La captive or Chris Marker's La Jetée, have appeared, however, from within France. This paper explores divergent types of cinematographic adaptations of Proust by French and non-French directors, and reexamines the very notion of adaptation.

Building on Andrew Higson's analyis of the representation of time in the "heritage" film, on Raymond Bellour's work on the "stilled" image, and on Réda Bensamaïa's consideration of the photogram, I examine several adaptations of La recherche, especially Raoul Ruiz's Le temps retrouvé (1999) and Chris Marker's La Jetée (1962). I contend that while it may be more literal-minded, Ruiz's adaptation of Proust is, paradoxically, directly at odds with a Proustian aesthetics. Marker's work, however, cleverly translates a Proustian aesthetics of time, memory, and experience.

I also consider Marker's relationship to the English-language translations that Marker himself has supervised and sometimes preferred of both La Jetée and of his cd-rom Immemory (another Proustian work), and I examine the case of Terry Gilliam's 12 Monkeys, an adaptation of Marker's La Jetée (and hence an adaptation of a Proustian adaptation). I end by suggesting that these works constitute bridges from La recherche toward an Anglo-Saxon audience, and that while foreign directors may have had little luck in adapting Proust, Proust has had notable success in moving abroad.