The Surreal Real: Proust, Woolf, and World Cinema

From the 1920s onward, surrealist ideas circulated on an international market from Paris to New York, Prague, Tokyo, and beyond, and surrealism’s hidden legacy is to be found also in world fiction and contemporary film. In this talk, I’ll argue how Proust’s and Woolf’s revolutionizing understanding of time representation and the psychological self are developed within a new version of realism that is very close to the surrealists’ and which I’ll call oneiric realism. Contemporary productions of world cinema that uses the legacy of surrealism – Stephen Daldry’s The Hours and Raúl Ruiz’s Le Temps retrouvé – take Proust’s and Woolf’s concept of time and the psychological representation of the self to a whole new level through the use of musical and cinematic devices.