Books, 8/23.

Ronald Bergan is one of 3000 volunteers each reading a single page from Marcel Proust's A la Recherche du Temps Perdu as part of Veronique Aubouy's ongoing project, Le Baiser de la Matrice, which'll eventually be 170 hours long: "In all, Aubouy has filmed 742 people since 1993, and yet only three volumes have been completed.... In a way, this could be considered the most successful attempt to film Proust's novel of time, space and memory, a landmark in 20th-century literature. Previous films have been bleeding chunks by directors having only dared tackle one volume such as Volker Schlondorff's Swann in Love (1984), Raul Ruiz's Time Regained (1999) and Chantal Akerman's The Captive (2000). Various others have tried to bring the whole novel to the screen, only to end in tears."

Also in the Guardian: In his engaging review, Simon Callow writes that Ever, Dirk: The Bogarde Letters "remarkably reveals a fascinating, original and in some ways haunted man in shockingly unmediated form." And Louise Dean reviews Linn Ullmann's novel, A Blessed Child.

Via Bookforum, Claudia Pummer on The Cinema of Werner Herzog: Aesthetic Ecstasy and Truth: "One of the most refreshing aspects of this study is that [Brad] Prager avoids situating Herzog solely in the context of the New German Cinema, taking into account that the director has long established himself outside this outmoded historiographical and national category.... It is rather unfortunate, however, that Prager never reflects critically on [auteur theory], since it seems to challenge his major argument of defining Herzog's work as a mode that defies the very conventions of a unifying aesthetic principle."

"From the earliest days of cinema a fascination with Scottish historical themes fed the appetites of Hollywood." The Times of London runs an extract from Being a Scot by Sean Connery and Murray Grigor with a good swath on Alexander Mackendrick.

Online listening tip. On Point on "the last Victorian, proto-feminist classic, Anne of Green Gables, at one hundred."

Posted by dwhudson at August 23, 2008 1:17 PM