The Work of Art as a Fictionalized Duplicate of Life: Boris Lehman's Babel film project in the Light of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time

Abstract

Belgian filmmaker Boris Lehman has created what is surely the most ambitious film diary in the history of cinema, Babel, a twenty-four-hour film divided into nine parts and several appendices, which traces a sort of sublimated filmic duplicate of the author's life between 1983 and 2020. In Babel, Lehman painstakingly records the daily activities of his life: eating breakfast, walking, talking with friends, traveling, playing the piano, being evicted, looking for a job or paying his taxes. Despite the appearance of a realistic duplicate, the filmmaker claims for his film the denomination of "autobiographical fiction". How can we understand this mismatch between the everyday reality suggested by the film and the fictional will that the author proposes as a key to reading it? This article proposes to consider this fictional quality of Lehman's autobiographical project in the light of the aesthetic proposal crystallized in Marcel Proust's novel In Search of Lost Time, which Gérard Genette proposed to call "autofiction".