‘La lettre au cinéma n’est pas une excellente solution’ : A Heteromedial Analysis of Chantal Akerman’s Proust Adaptation Jørgen Bruhn When probing the intricate relation between the visual and the verbal, often translated into the registers of the image and the text, it is salient to discuss the work of Marcel Proust. In this chapter I pursue what I call a ‘heteromedial’ point of view in order to focus on one of the fascinating relationships connecting Marcel Proust and the arts, namely the relation between his writings and later cinematic adaptations of his work. I begin here by making a short sketch of the reception of Proust in an interart/intermedial perspective, which will lead me to consider the relation of Proust’s work to cinema. I shall concern myself almost exclusively with Chantal Akerman’s film adaptation of Proust’s La Prisonnière, entitled La Captive, focusing on the opening scene. My discussion of Akerman’s work will necessitate a short description of my theoretical framework, where I propose a wider understanding of intermediality. I Marcel Proust created a handful of fictive but extremely lifelike artists in A la recherche du temps perdu, each of whom had not only a physiognomy and a psychological profile, but represented a well-defined aesthetic theory, and each of whom created entire artistic (though fictional) œuvres. Partly as a result of this, and also because Proust’s narrator