While a more conventional example of “the art film” than the other two titles in this series, Swann in Love deserves credit as the first feature to bring any part of In Search of Lost Time to the screen. Its skillful attempts at condensing and visualizing Proust’s prose and at evoking the 1880s Paris of Swann’s Way, from cultured salons and aristocratic parties to elegant brothels, helped pave the way for future adaptations. The film depicts the episode that makes up the bulk of Proust’s first volume: the love affair between the bourgeois aesthete Charles Swann and the courtesan Odette de Crécy. Perhaps the most remarkable, and the most cinematic, achievement of Swann in Love is the way that it deploys the Vinteuil sonata, the fictional piece of chamber music that reveals Swann’s love to himself. As realized by composer Hans Werner Henze, this music channels late Romanticism on its way to turning into musical modernism and permeates the film as expression and extension of the perplexing affair between Swann and Odette.