Although the title of Time Regained identifies it as an adaptation of the last volume of In Search of Lost Time, Raúl Ruiz’s film ambitiously attempts to present something of the sweep of the novel as a whole. Time Regained finds the battlefront of World War I approaching Paris as Proust’s narrator observes his aging friends, their loves, their deceptions and their inscrutabilities. The ominous rumblings from the front announce the dawning of modernity that is already confronting these characters, from young to old, with rapidly changing technologies and sexual mores. The film foregrounds various new instruments of perception, from mirrors and magnifying glasses to magic lanterns and stereoscopic slides to the Theatrophone, a precursor of the radio that fascinated Proust, and cinema itself. These instruments deterritorialize and defamiliarize all sense of space or time; Ruiz foregrounds them in Time Regained as his cinematic version of the argument that modernity’s unsettled, drifting consciousness is a byproduct of the sound and image technologies.