Marguerite Duras: le cinéma

Abstract

In 2014 the Centre Pompidou mounted the centenary exhibition Duras Song: portrait d'une écriture. In the library, a Duras space was created. Its outside walls were hung with images and texts about her political commitments and historical positioning. The interior featured her literary, theatrical, and cinematic works, with scenes from her films and from interviews projected at intervals on different wall spaces. The exhibition accompanied a retrospective of her films, which opened with a sell-out screening of La Musica (dir. by Duras and Paul Seban, 1967). This new entry into Duras's work, and vivid appreciation of her filmmaking as well as her writing, is marked too in this excellent Études cinématographiques volume. The first pieces, an Introduction and a further essay, ‘Métissage cinémato-graphique’, by Jean Cléder, and an essay of contextual discussion, ‘Marguerite Duras de la littérature au cinéma’, by Claude Murcia, think through some of the questions about the relation between writing and filmmaking for Duras. An essay by Michelle Royer marks a lovely departure, illuminating the sensory experience of becoming immersed in a Duras film such as India Song (1975). Comparisons with the work of Philippe Grandrieux are fascinating, as are references outwards to Richard Cytowic and to Deleuze. For Royer, Duras ‘demande aux spectateurs de renoncer au désir de contrôler l'expérience spectatorielle et de préférer l'intensité de l'émotion à la démarche rationnelle’ (p. 49). Royer's words remind me of the experience of responding to the seemingly unbidden appearance of Duras extracts, followed by intervals of darkness, in Duras Song. Like the exhibition, essays in the volume are interested, in varying ways, in the relation between history, living, and writing. Najet Limam-Tnani's suggestive piece on autobiography juxtaposes a text from Duras about her love for Gérard Jarlot — their days in a hotel on the banks of the Loire; their sorties at night to find a bar — with the encounters in Hiroshima mon amour (dir. by Alain Resnais, 1959). Intimate and public history inform one another here. In an excellent essay on Les Mains négatives (1978), Césarée (1978), and the Aurélia Steiner films (also discussed by Alice Delmotte-Halter), Didier Coureau reminds us that Duras alluded to the drowning of Algerians in the Seine in October 1961 as she described her own obsessive filming of the river in Aurélia Steiner (Melbourne) (1979). These essays dwell on these historical locations and displacements, as they also explore Duras's home spaces, where Sophie Charlin writes about the house at Neauphle-le-Château in Nathalie Granger (1972), and further still on the cinematic spaces of Duras's work. Coureau's piece ends with a section, ‘Vers le noir’, which looks ahead to two final essays, by Laure Bergala and Sébastian Ronceray respectively, on ‘l'image noire’ and the blank/black screen. The latter aligns Duras beautifully with Stan Brakhage. The volume closes with three interviews conducted by Jean Cléder with filmmakers Benoît Jacquot, Bruno Nuytten, and Michelle Porte. There is scant reference to anglophone scholarship on Duras — citation of Leslie Hill, Martin Crowley, Renate Günther, and Laura McMahon would have been welcome — but, this qualm apart, this is a coruscating volume.