Marguerite Duras

A husband and wife meet three years after their formal separation, when they return to the provincial town where they once lived to pick up their divorce decree.Read More »

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In this most talky and personal of films, director Marguerite Duras and actor Gerard Depardieu do an on-camera read-through of a movie script. Occasionally, the director comments about the characters or their motivations, and sometimes the actor does. That’s all — there is no action, there are no location shots, no one pretends to be anything else. The script itself tells about an encounter between a blank-slate of a woman hitchhiker, and a communist truck driver. As the reading progresses, Duras comments bitterly about the failed ideals of communism and the glorious revolution that will probably never happen.Read More »

Marguerite Duras’s most celebrated work is a mesmerizing, almost incantatory experience with few stylistic precedents in the history of cinema. Within the insular walls of a lavish, decaying embassy in 1930s India, the French ambassador’s wife (Delphine Seyrig) staves off ennui through affairs with multiple men—with the overpowering torpor broken only by a startling eruption of madness. Setting her evocatively decadent visuals to a desynchronized chorus of disembodied voices that comment on and counterpoint the action, Duras creates a haunted-house movie unlike any other. (-criterion.com)Read More »

Each night in Paris, hundreds of men and women anonymously use telephone lines that date from the German Occupation and are no longer listed to talk to each other, to love each other.

The plot of Le Navire Night concerns a love affair between a young man and a woman, F., who first make contact by telephone one night, quite by chance. They have never seen each other or met before, but a relationship begins as a result of the conversation; F. continues telephoning. He, however, never learns F.’ s full name, telephone number or address, and all initiative for the relationship falls to her. The affair unfolds purely as an affair of the human voice, but this adds to the sexual intensity of the relationship rather than detracting from it: ‘C’est un orgasme noir,’ one hears the voice of Bulle Ogier saying. ‘Sans toucher réciproque. Read More »

Texte de Marguerite Duras, 1979

On appelle mains négatives, les peintures de mains trouvées dans les grottes magdaléniennes de l’Europe Sub-Atlantique. Le contour de ces mains – posées grandes ouvertes sur la pierre – était enduit de couleur. Le plus souvent de bleu, de noir. Parfois de rouge. Aucune explication n’a été trouvée à cette pratique.Read More »

When the film Son nom de Venise dans Calcutta désert was initially shown in 1976, many viewers found it hauntingly beautiful but deeply perplexing. Some, seeing it as a sign of Duras’ inability to separate herself from the making of India Song, even ascribed the film to a kind of postpartum depression. Since that time, the film has been placed in perspective as an inseparable component of the India cycle as a whole, although little has been written, with certain notable exceptions, on its specific relation to the other works. Son nom de Venise dans Calcutta désert is a purely metanarrative epilogue that culminates the progressive decomposition of spectacle as well as the dismantling of the neocolonial subject conceived as specular identity that was initiated by previous works in the India cycle.Read More »

A man and a woman in Rome evoke a civilization and an ancient love.Read More »

Vera Baxter is talking to a woman. It seems that the woman was attracted to her by hearing her name called out: “Baxter, Vera Baxter.” In response to her new friend’s queries, Vera recounts the story of her life.
The story begins with his marriage to Jean. Vera is a faithful wife to the point that her husband pays a man to be unfaithful to him, according to him, adultery paid revitalize the desire of the couple. But this does not happen and Vera will not see him anymore.Read More »

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Filmed in 1979, these four short films share a common method: they combine texts written and read by Duras (in voice-over) with images shot by Pierre Lhomme.Read More »