Her, To a Great Extent, Shared: On Marguerite Duras’s My Cinema

In an interview from 1967, filmmaker and writer Marguerite Duras stated, “I don’t think a film is ever capable of replacing the private relationship a reader has to a book. A film can only ever be weaker. My own imaginary ‘cinema’ of Madame Bovary is unparalleled” (p. 57). Nine years later, reflecting on her own film India Song (1975), Duras changed course, claiming, “I don’t believe in books anymore; I don’t read anymore” (p. 188). These contradicting assertions, which appear in Another Gaze Editions’ My Cinema, translated by Daniella Shreir, showcase Duras’s ever-oscillating appreciation for, and understanding of, the power (or failure) of images and words. Though Duras may possess a penchant for speaking in the declarative, the compilation of texts in My Cinema belie such certainty. There is, in these pages, a rhizomatic – and occasionally indecisive – mind at work.

In Shreir’s translator note, she reflects that she “tried to preserve the punctuation of all texts: honouring Marguerite Duras’s proclivity for long, run-on sentences, and her attachment to commas over all other punctuation” (p. 49). Shreir’s commitment to Duras’s punctuation allows her to capture the ethos of “such a restless mind across four decades and numerous different forms” (p. 49). Indeed, the content of My Cinema is as capacious as its roving syntax. An exhaustive and ambitious collection, My Cinema was originally published in French in 2021 under the title Le cinéma que je fais: Écrits et entretiens. A chronological assemblage of interviews, essays, and non-standard press releases, the collage of texts explore Duras’s nineteen films completed between 1966 and 1985. 

Born in 1914 in the French colony Cochinchina (now the southern tip of Vietnam), Duras’s family moved back to Europe before returning again to French Indochina after her father had passed. Duras would later fictionalize her mother’s financial struggles in the rice farmland in her novel The Sea Wall (1950) after Duras had returned as an adult to France. It was here where Duras published her first novel at 29 while she worked for the Vichy government. Duras would later memorialize memory, trauma, and desire in her Academy Award nominated screenplay Hiroshima mon amour (1960) after serving as a member of the French Resistance during World War II. Soonthereafter, she became a filmmaker in her own right, directing dramas such as Nathalie Granger (1972) and India Song (1975), while remaining a prolific writer. Among her many accolades, her autobiographical novel L’amant was awarded the Prix Goncourt in 1984. 

Filled with Duras’s gnomic pronouncements and declarations on filmmaking, money, revolution, Jews, political ethics, and boredom, My Cinema rewards a recursive kind of movement from its reader. The four-hundred plus page book is infinitely richer when one loops back like an Ouroboros to (re)trace Duras’s evolution as a writer, thinker, and filmmaker. The mimetic gesture of reading, and rereading, My Cinema echoes Duras’s ever-ongoing revision of her beliefs and taxonomies surrounding filmmaking and writing. 

Duras initially sees the relationship between language and images as one of adaptation rather than opposition. Of the press’s commentary on her novel Détruire, dit-elle (1969) she proposes, “Let us try to translate this into cinema” (p. 73). Her hypothetical invitation, to translate commentary into cinema, is the essence of Duras’s life’s work, if such a mercurial character could indeed be pinned to one central aim or ambition. Questions like, How can words become light? How can language or sound become physical? reveal no definitive answer within the sum total of these pages. There is an intellectual tussle always already at play which never exhausts itself in Duras’s endless, albeit elusive, pursuit of certainty. 

Duras does posit that a fundamental difference between writing and filmmaking is the issue of money. “You don’t know where you’re going with a book,” she writes.

You’re constantly faced with the void. I mean, you don’t know what will come towards you; at every moment, it is the unknown… In a film, you can’t start out with any baggage because it’s expensive; you can’t wait, you see, so you are already obliged to depart with something written: a schema, a “remedial plan,” as it’s called (p. 188).

Though “not writing is writing” (ibid), such inaction is impossible on a set. There is an entire apparatus at work in making a film, as well as a cast of characters and crew to compensate. The author as an entity in space and time also precipitates questions of capital. While a writer can sit down and transcribe anything moment to moment, filmmaking does not engender such spontaneity. To write is a solitary endeavour, one unrestrained by the schedules of others’. Not only is there a dialectic between the one and the many at play in writing versus filmmaking, but “I stand before a book that is yet to be written, yet I stand behind a film that is yet to be made… To make a film is to attempt to destroy those who make books. It is to overthrow the writer” (p. 206). Employing the language of warfare, Duras is no longer interested in translation but in efforts to divide and conquer. Destroy, indeed, she said.  

~~~

Of contemporary experimental filmmakers working today, perhaps none achieves a Durasian sensibility in spirit, if not in form, as much as Sofia Theodore-Pierce, whose 2023 short experimental film Exterior Turbulence recreates scenes from Duras’s Bater, Vera Baxter (1977). Throughout Theodore-Pierce’s oeuvre there often arise a chorus of female voices, and texts, that explore desire, pleasure, motherhood, and artistic influence through the interplay of language and images, perhaps most beautifully rendered in her 2020 film Hear Me Sometimes. By drawing upon the archives of her mother, the work of Duras, her friends, and women writers, Theodore-Pierce’s work recalls artist Nayland Blake’s assertion, “I don’t really see the work as a vehicle for expressing an idea about my sexuality. I see it as another form of practicing my sexuality.”¹ Filmmaking is not a hermetic, private undertaking for Theodore-Pierce, but an embodied, communal practice that fleshes out new versions of both (her)self and womanhood writ large. “Perhaps, one day, cinema will be capable of showing a woman in the plural,” Duras once reflected. Indeed, Theodore-Pierce achieves this plurality through her collaging of various female voices, bodies, and writings. Her praxis compliments Duras’s sentiment, “I believe that women’s bodies are, to a great extent, shared” (p. 202). 

While Duras often worked with the same actors, Delphine Seyrig chief among them, Duras does not cite nor credit female predecessors or contemporaries in My Cinema, but rather positions herself as a solo maverick. “The scene of the vice-consul screaming and exploding in India Song,” Duras asserts, “that scene – I’m going to sound pretentious – has never been done in cinema before” (p. 380). Perhaps Duras’s sense of singularity stems from her approach to the start of a shoot: 

When I begin a film, it is as if I am setting myself free from everything. I enter an unknown land, immediately, even if everything is already there: as if, suddenly, there were nothing left of either the script or a shooting plan. Everything has been erased. There is just the camera, the crew, the actors, and the unknown: me (p. 398).

While it might flummox many and anger some that Duras purports each film begins as a tabula rasa, I’m less interested in venerating than in probing this assertion that Duras is unknown to herself, utterly absent of any influence. In Alice Blackhurst’s introduction “Tabula Rasa,” she posits that “in [Duras’s] cinema, erosion bequeaths a form of love, but also a means of covering one’s tracks and coming up against one’s limits: against the impossible itself (‘Cinema knows that it can never replace the written text. It nevertheless sets out to replace it’)” (p. 16). While Duras insists on her singularity over and over again, she (willingly or not) joins the ranks of countless others who have also sought to replace or expand our understanding of written text. Theodore-Pierce is just one of many following in Duras’s footsteps, honouring those female directors who have come before her while also carving out new ground. 

~~~

In Marguerite Duras’s 1985 essay “Reading on the Train” from Dorothy, a publishing project’s book Me, Duras writes, “Criticism, especially written… kills the book it portrays.”² In other words, the act of analysis snuffs out the life force inherent within the text. Duras suggests that the failure of language is as much responsible for this mort as a mind at work. In many ways, the exercise of my own essay becomes one answer for why we write criticism: not to kill, but to vivify. To grip all the edges of a text tight and nestle within its body that unexpectedly pokes and prods your own. What then would Duras think of me, another marauder (i.e. critic), claiming purchase to this collection? I can only imagine she might forgive my analytical engagement if I told her that I write “to fill my time.” Like Duras’s own admittance around her filmmaking, “If I had the strength to do nothing, I would do nothing… This is the truest thing I can say about my practice” (p. 153). But while I, like Duras, do not possess the strength to do nothing, I hope that the words that you’re reading on this page still honour My Cinema’s élan vital.

In the opening of The Easy Life (1947), Duras illustrates that nothingness is inevitable when Francine, the young protagonist, watches her uncle die a slow and painful death on their family farm. The murder, by Francine’s brother, prompts a crisis in her soul, an attempt to understand who she is in the world, specifically as a finite being susceptible to the unceasing onrush of time. I would argue with – or alongside – Duras to suggest that how we fill our time continually (re)asserts a commitment to life, to community, to love; in other words, the act of creation is a commitment not to nothing, but to everything: both ourselves and all. 

~~~

Though I have read – and watched – Duras for decades, I was reminded specifically of her fiction in 2023 by a young graduate student who would soon become my (now former) partner’s (and her professor’s) love interest. He is fifteen years her senior, a tired trope that underscores male power’s ongoing allure. Flip through any text of Duras’s, and you will encounter similar discrepancies in age or capital between men and women. In The Sea Wall (1950), Suzanne takes Monsieur Jo’s diamond without scruples, and he gazes upon her body with sudoriferous incredulity. In The Lover, an unnamed Asian man sleeps with a teenage French girl who demands that he do with her what he does with women. Weeping, he nonetheless complies.

There is always a varying exchange of power between women and men in Duras’s oeuvre, an exchange that is sometimes careless, and sometimes cruel. As Duras states in the interview “Love is a Constant Becoming, Just Like the Revolution,” “What is infidelity if not fidelity to love?” (p. 60). Infidelity, through a glass, darkly, is a refraction of another person’s fidelity to their own self, and truth. I mention this personal anecdote only because I think Duras herself would’ve mined it: beauty, betrayal, and bitterness marbling like the sea, flecked with the faintest whiff of vengeance. 

And while there is inherent judgment in evoking heterosexuality’s power and violence, I, like Duras speaking of Vera Baxter, “do not judge her”: “her” being the aforementioned writers, filmmakers, paramours, et. al. who inform this essay – and my life. A critic is definitionally never able to approach her work believing herself a “blank slate.” She is a composite of all that she has read and brings that archive to bear on each subsequent new work she reads. Ergo, within these sentences there is a radical plurality of voices that Duras has, whether she likes it or not, inspired. But “I do not believe I have judged [even] her…there [simply] ha[s] to be an ending. Yes, at [this] time I still believe in endings” (p. 217).

Marguerite Duras, My Cinema, François Bovier and Serge Margel, eds. Translated by Daniella Shreir (Another Gaze, 2023).

Endnotes