Film Screenings / Programs / Retrospectives
MARGUERITE DURAS: AUTO-REMAKES
May 2 – May 15
May 2-15, 2024
To celebrate the release of the new publication from Another Gaze Editions – a new English translation of “My Cinema”, a collection of writings by and interviews with Marguerite Duras – we present a selection of Duras’s films, with a special focus on some of the more rarely-screened works in her moving-image oeuvre.
Working chronologically through her nineteen films, made between 1966 and 1985, “My Cinema” is a collection of reflections by Duras that includes non-standard press releases, notes to her actors, letters to funders, short essays on themes as provocatively capacious as “mothers” and “witches,” as well as some of the most significant interviews she gave about her cinematic and writing practices (with filmmakers and critics including Jacques Rivette, Caroline Champetier, and Jean Narboni). In Duras’s hands, all of these forms turn into a strange, gnomic literature in which the boundary between word and image becomes increasingly blurred and the paradox of creating a cinema that seeks “to destroy the cinema” finds its most potent expression.
Anthology’s series showcases several instances in which Duras revisited her own work. For HER VENETIAN NAME IN DESERTED CALCUTTA (1976), she repurposed the soundtrack of her most famous film, INDIA SONG (1975); the film version of DES JOURNÉES ENTIÈRES DANS LES ARBRES (1977) is an adaptation of her own short story which she had already transposed to the stage a decade earlier; while L’HOMME ATLANTIQUE (1981) is constructed using outtakes from her feature film of the same year, AGATHA ET LES LECTURES ILLIMITÉES.
Programmed in collaboration with Daniella Shreir, co-creator of Another Gaze Editions and co-editor of Another Gaze, a journal of film and feminisms.
For more info about “My Cinema” visit: https://www.anothergazeeditions.com/books
This series is presented with invaluable support from Villa Albertine. Special thanks to Vincent Florant, Sandrine Neveux, Paul Vezinet, and Nathalie Charles (Villa Albertine); Brian Belovarac (Janus Films); Dies Blau (INA); Michèle Kastner (Editions Benoît Jacob); Louise Paraut (Gaumont); and Daniella Shreir (Another Gaze).
INDIA SONG
1975, 120 min, 35mm-to-DCP. In French with English subtitles. With Delphine Seyrig, Michael Lonsdale, and Mathieu Carrière.
In her best-known film, Duras effectively evokes the colonial India of the thirties, contrasting the indolent life of the colonialists with the squalor and suffering that lie just outside their gates and consciousness – though her camera never ventures from the abodes of the wealthy, and the film was in fact shot in Paris. The story concerns a beautiful woman, the wife of a diplomat, who suffers from what Duras has called “colonial sickness.” Despite numerous suitors and affairs, she lives in a private desolation which none can enter. With its offscreen voices, a kind of distant dialogue counterpointed by image and music, INDIA SONG portrays what Richard Roud called an “India of the soul.”
Thurs, May 2 at 7:00, Mon, May 6 at 7:00, and Wed, May 15 at 7:00.
HER VENETIAN NAME IN DESERTED CALCUTTA / SON NOM DE VENISE DANS CALCUTTA DÉSERT
1976, 114 min, 35mm-to-DCP. In French with English subtitles.
“[This film] is the culmination of the Indian Cycle’s undoing of cinema and, for her, the ultimate riddance of the Stretter character [Delphine Seyrig’s character in INDIA SONG]. The film consists of the soundtrack of INDIA SONG played in its entirety over images of the crumbling interiors and exteriors of the Château Rothschild, the location on the outskirts of Paris where much of INDIA SONG was shot, the sound reverberating in the deserted location. During the making of HER VENETIAN NAME IN DESERTED CALCUTTA, Duras walked alongside Bruno Nuytten, her cinematographer (here as on INDIA SONG), matching the sound playing from a tape recorder to his tracking shots. The director had fixated on this palace in the Bois de Boulogne, used as Nazi quarters in World War II and never again occupied by the Rothschild family, as the setting for INDIA SONG. Frozen in its layered history, this husk of a husk of a location is her choice for a final mourning – a ‘deserted’ place, she said, ‘to speak of the end of the world.’” –Ivone Margulies, CRITERION
Fri, May 3 at 7:00 and Wed, May 8 at 7:00.
AGATHA ET LES LECTURES ILLIMITÉES
1981, 90 min, 35mm. In French with English subtitles. With Yann Andréa and Bulle Ogier.
“A crystalline expression of Duras’s central themes – memory, desire, lost or forbidden love – AGATHA stars Duras’s companion Yann Andréa and Bulle Ogier as brother and sister. They arrange to rendezvous in the Hôtel des Roches Noires in the seaside village of Trouville because the hotel reminds them of the house they grew up in. There, engulfed by an expanse of sea and sky which turns into a confluence of memory, they wander through the château of endless windows and mirrors and empty rooms, finally confronting their incestuous desires. Among Duras’s most radical experiments, AGATHA not only separates image and text, but also concludes with a bravura, sustained use of black frame over which the denouement of the tale is narrated.” –James Quandt
Sat, May 4 at 6:15 and Mon, May 13 at 6:30.
L’HOMME ATLANTIQUE
1981, 45 min, 35mm. In French with English subtitles.
“A poetic evocation of measured anguish by a woman who has just been left by her lover, L’HOMME ATLANTIQUE is the culmination of Duras’s belief in the primacy of the text and the power of the voice to conjure the ineffable. Using outtakes from AGATHA ET LES LECTURES ILLIMITÉES, in which Yann Andréa gazes out toward the sea, and other shots in which he looks right into the camera, Duras overlays a soundtrack composed of her hypnotic voice and the sound of crashing waves. Punctuated by darkness, eventually the film gives way entirely to a black, imageless screen (with only specks of light that have ruptured the celluloid over time) and a trance-like quality delivers us into a meditation on death and sublimation. Driven by melancholia as a creative force, L’HOMME ATLANTIQUE, not unlike Derek Jarman’s masterpiece BLUE, transforms the cinema itself into a space to consider grief, memory, absence, doomed love, the absolute of our mortality – and the liberatory refusal of representation. ‘The black is a space of listening’ (Marguerite Duras).” –Andréa Picard, TIFF
Preceded by:
Absis CYGNE I 1976, 11 min, 35mm-to-DCP. Narration by Marguerite Duras.
Absis CYGNE II 1976, 8.5 min, 35mm-to-DCP. Narration by Michael Lonsdale.
Inspired in part by Duras, whom filmmaker Absis befriended in the 1970s, CYGNE I & II were made in collaboration with both Duras and actor Michael Lonsdale (INDIA SONG). After their initial screenings in 1976, they fell into obscurity before their rediscovery in 2021.
Total running time: ca. 70 min.
Sat, May 4 at 8:30 and Mon, May 13 at 8:45.
DES JOURNÉES ENTIÈRES DANS LES ARBRES
1977, 95 min, 35mm-to-DCP. In French with English subtitles. With Madeleine Renaud, Jean-Pierre Aumont, and Bulle Ogier.
“An elderly woman (Madeleine Renaud) returns to Paris to see her son one last time. She hasn’t seen him in ten years. But this favorite son (Jean-Pierre Aumont), the one who spent ‘whole days in the trees’ as a child, has become old, selfish, immoral and squanders all his money gambling. Crazy with love for him, his mother nevertheless tries to save him from this precarious existence. DES JOURNÉES ENTIÈRES DANS LES ARBRES is Duras’s screen adaptation of her own eponymous short story from 1954, which she had previously adapted for the stage in 1966.” –LaCinetek
Sun, May 5 at 5:00 and Thurs, May 9 at 7:30.
