MARGUERITE DURAS

’Écran d’art’ will screen Marguerite Duras’ most radical films, which have been only rarely shown, for they set out to attempt the impossible; but they still hold many a surprise in store for us... Marguerite Duras discovered the crucial importance and the desire for independence of the soundtrack... This meant rebalancing film, wresting it (a little) from "directors" and "actors" and restoring it to the written medium--and the actual voice--of the writer. Duras’ very own voice...

L’homme atlantique, 45’, 1981

On the Normandy coast, a woman describes her break-up with the man she loves. This film was made using out-takes from the film Agatha. As an extreme experiment, more than half the film is made up of black frames. It broaches head-on the issue of representation on film. This manifesto reverses the cinematographic machine. It expands the interstice between two photograms and this time around it is the images which become fleeting flashes. This film does indeed talk about its own material (the image and its disappearance), but it is also a love letter to the beloved, about the impossibility of keeping a trace of him.
"Yes, this blackness is possibly actually an arena of decipherment which has the effect of letting this film take advantage of us more than other films. Here, you yourself, unbeknownst to you, needless to say, have to create the space in which the film will be received inside you. Here, everything is joined together, everything merges, the wound, the chill cutting edge of the black stone, and the lukewarm softness of the threatened image. The happy coincidence between image and word obviously fills me with pleasure here. You can see this blackness as a shift by way of a non-thinkingness, a stage where thought topples and is obliterated. You can see that this obliteration will link up with the blackness of orgasm, the death of orgasm... In my films (viewers) do not decipher things, they let themselves be taken in, and this openness that occurs within them makes way for something new in the bond which links them to the film, and which has something to do with desire."
M.D.

Les mains négatives, 18’, 1979

Just before daybreak, the film, which consists solely of tracking shots, is a slow forward movement through Paris from the Place de la République to the Champs Elysées. The heart-rending lament of Amy Flammer’s violin mingles with the cry of love uttered by Marguerite Duras on the soundtrack. This cry is aimed both at the earliest prehistoric people who pressed and painted their hands on rock surfaces and walls, and likewise at the obscure population of people who are displaced and on their uppers, people who are underprivileged, and emigrants.
"It’s not true that film expresses writing--what is written--as much as the written language does." Film sends words back towards its original silence. Once words have been destroyed by film, they no longer return to anywhere. And with the film-maker, it is the very habit of his or her destruction that will turn into a creative fact.
Film--for me--is built upon this defeat of writing. It is in this massacre that its essential and decisive attraction resides. For this massacre is precisely the bridge that leads you to the very place of all reading. And further still: to the very place of the submission, period, which all existence experienced in present-day society presupposes. We can put this another way by saying that the almost universal option of youth for film is a kind of political option--conscious or intuitive. We can say that the desire to make films is precisely a wish to go straight to the place of its submission: the spectator. And this is done by avoiding and destroying the--invariably preferred--stage of writing."
M.D.

Aurélia Steiner (Melbourne), 35’, 1979

"It was tiring filming Steiner because the emotion it made me feel was very exacting, so I was hardly able to read. What’s more, there are whole sentences that are uttered in tears, at the moment of the father’s death, for example, and I really didn’t want to start that all over again, I found it obscene. It’s an extreme cinema, and I can’t go any further beyond it. In it, I reveal myself, if you will, in this despair...
The two Aurelias are films that are like... sacrileges, a bit. Kind of sacrilegious. Almost sacrificial.
All I can see of her face is her smile. I think she too is Aurelia Steiner. She’ll never know. She’s there and elsewhere, that’s the thing. She’s broken, in bits and pieces, scattered throughout the film, drowned... And she is totally there at the same time, impregnable, indestructible. But there’s a void at the centre of the image, the river. At times a sentence bestrides it, there are bridges, perhaps linguistic passages that one can attempt, but afterwards you come back to the void, you fall back into the void. That’s what Aurelia Steiner is about.
You become speechless when you think about it.
There are cities where nothing happens, except the accident of memory, Melbourne, Vancouver, it never gets into the newspaper. There are places of survival, where the memory can function fully, all the time.
It’s true that memory is separate from me, and that’s it memory that talks in the films. I merely listen and translate memory’s voice, every word, every second, I make sure, really every second, that I’ll link back up with this memory and stay behind it, trying to be aware of just the writing coming out of it, again without appearances, and almost without meaning.
Compared with the phenomenal power of Aurelia Steiner, film is nothing. The film of Aurelia Steiner was impossible. It was made. The film is admirable because it does not even attempt to correct the impossibility. It goes along with this impossibility, it walks alongside it. On this journey along the northern river, Aurelia summons her love lost in killing fields, wars, crematoria, and equatorial lands racked by hunger. We are precisely in the middle of an unknown city through which the river flows. The river channelled all the dead Jews and carried them away. People talked about Aurelia everywhere, you could hear her name whispered beneath bridges, she was in the memory of all those particular days. Yes, the river carried them off in the funereal barge towards the strange end of the river, the universal dilution of the sea.
Aurelia Steiner calls for help, she beseeches love while she remembers. She calls from everywhere, everywhere she remembers.
She is in Melbourne, Paris, Vancouver.

Serge Daney: There’s something going on right now that is quite perceptible: it’s very rare for the cinema to vibrate. In your films, there’s a vibration. I don’t know if that’s the exact right word. It’s an impression I got too, in a general way, when I saw Aurelia Steiner. This is what makes film vibrate as such. We might also add that there’s a cruelty, which passes. In many senses.Love.
They are always cruel loves.
I didn’t do the choosing.
What you’re doing is a different kind of cinema?
Yes, I think so. I also know as much through myself. When I don’t manage to resolve my films in the pitfalls of cinema, when they remain suspended like so many on-going questions, when I can’t utter what they’re thinking, that means I’ve been making cinema. This is the state I’ve been in since I made the Aurelia Steiner films."
M.D.

Introduction by Michel Assenmaker, curator.

The Ecran d’Art series is a monthly screening of artists’ film and/or video jointly organised by argos and Cinema Arenberg, in collaboration with La Cambre Academy