Marguerite Duras Cinéaste

The inventiveness, beauty, power, and radically different writing style of Marguerite Duras met with instant recognition. Her films though, were long under-estimated. There can be no denying her output as a cinematographer, the number of films she made reaching a total of nineteen between 1966 and 1984. Her films signal a return to zero in terms of cinema, in order to experience new possibilities. “Il/Elle aurait...”, the conditional tense, is what opened up her writing to the imagination, to research, but also to doubt, one of the fundaments of her cinema.

With each film, the titles of which bring the promise of another world, India Song, Baxter Véra Baxter, and L’Homme Atlantique, Duras reinvents a relationship between narrative, image, sound and their spectator. The actors, Gérard Depardieu in the first place, find their voice and body in unaccustomed ways. This search for the poetic and for a constantly renewed form, as though each film might exist in accordance with its own particularities, prompted Duras to delve deeper and deeper into the realms of experimentation, to the extent that her films seem to have more to do with today’s world than that of her own. We begin to understand why contemporary cinematographers and artists alike, succumbing to the dizzying and hypnotic effects of her films, see in them a living history of their own work. A number of them will be taking to the stage to bear witness to her influence as part of this retrospective of all the films of Marguerite Duras.  

And also :
Duras Song, portrait d’une écriture
Bibliothèque publique d’information - Centre Pompidou
from 15 October 2014 to 12 January 2015

To mark the centenary of the writer’s birth, the Bibliothèque publique d’information (Bpi) and the Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine (Imec) have collaborated on an exhibition dedicated to the writing of Marguerite Duras. The responsibility as curator for the exhibition has been given to the art critic Jean-Max Colard, and the artist Thu van Tran has been appointed as its Artistic Director.
Due to the importance of her work, its place in the century we live in, the openness of her writing to other art forms, notably theatre and cinema, and her decisive influence on contemporary creation, the author of Hiroshima mon amour, The Lover, The Ravishing of Lol Stein and India Song continues to be one of the great incarnations of the twentieth century writer.