Marguerite Duras Films | Marguerite Duras Filmography | Marguerite Duras Biography | Marguerite Duras Career | Marguerite Duras Awards

As a writer, Marguerite Duras's work is identified, along with that of such authors as Alain Robbe-Grillet and Jean Cayrol, with the tradition of the New Novel. Duras began working in film as a screenwriter, with an original script for Alain Resnais's first feature, Hiroshima mon amour. She subsequently wrote a number of film adaptations from her novels. She directed her first film, La Musica, in 1966. If Hiroshima mon amour remains her best known work in cinema, her later films have won widespread praise for the profound challenge they offer to conventional dramatic narrative.

The nature of narrative and the potential contained in a single text are major concerns of Duras's films. Many of her works have appeared in several forms, as novels, plays, and films. This not only involves adaptations of a particular work, but also extends to cross-referential networks that run through her texts. The film Woman of the Ganges combines elements from three novels?The Ravishing of Loi V. Stein, The Vice-Consul, and L'Amour. India Song was initially written as a play, taking characters from The Vice-Consul and elaborating on the structure of external voices developed in Woman of the Ganges. India Song was made as a film in 1975, and its verbal track was used to generate a second film, Son Nom de Venises dans Calcutta desert.

This process of transformation suggests that all works are ?in progress,? inherently subject to being reconstructed. This is partly because Duras's works are more concerned with the quality or intensity of experience than with events per se. The films present narrative rather than a linear, unambiguous sequence of events. In Le Camion, two characters, played by Gerard Depardieu and Duras, sit in a room as the woman describes a movie about a woman who hitches a ride with a truck driver and talks with him for an hour and twenty minutes. This conversation is intercut with scenes of a truck driving around Paris, and stopping for a female hitchhiker (with Depardieu as the driver, and Duras as the hitchhiker). Thus, the verbal description of a potential film is juxtaposed by images of what that film might be.

An emphasis on the soundtrack is also a crucial aspect of Duras's films; her verbal texts are lyrical and are as important as the images. In India Song, sound and image function contrapuntally, and the audience must actively assess the relation between them, reading across the body of the film, noting continuities and disjunctions. The verbal text often refers in past tense to events and characters on screen, as the viewer is challenged to figure out the chronology of events described and depicted?which name on the soundtrack corresponds to which actor, whether the voices belong to on- or off-screen characters, and so forth. In this way the audience participates in the search for a story, constructing possible narratives.

As minimal as they are, Duras's narratives are partially derived from melodrama, focusing on relations between men and women, the nature or structure of desire, and colonialism and imperialism in both literal and metaphoric terms. In pursuing these issues through non-conventional narrative forms, and shifting the burden of discovering meaning to the audience, Duras's films provide an alternative to conventional ways of watching movies. Her work is seen as exemplifying a feminine writing practice that challenges the patriarchal domination of classical narrative cinema. In an interview, Duras said, ?I think the future belongs to women. Men have been completely dethroned. Their rhetoric is stale, used up. We must move on to the rhetoric of women, one that is anchored in the organism, in the body.? It is this new rhetoric, a new way of communicating, that Duras sought through her films.?M.B. WHITE