THE WORD AND THE IMAGE: FILMS BY MARGUERITE DURAS @ Yerba Buena Center for the Arts April 1, 2010

THE WORD AND THE IMAGE: FILMS BY MARGUERITE DURAS

Thu, Apr 1, 7:30 pm: India Song

Thu, Apr 8, 7:30 pm: Destroy, She Said

Thu, Apr 15, 7:30 pm: The Truck

Thu, Apr 22, 7:30 pm: Nathalie Granger

“Truffaut is a novelist. Bergman is a musician. Duras is silence.” – Gèrard Depardieu

Marguerite Duras was one of the most widely read French writers of the postwar era. She wrote 34 novels, including the autobiographical L’amant (The Lover), her best known work in the US (adapted into a film she despised). Duras also wrote the screenplay for Alain Resnais’ masterpiece Hiroshima, mon amour. In the 60s she began to direct films, which remain virtually unknown here. These experimental works, very much a product of their time, attempt to redefine the limits of the medium by breaking the syntax of traditional cinema narrative. Film descriptions adapted from Anthology Film Archives, NYC.

INDIA SONG
By Marguerite Duras
Thu, Apr 1, 7:30 pm
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, suffering from what Duras has called “colonial sickness,” who lives in a private desolation which none can enter. (1975, 120 min, 35mm)

DESTROY, SHE SAID
By Marguerite Duras
Thu, Apr 8, 7:30 pm
Five people isolated in a hotel become enmeshed in a ritualistic game. Duras’s second film is a psychodrama based on her own play, written in the wake of the events in Paris in May 1968. Many of the elements typical of Duras’s elliptical and often cinematic literature, such as her preoccupation with disjunctive experiences of space, place, and time, are skillfully translated to the screen. (1969, 100 min, 35mm)

THE TRUCK
By Marguerite Duras
Thu, Apr 15, 7:30 pm
In the time-honored French tradition of L’âge d’or and Rules of the Game, this film inspired fisticuffs between its supporters and detractors. Duras stars, along with Gèrard Depardieu, a truck, and a landscape. The two sit around a table and essentially conjure up the truck and the desolately beautiful landscape as she reads him a screenplay for a film in which he plays a truck driver who picks up a female hitchhiker. (1977, 80 min, 35mm)

NATHALIE GRANGER
By Marguerite Duras
Thu, Apr 22, 7:30 pm
An oblique and electrifying look at family and society, Nathalie Granger chronicles an afternoon in the benumbed lives of two women in their home on the outskirts of Paris. One is having trouble with her daughter, whose violent temper is making her unfit for public school. A sense of foreboding arises as they listen to radio reports of two teenagers who have murdered a child. Enter Gérard Depardieu as a traveling salesman, pathetic and somehow sinister, who is determined to sell the ladies of the house a washing machine they don’t need. (1972, 88 min, 35mm)

Special thanks to Cécile Hokes, French Consulate, San Francisco; and Delphine Selles, Cultural Services of the French Embassy, New York.

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