From the Third Eye by Ed Halter & Barney Rosset

Author:Ed Halter & Barney Rosset
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: new hollywood, cinema, film writing, film criticism, art house cinema, indie press, independent publisher, experimental film, underground film, cinema studies, film history, grove press, Film Industry, Independent Films, Film Culture, Amos Vogel, Andy Warhol, Jonas Mekas, Nat Hentoff, Stefan S. Brecht, La Chinoise, Jean-Luc Godard, Sidney Bernard, Jacques Demy, Norman Mailer, Henry Fonda, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Marguerite Duras, film, movies, art books, art book, movie, hollywood, criticism, essays, filmmaking, hitchcock, writing
ISBN: 9781609806163
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Published: 2018-01-23T18:00:00+00:00

Translated by Helen R. Lane

Grove International Film Festival Catalog, Spring 1970

Destroy, She Said:

An Interview with

Marguerite Duras

Jacques Rivette & Jean Narboni

Question: It seems you want more and more to give successive forms to each of the things—let’s not use the word “stories”—that you write … for instance, The Square, which had several versions, or La Musica, which also had several forms, or L’Amante anglaise. This corresponds to …

Answer: To the desire that I always have to tear what has gone before to pieces. Destroy, She Said is a fragmented book from the novelistic point of view. I don’t think there are any sentences in it. And there are directions that are mindful of screen plays: “sunshine,” “seventh day,” “heat,” “intense light,” “twilight”—do you see what I mean? I would like the material that is to be read to be as free as possible of style. I can’t read novels at all any more. Because of the sentences.

Q: When you wrote these stage directions, was the idea of a film lingering in your mind? Or was it simply because you could only write in this form?

A: I had no idea of a film, but I did have the idea of a book … of a book that could be either read or acted or filmed or, I always add, simply thrown away.

Q: In any case, you had theater in mind somehow …

A: Yes, yes, Claude Régy was to stage it, but I made the film first, I couldn’t help it … I believe it necessary to create things that are more and more timesaving, that can be read quickly, that give the reader a more important role. There are ten ways to read Destroy, She Said; that’s what I wanted. And ten ways to see it, too. But, you know, it’s a book I hardly know at all. I know the film better than the book; I wrote the book very quickly. There was a good scenario, called “The Chaise Longue,” which we tried to film; but it came out of a certain kind of psychology, maybe a searching one, but psychology nonetheless; and Stein wasn’t in it …

Q: Did the scenario come before the writing of the book?

A: “The Chaise Longue,” yes. There were only three characters. Still, as a story it was obviously classical. When I found Stein, the scenario wasn’t any good at all any more, and we threw the whole thing out that same day.

Q: I was struck by an interesting contrast between film and book. The directions for the characters are very brief in the book, but a number of acts and gestures in the book are omitted from the film. In the end, the film is a kind of mechanical process that is exactly the opposite of the one whereby a bad filmmaker who adapts a book keeps the events, the facts, the physical acts, and leaves out everything which would seem, on the contrary, to belong to the writing itself. And here one has the

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