The Suspended Passion by Marguerite Duras

Author:Marguerite Duras [Duras, Marguerite]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780857423535
Publisher: Seagull Books
Published: 2016-07-14T18:15:00+00:00

It was as though the word I wrote already contained its image within itself. To film it was to pursue the discourse and amplify it. It was to continue writing—on the image. It wasn’t a question of betraying the sacred halo of the text but heightening it, discovering the whole of its physical presence.

How can your cinematographic work be characterized?

The reality reproduced by classical cinema has never been of any interest to me. Everything is said too much, shown too much—an excess of meaning in which, paradoxically, the context becomes impoverished.

In my films I don’t gloss over or suppress those things that aren’t functional or organic to the expressive unity of the fiction—they are made up of a material that’s lacerated, superimposed, offset in time; there are gaps and breaks—that whole imaginary that’s meant to render the heterogeneity and irreducibility of life.

There’s a passage in The Man Without Qualities that sums up the sense of what I’m saying here:

[I]t struck him that when one is overburdened and dreams of simplifying one’s life, the basic law of this life, the law one longs for, is nothing other than that of narrative order, the simple order that enables one to say: ‘First this happened and then that happened . . .’ It is the simple sequence of events in which the overwhelmingly manifold nature of things is represented, in a unidimensional order, as a mathematician would say, stringing all that has occurred in space and time on a single thread, which calms us; that celebrated ‘thread of the story,’ which is, it seems, the thread of life itself. Lucky the man who can say ‘when,’ ‘before,’ and ‘after’! . . . It now came to Ulrich that he had lost this elementary, narrative mode of thought to which private life still clings, even though everything in public life has already ceased to be narrative and no longer follows a thread, but instead spreads out as an infinitely interwoven surface.7

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