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Introduction: Marguerite Duras, la grande imagière

All narrative organizes itself around a linguistic virtual core, situated outside the screen.

— albert laffay, 19641

The Ineffable Art of Film-making

In 1964 Albert Laffay synthesized the complexity of the narrative process in film through the anthropomorphic expression le grand imagier, liter-ally ‘the great image-maker’.2 At a time when narratology was not yet an area of investigation in film discourse, Laffay, as André Gaudreault notes, ‘defines with an impressive exactitude and theoretical adroitness this figure coming into view behind all narrative film work [often identified with the film director] and which the author did not yet dare call the “film narrator”.’3 Referring to Marguerite Duras as la grande imagière may seem

1 My translation. ‘Tout film s’ordonne autour d’un foyer linguistique virtuel qui se situe en dehors de l’écran’ (Albert Laffay, Logique du cinéma (Paris: Masson, 1964), p. 80).

2 An imagier is a person who creates images or tells stories through images. The expression appears in a chapter of Laffay’s Logique du cinéma titled ‘Le Récit, le monde et le cinéma’ (‘Narrative, the world, and cinema’).

3 My translation. ‘Défini[t] avec une exactitude et un doigté théoriques impression-ants cette figure qui se profile derrière toute oeuvre narrative cinématographique et que l’auteur n’osait pas encore appeler le “narrateur filmique”’ (André Gaudreault, Du littéraire au filmique: système du recit (Laval; Paris: Les Presses de l’Université

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odd, even inappropriate, given the iconoclastic and anti-narrative nature of her films. Indeed, Duras undermines the very function of the grand imagier, that of distilling the ‘“unbearable” heaviness of the enunciation system.’4 Instead, she draws attention to what Laffay describes as the ‘lin-guistic virtual core situated outside the screen.’5 In so doing, she carries onto film the dismissal of the linguistic and generic codes that marks her literary production, as well as her idea of artistic creation as an inward-outward movement and an exploration of one’s limits.6

Duras regards aesthetic creation as an exploration of the interior self, which she refers to as l’ombre interne, ‘the internal shadow’. She uses this metaphor in Le Camion/The Lorry (LC/TL, 1977), a film that offers both a reflection on and an allegory of her artistic practice. In the film, Duras and actor Gérard Depardieu sit in a room in Duras’s house in Neauphle-le-Château, reading the script of ‘what would have been a film’ (‘[ç’]aurait été un film’), as Duras puts it.7 At points, she refers to writing as a painful and dangerous process of expelling the ‘dark shadow’ onto the blank page, and to the room where the characters read as la chambre

Laval; Méridiens Klinckieck, 1988), p. 10). Christian Metz uses the expression le grand imagier in Essais sur la signification au cinéma: Tome 1 (Paris: Klincksieck, 1968), p. 29, also available in English in Metz, Christian, Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema, tr. Michael Taylor (New York: Oxford University, 1974), pp. 20–1.

4 My translation. ‘“[L’]insoutenable” lourdeur du dispositif énonciatif ’ (Gaudreault, Du littéraire, p. 189).

5 Laffay, Logique, p. 80. 6 These concepts will be further developed in this introduction. Duras does not

make reference to any literary theorist or theory of language; however, her views on writing present striking similarities and coincidences with those developed con-temporaneously by, among others, Maurice Blanchot and Philippe Sollers. Alwin Baum comments on this aspect of Duras’s relation to writing in his contribution to this collection, titled ‘Le Ravissement de l’autre: Subjective Exile and Semiotic Subversion in Duras’s Écriture Filmique’.

7 Michelle Royer, L’Écran de la passion: une étude du cinéma de Marguerite Duras (Brisbane: Boombane Publications, 1997), pp. 102–3. The script that Duras and Depardieu read is about an elderly woman who takes a ride on a lorry and talks with the driver about political and personal matters. The reading is interspersed with extreme long shots of a lorry driving through an industrial periphery.

Introduction: Marguerite Duras, la grande imagière 25

noire (‘the dark room’).8 Michelle Royer relates these figures to birth, the classic metaphor for artistic creation, which she paraphrases as a ‘vitalis-tic surge’ coming out of an ‘organic night’ and connects with a feminine creative expression that undermines the male Logos.9

8 In the film, Duras reads on screen, ‘What is painful, the pain – the danger – is the achievement, the performance, the layout, of this pain; it’s to puncture this dark shadow so that it spreads on the white of the paper; it’s to expel what is inherently interior.’ My translation. ‘C’est qui est douloureux, la douleur – le danger – c’est crever cette ombre noire afin qu’elle se répande sur le blanc du papier, mettre dehors ce qui est de nature intérieur’ (Marguerite Duras, Le Camion, suivi de ‘Entretien avec Michelle Porte’ (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1977), p. 124). Renate Günther relates the process of externalizing l’ombre interne as a figural use of the image in Marguerite Duras (Manchester; New York: Manchester University Press, 2002), p. 24.

9 Royer, L’Écran, pp. 106, 108–10.

‘La chambre noire’: Gérard Depardieu and Marguerite Duras in Duras’s house in Neauphle-le-Château, on the set of Le Camion (1977).

(Collection Cinémathèque québécoise, all rights reserved)

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In this collection, the dark room is also a metaphor for the film theatre and, by extension, the experience of watching a film, both in the physical space of the theatre and conceptually. In narrative and classical cinema, the darkness accompanying the screening of a film facilitates a comfortable regression into a pre-Oedipal state foreshadowing rec-onciliation with the plentitude of the screen’s world.10 The ‘dark room’ surrounding the film spectator is a reminder and an extension of a film’s out-of-frame, disembodied, and extra-diegetic elements, which the grand imagier is supposed to conceal and efface, and to which Duras instead draws attention.

This book assumes that Duras’s dismissal of the structuring mecha-nisms of film narrative and enunciation represented by the figure of the grand imagier is the fundamental characterizing trait of her film-making practice and a central point of reference for discussing her films. The pur-pose is to illustrate the intertextual and intermedial frameworks, as well as the socio-political subtext reflected in Duras’s anti-narrative approach to film. Duras brings to cinema the intermedial hybridity of her overall work, drawing on texts and motifs of her novels and plays, themselves embracing cinematic strategies of representation.11 As a result, she main-tains the distinction between the scriptural and scenic dimensions of

10 The reference is to the application of Freudian and especially Lacanian theories of identity formation in film discourse to explain the mechanisms of cinema’s appeal to the film spectator. This process involves primary identification, that is, the isolation of the film image as a total object, coinciding with the infant’s identification with himself/herself as a unity (primary narcissism). Simultaneously, the film spectator engages in a process of secondary identification, through which the ego constructs itself as an imaginary instance. Secondary identification occurs through narrative instances (narrative developments and resolutions, characters). The labour of enun-ciation consists of shaping the film spectator’s relation to the film by providing her/him with a pleasurable and non-problematic identification with the diegesis. On this topic, see Christian Metz, Le Signifiant imaginaire (Paris: Union Générale d’éditions, 1977); and ‘Film and its Spectator’, part five in Jacques Aumont, Alain Bergala, Michel Marie, and Marc Vernet (eds), Aesthetics of Film, tr. and rev. by Richard Neupert (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, [1983] 1992), 182–238.

11 Duras’s practice of re-imagining the same text in different forms or media is typical of her creative process.

Introduction: Marguerite Duras, la grande imagière 27

film representation, refusing the transition to the integrated system of enunciation that, according to Gaudreault, marks the appearance of the narrative film.12

Duras gives up the narrative conventions of literature after the mid-1950s. Cinema, together with theatre, provides the intertextual and inter-medial context from which she takes inspiration when she abandons conventional storytelling. Madeleine Borgomano locates this shift with the novel Le Square (1955) in which Duras adopts a dialogue-based writ-ing style recalling that of theatre and film scripts.13 Duras’s activity as a playwright and a screenwriter, as well as her experience as a stage director (of her own plays), helped her develop a sense of mise en scène. In particu-lar, the meticulous annotation in her plays concerning sound design and actors’ vocal performances prefigures the special role of the soundtrack in her films.14 Conversely, her films reveal many literary and theatrical qualities. The scriptural influence is obvious in the frequent use of texts recited in voice-over or presented graphically on screen.15 The links with the theatre are manifest in the treatment of interior scenes, typically filmed in frontal, static shots and featuring stylized sets and geometrical blocking in the mise en scène.

Several scholars have stressed the intermedial permeability of Duras’s oeuvre. Michelle Royer defines Duras’s style as a ‘generic subversion’ carried out through the adaptation of the same work in various media and the diverse and multiple classifications of her texts (a case in point being Duras’s designation of the 1973 book India Song (IS) as ‘texte théâtre film’).16 These critics put special emphasis on the interrelations

12 Gaudreault, Du littéraire, pp. 12–13. 13 Madeleine Borgomano, L’Écriture filmique de Marguerite Duras (Paris: Albatros,

1985), pp. 27–33.14 On the influences and intertextual relations of theatre in Duras’s films see

Borgomano, L’Écriture. 15 On this point see Royer, L’Écran, pp. 98–102.16 Royer, L’Écran, pp. 22–23. On the importance of theatrical concepts and strategies

for this film see Dong Liang’s article ‘Marguerite Duras’s Aural World: A Study of the Mise en son of India Song’, included in this collection.

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between Duras’s literary texts and her films, a connection epitomized in Borgomano’s characterization of Duras’s film-making practice as écriture filmique (‘filmic writing’).17 Borgomano depicts Duras’s abandonment of traditional storytelling as a dépouillement progressif, a ‘progressive stripping down’ of writing, which finds in the cinema a further radicalization.18

In film, the shredding of conventional narrative also entails dispelling the film spectator’s impression of reality and integration in the diege-sis through anti-illusionist techniques such as static cinematography, minimal editing composed of sequence shots, Brechtian-style acting, and stylized mise en scène. Since the mid-1970s, Duras intensified her anti-narrative proposition by systematically resorting to audio-visual de-synchronization, at times severing dialogue from on-screen action, at other times utilizing voix off or off-screen narration (often Duras’s own clearly identifiable voice) for reciting texts with no obvious connection to the visual track.19 This feature – which becomes a signature mark of Duras’s film style and is considered her most innovative contribution to film-making – as well as her recycling of themes, stories, and characters from her literary and theatrical oeuvre, engage her films in a mise en abyme of extra-diegetic and intertextual allusions and references.

These de-naturalizing strategies of representation are distinctive of modernist and counter-cinemas and place Duras’s film-making within

17 Borgomano, L’Écriture, pp. 27–29. The concept will be further discussed in this introduction. On the interrelation between Duras’s text and films see especially Najet Limam-Tnani, Roman et cinéma chez Marguerite Duras (Tunis; Alif: Faculté des Sciences humaines et sociales; Éditions de la Méditerranée, 1996), as well as Günther, Marguerite, pp. 18–19, Royer, L’Écran, pp. 24–27, and Bernard Alazet, Le Navire Night de Marguerite Duras: Écrire l’effacement (Lille: Presses Universitaires de Lille, 1992), pp. 17–20.

18 Borgomano, L’Écriture, p. 11. Here and throughout this introduction all translations from Borgomano are mine or taken from the English translation of her book’s first chapter included in this collection as ‘The Image of Cinema in The Sea Wall’.

19 Royer makes insightful observations about the analogical links that the voix off entertains with the image track in Duras’s films in her aforementioned book, especially in the chapter titled ‘Dans l’interval du regard et de la voix’, L’Écran, 29–41.

Introduction: Marguerite Duras, la grande imagière 29

these anti-classical film modes, as well as within the tradition of avant-garde and experimental cinemas.20 They also relate to Duras’s conception of artistic practice as a transgressive activity.21

Critics have stressed the gender-specific connotations of Duras’s artistic approach, associating her literary and film-making style with the concept of écriture feminine (‘feminine writing’), a type of language anchored in the subject’s pre-Oedipal relation to the Mother.22 This

20 Duras’s films have been variously categorized within alternative film modes. An exhaustive contextualization of Duras’s film-making within contemporary French cinema appears in Günther, Marguerite, pp. 14–18. Dominique Noguez includes Duras in his book on contemporary experimental cinema, Éloge du cinéma expéri-mental (Paris: Musée national d’art moderne/Centre Georges Pompidou, 1979), in a chapter titled ‘Cinéma de la durée’ (‘Long-shot Cinema’), pp. 141–51. On his part, Alan Williams defines Duras’s approach to film-making as a rejection of com-mercial cinema, ‘striving to create a kind of anti-cinema which has assumed a variety of forms’ (Republic of Images: A History of French Filmmaking (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 373). Guy Austin stresses the literary compo-nent of Duras’s films in a chapter on women film-makers in his book Contemporary French Cinema: An Introduction (Manchester; New York: Manchester University Press, 1996), pp. 82–85.

21 Duras expressed her ideas about writing on several occasions and in different venues and media. The essay by Michelle Royer included in this book, titled ‘Writing, the Writing Self and the Cinema of Marguerite Duras’, concentrates on this subject. See also the last two chapters of Royer’s essential monograph on Duras’s cinema (L’Écran, pp. 97–123); a section in the second chapter of Günther’s book on the same topic (Marguerite, pp. 23–28); and Leslie Hill’s Marguerite Duras: Apocalyptic Desires (London; New York: Routledge, 1993), particularly the first chapter, ‘Image of Authorship’ (pp. 11–23). In this chapter, Hill proposes that Duras’s discussions of writing constitute a performative discourse of authorship. Both Royer (L’Écran, pp. 1–39) and Hill (Apocalyptic) relate Duras’s reflections on her artistic practice to her position in France’s cultural and socio-political life and examine the vast mediatization of her public persona starting in the 1980s.

22 Duras is one of the writers with whom Hélène Cixous (who first employed the term) associates the idea of écriture féminine in a footnote to her essay ‘Le Rire de la Méduse’, L’Arc, 61 (1975), p. 42. Julia Kristeva, who identifies feminine writing with the pre-oedipal semiotique (semiotic), as opposed to the symbolique (sym-bolic), relates Duras to depression in a chapter of her book Soleil noir: dépression et mélancolie titled ‘La maladie de la douleur: Duras’ (Paris: Gallimard, 1987), 227–65.

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literature underlines how in Duras’s films the feminine corresponds to the major presence of female voices, both off-screen and in voice-over, with the latter, as mentioned above, often comprised of Duras’s own voice.

These voices ostensibly substitute for the narrative continuity other-wise missing in Duras’s films and place enunciation on the side of femi-nine identity, traditionally undermined in narrative cinema. Even more, these female voices draw attention to social marginality and convey his-torical memory, establishing a parallel between social, economic, and cultural segregation in patriarchal Western society and off-screen and non-diegetic elements in film representation. Hence the female charac-ters featured in or referred to in the voix off of Duras’s films denote Third World society and the colonized subject (the beggarwoman from Laos in IS (1975)); social transgression (Bérénice in Cesarée (C, 1979)), and Agatha in Agatha et les lectures illimitées/Agatha and the Unlimited Readings (ALI/AUR, 1981)); historical trauma (the ‘She’ character in Hiroshima mon amour/Hiroshima, My Love (HMA/HML, Alain Resnais, 1959)); and the Holocaust (Aurélia Steiner in Aurélia Steiner (Melbourne) (ASM, 1979) and Aurélia Steiner (Vancouver) (ASV, 1979)).23 This book offers that the anti-narrative nature of Duras’s films constitutes not just a mod-ernist rejection of the grand imagier as a normative and medium-specific idea of cinema, but also a hybrid aesthetics embracing the irreconcilable

On écriture féminine as applied to Duras’s literary work see, among others, Hill, Apocalyptic, pp. 21–25; Marcelle Marini, Territoires du féminin: avec Marguerite Duras (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1977); Royer, L’Écran; Marilyn R. Schuster, Marguerite Duras Revisited (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1993), pp. xxv–xxxiv; and Sharon Willis, Marguerite Duras: Writing on the Body (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1987).

23 On the role of the soundtrack and of female voices in Duras’s cinema see especially Royer, L’Écran, pp. 29–67; Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier’s Le Texte divisé: essai sur l’écriture filmique (Paris: PUF, 1981), pp. 131–61, and ‘The Disembodied Voice’, Yale French Studies, 60 (1980), 241–68; and Wendy Everett, ‘An Art of Fugue?: The Polyphonic Cinema of Marguerite Duras’, in James S. Williams, ed., Revisioning Duras: Film, Race, Sex (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000), 21–35.

Introduction: Marguerite Duras, la grande imagière 31

otherness of language and identity, as well as the unrepresented Other of Western culture and history.

In putting herself forward as a grande imagière and using cinema to explore the limits of language and representation, Duras touches upon questions that punctuate film theory and aesthetics and have philosophi-cal, ethical, and political implications for film discourse. These impli-cations include a reconsideration of cinema’s relation to thought and discourse, as well as its role vis-à-vis history and society, with specific attention put on its interaction with other media and the ideological and cultural constructiveness of its techniques and forms. The hybridity of Duras’s aesthetic is central to the methodological and theoretical prem-ises of this book. Cinema here constitutes less an exclusive or privileged subject of scrutiny than a discursive framework. In addition to analysing the films Duras wrote and/or directed, the collection also considers the meta- and paracinematic elements of Duras’s films and some of her liter-ary and theatrical texts, from within a cross- and interdisciplinary frame-work of analysis.

Before presenting the structure of the collection, an overview of Duras’s role in contemporary cinema and the scholarship on her film work is in order.

Duras and Cinema: A Synecdochical Relation

In many ways, the place of cinema in Marguerite Duras’s multifarious and vast oeuvre evokes the figure of the synecdoche. Becoming a film director when she was already an established writer, film constituted a decisive phase in her artistic career and arguably the most important element in the development of her personal style and poetics. Duras rejected the institution of cinema and deemed it an instrument of social control. She strongly supported anti-mainstream film practices, attending independ-ent film circuits and festivals (where she also served as jury member) and

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willingly discussing her films at special screenings and in interviews.24 She always worked at the margins of the film industry, making her films in semi-autarchy with independent film producers, extremely low budgets, and minimal crews. Duras was involved in feature film-making for over two decades, which constitutes a rather long yet circumscribed period within her half-century-long career as an artist. During these years, she completed nineteen films, for which she also wrote the screenplays.25 Particularly during the 1970s, Duras set literature aside and the texts she published during this period were mainly scripts from the films she directed.

She first became involved in film through a short-notice commission, signing to write the screenplay for the critically acclaimed HMA upon request of the film’s director, Alain Resnais. Her conversion to film was gradual and matured during the 1960s through her occasional forays into screenwriting and her responses to disappointing film adaptations of her novels.26 Although films and screenplays represent only a discrete portion

24 On Duras’s participation in film festivals see especially Dominique Noguez, Duras, Marguerite (Paris: Flammarion, 2001), which includes the texts of the 1975 and 1980 declarations regarding the ‘Different Cinema’ awards at the Toulon Film Festival, which Duras co-signed as a jury member (pp. 225–26, 241–43). Duras did many interviews on the topic of cinema, some of which appear in Royer, L’Écran, pp. 130–32. Among the publications of Duras’s conversations about cinema, see, besides Noguez and Royer, Marguerite Duras, Marguerite Duras à Montréal, eds Suzanne Lamy and André Roy (Montreal: Spirale, 1981), which contains discus-sions and interviews with Duras on the occasion of a three-day series of her films at the Cinémathèque québécoise in Montreal.

25 Duras’s filmography appears at the end of this book, pp. 355–57.26 Duras co-wrote with Gérad Jarlot the screenplay for Une aussi longue absence,

directed in 1961 by Henri Colpi. In the 1960s Duras completed scripts for short films directed by Michel Mitrani, Marin Karmitz, Georges Franju, and Jean Chapot. Her film-making début occurred in 1966 with La Musica (LM), which she co-directed with Paul Seban. On her early experiences as a screenwriter see Royer, L’Écran, p. 128. Barrage contre le Pacifique was made into a film by René Clément in 1958 with the title Una diga sul Pacifico/This Angry Age (UDSP/TAA). The film was an Italy–USA co-production involving Columbia Pictures and the Dino de Laurentiis Cinematografica. Following UDSP, two other Duras novels were adapted into

Introduction: Marguerite Duras, la grande imagière 33

films, Moderato Cantabile (1958), directed by Peter Brooks and released with the same title in 1960, and Le Marin de Gibraltar (Paris: Gallimard, 1952), directed by Tony Richardson and released under the English title The Sailor of Gibraltar in 1967. In 1966 Duras developed a script from Jean Genet’s story Mademoiselle, which Tony Richardson directed in 1966. Like in Moderato Cantabile, this film featured Jeanne Moreau as the protagonist.

Marguerite Duras at the Cinémathèque québécoise, Montreal, 1981. (Photo: Alain Gauthier/ Collection Cinémathèque québécoise)

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of Duras’s overall production, they reverberate in her vast literary corpus as intertextual motifs and stylistic influences. Cinema is an intrinsic com-ponent of her texts, whether in the form of published scripts, of writings about her cinema, or of formal techniques in her writing style.27

Ironically, cinema is most present as a stylistic overtone in Duras’s later literary work, after she definitively sets film-making aside.28 In this phase of her career, the synecdochical rapport between literature and film takes yet another turn following Jean-Jacques Annaud’s adaptation of her novel L’Amant/The Lover (A/TL).29 Duras, who at first collab-orated with Annaud on the screenplay, subsequently withdrew from the project and allegedly disavowed the film (although she never made direct comment on it and is even said to have never watched it).30 In response, she wrote the novel L’Amant de la Chine du Nord/The North China Lover (ACN/NCL, 1991), essentially a counter-script to Annaud’s adaptation, fortuitously published just before the film’s release. Yet ACN is not just a literary rejoinder, but also an addendum to the autonomous yet all-encompassing role cinema has played in her work. Like A before it, the novel is based on autobiographical aspects of Duras’s childhood in Indochina, which inform her early novel Un Barrage contre le Pacifique/The Sea Wall (BCP/SW, 1950/1967).31 Duras openly abjured the 1958

27 Royer, L’Écran, pp. 128–32; and James S. Williams, Revisioning, pp. 211–12, provide thorough lists of these works in the bibliographies of their respective books.

28 Sandy Flitterman-Lewis refers to the unrealized film project at the end of Duras’s 1985 novel, La Douleur/The War: A Memoir, in the article included in this collec-tion ‘Nevers, Mon Souvenir: Marguerite Duras, History, and the Secret Heart of Hiroshima mon amour’.

29 A/TL (1984) brought Duras unprecedented international fame, both in France and abroad. The novel was made into a film by the same title ( Jean-Jacques Annaud, 1992).

30 Schuster, Revisited, pp. 116–30; and Jane Bradley Winston’s Postcolonial Duras (New York: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 83–91, provide detailed and insightful readings of Duras’s relationship to the film adaptation.

31 On the intertextual links between these three novels and the autobiographical accent of Duras’s literary production during this decade, see especially Schuster, Revisited, pp. 116–30.

Introduction: Marguerite Duras, la grande imagière 35

film version of the novel, UDSP/TAA. In this respect, ACN epitomizes her trajectory from literature to film, which for Borgomano started with BCP, and rearticulates into a cinematic type of storytelling Duras’s rejec-tion of conventional cinema.32

Cinema also operates synecdochically in the scholarship on Duras. While Duras is primarily acknowledged as a writer, some of her films and screenplays are considered to be among her best works. By the same token, while cinema per se has received limited attention within the vast literature on Duras, some of the films she wrote and/or directed are considered paradigmatic of her entire oeuvre.33 This is especially the case with HMA and IS. In this respect, another factor in the synecdochical role of cinema in Duras’s reception is the very limited accessibility and knowledge of her films. Duras has quite a unique position within modern cinema. Although she declined affiliation with any of the aesthetic or political movements that emerged in postwar France (notably nouveau cinéma and counter-cinema, also from a feminist perspective), some of her film work is considered canonical in relation to these film modes.34 In addition to HMA and IS, Nathalie Granger (NG, 1972) and Son nom de Venise dans Calcutta désert (SNDV, 1976) fall into this category. As it turns out, discussions about Duras within contemporary cinema dis-course are almost exclusively limited to these titles, since most of her films never reached regular film distribution and exhibition circuits, only a few have or are now being released in video or DVD format, and are still difficult to locate even in specialized venues such as universities and film archives.

Finally, Duras’s synecdochical position in contemporary film and film discourse is over-determined by the connotations of being a female artist. While as a writer Duras is one of the most internationally renowned and

32 On this point see, among others, the chapter titled ‘The Limits of Fiction’, in Hill, Apocalyptic, 114–36; Royer, L’Écran, p. 12; and Winston, Postcolonial, pp. 86–87.

33 The literature on Duras’s cinema will be further discussed in this introduction.34 On Duras’s position vis-à-vis the nouveau cinéma movement see in particular

Günther, Marguerite, p. 16. Baum discusses Duras’s peculiar relation with these aesthetic currents in his essay included in this collection.

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mediatized cultural icons of twentieth-century France, as a film-maker she was (like most female film directors of her generation) disparaged and limited within the framework of both France’s art and auteur, as well as feminist avant-garde films.35 As a consequence, within modern cinema Duras is mainly distinguished by, even reduced to, the notion of feminine writing or feminist counter-cinema.36

The synecdochical position of cinema in Duras’s work resonates throughout the intermedial and interdisciplinary framework of the essays in this collection. The intention is not just to stress Duras’s crucial role within contemporary cinema and film discourse, but also to highlight the relevance of her hybrid approach to film-making to current film discussions.

Beyond the ‘Durassian’ Discourse

Most of the scholarship on Marguerite Duras emphasizes the self-referen-tial and intertextual dimensions of her oeuvre, glossing over its political subtext and historical specificity. Furthermore, as Jane Bradley Winston pointedly observes, postwar French culture obliterates the political con-tent of Duras’s work by hyper-feminizing her as an intellectual, a canonical writer, and a media celebrity.37 Duras’s indirect treatment of socio-political issues (which she typically conveys through a subjective and personal style of address) and idiosynchratic view of politics (particularly acute towards the end of her life) have encouraged this type of reading. The persistent attention to the autobiographical elements of Duras’s corpus began to intensify in the 1980s, when Duras started making more explicit and

35 Günther, Marguerite, pp. 14–15. See also Jill Forbes’s discussion of Duras in her book The Cinema in France after the New Wave (Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1993), pp. 94–102.

36 This issue is further discussed in the first section of this collection.37 See particularly the first two chapters of Winston, Postcolonial, pp. 1–91.