"Song of India" stills
"Song of India" stills
"I want to talk about Duras"
◎黑泽明
This year is the 110th anniversary of the birth of Marguerite Duras. The French Cultural Center in Beijing held a retrospective exhibition of Duras's films in April. Eight film and television works including "Song of India", "Lovers" and "Hiroshima Mon Amour" once again brought movie fans into the world of Duras.
"Song of India" (1975) directed by Marguerite Duras is a very "addictive" movie. I have watched it probably no less than seven times. Watching this movie completely reversed my "stereotype" of Duras: it may have been influenced by the " lover " filmed by Jacques Annaud (in the 1990s) (starring Tony Leung ). Bind the name Duras with "petty bourgeoisie" (think of the "golden sentence" at the beginning of the novel: Compared with your appearance at that time, I love your tortured face now).
Reflecting on this, this is obviously a biased view, and it is related to the overall level of understanding of the French "New Novel School" writers including Duras at that time: they were introduced and read as a kind of "fashionable" literature. , but the ideological content of these works is actually misaligned with the mainstream of cultural trends in our country at that time. Coupled with the losses in translation, it is really difficult to understand. So I have to blame these writers for playing word games (they do have their own unique language style). At that time, I felt that Duras was always making fuss about unethical love, always talking about his unrequited love or private traumatic memories, always a bit "mysterious".
The voice of despair and the "emergence" of pain
The feeling when watching "Song of India" for the first time was similar: it was "immoral" again, all the dialogues seemed to be in sleep, decadent and colonial. But soon I realized that something unusual was going on, that I must have missed something or didn't understand it at all, so I watched it again: this time it felt like I had never seen the movie before. This film has great staying power, like a trap with magnets, a web of sounds and images that always keeps you coming back again and again - with new discoveries every time. It has an obvious characteristic, namely the separation of sound and image - a thorough implementation of Eisenstein's theory. But the film’s power goes far beyond that. To understand Duras, two questions need to be addressed: What is the relationship between literature and film? What is the relationship between sound and image (in movies)?
This year marks the 110th anniversary of the birth of Duras. The French Cultural Center in Beijing held a retrospective exhibition of Duras's films, including works such as "Song of India" and "The Lover", as well as a film by Claire Simon, who is also a female writer and film director. His work "I Want to Talk About Duras" (2021). So, can we enter another level today to understand Marguerite Duras as both an outstanding novelist and an outstanding director?
People often think that if they can write good novels, they can make good movies. This is a wrong view again and again. The way literature and film tell stories actually require completely different modes of thinking. In Duras's own words: "The success of film is rooted in the failure of writing. The most important and decisive charm of film lies in its massacre of writing." Historically, he can be called a first-class writer and a first-class director at the same time. There are only a handful of them. At the same time, it is impossible for first-class literary works to be successfully adapted to the screen, and it is even rarer for film history masterpieces to be successful after being "literary", and are more likely to be reduced to "airport reading".
Duras's literary strategy is contrary to the usual way of writing novels. This is a reason that is difficult for readers accustomed to reading 19th-century literary classics or accustomed to expecting stories to accept. The opposite is that she is always looking for an outlet for her voice to escape. This is reflected in the text, that is, her dialogues always do not occur simultaneously with the plot. The position of Duras's dialogue is always uncertain: sometimes it is late, sometimes it is overtaking in a corner, and it always comes unexpectedly, which creates a sense of "trance" for the reader and makes the entire novel confusing. There is a sense of ambiguity, even a little weird.And because the conversations seemed to be whispers, the strangeness had a dangerous appeal. When you listen carefully, this temptation is actually wrapped in a desperate scream or cry.
If we identify dialogue as "voice", we can understand that there is always a desperate voice in Duras's novels, nagging and repeating. Its purpose is to relieve pain (usually associated with death) - through repetition, the sound is absorbed, and ultimately some kind of healing is achieved (which can also be said to dilute the memory of pain). In addition, Duras was very opposed to the use of images in his text and the use of illustrations in his novels. Because she feels that good words are enough to establish a picture with readers, while images destroy words.
But Duras in the movie is very different. As Foucault pointed out, her films have similarities to the paintings of Francis Bacon, in that there is always an "emergence" of this painful tension, a surge of eyes, or An action, a character coming out of the "fog". Of course, this is because movies are an audio-visual art, and the imaginative space advantage created by novels will be completely lost in movies. Duras certainly understood this, so when she expressed the same story visually and aurally, she made drastic changes.
Of course, we can also see the original storyline of the novel ("Song of India" and "Vice Consul") from the movie "Song of India", but the direction is different: the pain in the novel finally leads to nothingness; the sounds and voices in the movie The picture makes the pain more clear and perceptible, just like Bacon's twisted human body (Delouz has an excellent analysis of Bacon in "The Logic of Sense"), we can always listen at the same time in this "emergence" to cry.
Precisely because film is an audio-visual art, Duras played the role of vision and hearing in this story. The use of both is superb, and the complete separation of sound and image echoes the novel's sonic technique. The sound design of "Song of India" is unique: first of all, the separation from the picture brings a sense of detachment and trance to the audience. Indian dialects and French are intertwined with each other, like whispers at night in the tropics reaching the audience's ears. It seems (or actually is) gossiping about the characters we see. These whispers are intertwined with the natural sounds of the tropical night—like French chanson and the melody of Indian music. The shouts in the film are close to desperate wails, and the deputy consul's howls in the night are chilling. The reason is not howling like a wolf, but a fear of approaching death. Under the entanglement of these sounds, a "death drive" is generated that is both desperate and as seductive as the song of a siren. It is this drive that weaves a bird-catching net, trapping the viewer in it.
Of course, pictures also participate in the weaving of this web. The film's vision is, in Foucault's words, "fog-like." My understanding is that the visual presentation method of this film is not line drawing, but flat painting: from the first shot, the sun and the earth at the beginning, there is a sense of blur, as if Duras avoided outlining any of the people in the shot. Rather than the outline of an object, it renders a dense image; the characters seem to be "wandering" when they appear in front of us (of course, the protagonists in Duras's works are all "wanderers"). When such images and sounds are intertwined, the sound becomes "a voice without a body", and then suddenly a pair of eyes and an expression emerge from the fog. This means that it is separated from the daily and stable body narrative, which means that it is difficult for ordinary viewers to understand.
The Significance of Women's Suffering and Redemption
The important significance of the film is not its "documentary" nature - it is not "documentary", but that it is an art that separates events from the entities in which they exist. It is precisely to extract life from certain stipulations imposed on the human body. This creates a more acute "erratic" feeling for the audience.
In fact, we undoubtedly "feel" the "falling" beauty of the ambassador's wife played by Delfin Selig, but we cannot tell which detail led to the fall.The vice-consul is played by Michel Rondale, another legendary figure in the history of French film. In Foucault's words, his existence is also "fog-like": his burly body, thick black hair, and even... He has thick black eyebrows and a slender face (perhaps because of this, he is a famous "big villain" in film history), but he has an extremely sad face - including his real tears, hopeless steps, and desperate wailing. What is the secret of his attraction? Perhaps the reason is that he made us feel the vice-consul's sorrow, which was not the unrequited love in ordinary melodramas, but a kind of "unreachable". It can even be said that he never considered "reachable" as happiness. Because his wailing comes from the despair of death, or in other words, the despair of facing suffering (we cannot ignore that this story is based on the Japanese bombing of Shanghai in World War II, and the prototype of the vice-consul is the French Consul in Bombay whom Duras knew. Vice-Consul. He was a Jew, and "Jew" for Duras meant the lethality of human fratricide). The vice consul didn't even take action when the ambassador's wife committed suicide...
The relationship between Rondale and Delfin in life also forms a contrast with the movie: they met in a film acting training class when they were young, and he was attracted to her. She fell in love with her at first glance, but the goddess remained unmoved until her untimely death. Rondale never married and considered "Song of India" to be her most satisfying film (Definine may also think so, as she collaborated with Duras in 7 films).
Perhaps movie viewers can’t help but ask, where do despair and sadness come from? This goes back to the text of the novel. In Duras's film, only the sound part is used to explain an important clue in the writing of the novel, that is, the clue of the "female beggar" in Calcutta. The text of Duras's novel is about female suffering: a suffering shared by an Asian woman (the Indochina beggar) and a European woman (Anna Marie-Strait, the ambassador's wife). In a sense, they were all exiled by their mothers—the female beggar was driven out because she became pregnant out of wedlock, and lived in unimaginable poverty, disease, and madness. The ambassador's wife is a "nothingness" who has given up everything: she played the piano when she was young, but later gave up, and is completely passive. She is hunted by various men around the world, but she is the "Black Sun", absorbing the light they radiate to her. However, the black sun devours itself. She does not know what she is, but she knows death. She seems to be suffering from a disease of death. You can say that she actually committed suicide because of depression. Like many of Duras's heroines, she is a bit narcissistic and hypocritical, but it is the suffering that makes her different from Indochina. The beggars form a kind of duet.
Although Duras claims that she is not religious (and Rondale is the opposite), she undoubtedly tells a certain story through the suffering of women (of course it is unavoidable that it is related to the collapse of beliefs and values brought about by the disasters of the 20th century). Close to the meaning of redemption, which is to alleviate despair through this painful writing. Compared with women, men are more complete "wanderers". We may compare these texts with "postmodern" literature. What "postmodernity" lacks is this little recognition of pain, and reduces everything to comedy. But comedy that seems to be equal can most easily lead to mediocrity, and all literature and art are understood as short videos on mobile phones.
Young should be Duras's satisfactory "protagonist"
Perhaps we can take this to see Claire Simon's "I Want to Talk about Duras". This documentary-like feature film tells the story of female journalist Michelle Manceau's 1982 interview with Jan Andrea, Duras's young lover who stayed with him until the end. A recording of this interview was left, so the film has the characteristics of "restoring the scene".
"I Want to Talk About Duras" has only four actors in total: Young is played by Swann Elaud, who was called "French Zhang Zhen" by Chinese audiences because of his appearance in " The Trial of the Fall" . The female reporter is played by the famous French actress Emmanuelle Dove, who starred in Truffaut's "The Flower" with Gérard Dipaglio. The female reporter’s husband and Yang’s ex-girlfriend only appear briefly in the film.Think of the "truck" (1977) directed by Duras. The actor was herself having an "awkward chat" with Gerard Depagli. The same is true for Claire Simon's film - but it does not let People find these conversations boring, but instead they find these conversations fascinating.
The relationship between Jan Andrea and Duras was extraordinary. In 1975, when he was still a college student studying philosophy in his 20s, he was "captured" by Duras (although he read "Song of India" (Duras came to his university to promote it)). earlier). He kept writing to this female writer who was older than his mother, but at first there was no reply. After five years of this, Duras replied to his first letter. This started the relationship between the two, and then they met, and one day Young stayed at Duras' house.
One thing to be clear about is that Young is not heterosexual, not at all. But this love affair not only lasted until Duras's death (it was Young who accompanied and cared for her in her last days), and Young also chose to be buried with Duras after his death. Therefore, this interview conducted from Young's perspective can satisfy the curiosity and voyeurism of readers and viewers. Young did keep "complaining" in his narration. For example, we even learned that Duras was not satisfied with other directors directing his works.
This interview was conducted after they were together for two years, a time when it was very easy to break up. If we reverse the gender, it may be easy to substitute a story in which the senior uses his fame to brainwash and pua the junior. Duras behaves like a tyrant. But we might as well change our thinking. In this interaction between the two, Young did lose himself, but he was more like a "protagonist looking for the author" (let us not forget that Young himself is also a writer). There is certainly something dangerous here as his mind is reshaped by Duras - Duras even repeatedly suggests that his sexual orientation could have been "normal". Isn’t this exactly Duras’s mentality of “treatment” and “correction”? What to treat? It seems to be a complex and multiple perversion, which may also contain the deep resentment of the daughter towards the mother that appears repeatedly in her own writing.
"The Lover" was also written by Duras during his relationship with Young. Now let's think back to that beginning. Isn't it possible that a man who is not interested in women's bodies can say the most natural sentence: "Compared with your appearance at that time, I love your tortured face now." ” (otherwise it would look like a lie)? However, Duras's "correction" also includes a more common situation, that is, she regards the other person as a "wanderer" in her writing, that is, a "wanderer" who cannot find the meaning of life and has a tendency to self-destruct. Wandering" generation. Duras was obviously confident in her "correction". She said, "The more I write, the more I live." And Young had self-destructive thoughts before living with Duras. He was "involved" in Duras' writing of despair and finally resisted "despair". He should be a "protagonist" that Duras is satisfied with.
