"Astray: Duras on Cinema", author: [French] Marguerite Duras / [French] François Beauvier [French] Serge Magel edited, translator : Yuan Xiaoyi and Yuan Siyu, version: Yazhong Culture·DaFang·CITIC Press May 2024 Philo Bregstein (hereinafter referred to as P.B.): Why did you switc

"Astray: Duras on Cinema", author: [French] Marguerite Duras / [French] François Beauvier [French] Serge Magel edited and translated Author: Yuan Xiaoyi Yuan Siyu, version: Yazhong Culture·DaFang·CITIC Press May 2024

Philo Bregstein (hereinafter abbreviated as p.b.): Why did you stop writing, a lonely job? What about the collective work of turning to film?

Marguerite Duras (hereinafter referred to as M.D.): Eight years ago I first decided to make a film - "Music", because of the adaptations of my books The movies are terrible. So I said to myself, I also want to try and make a film. This wasn't a serious decision, it was an almost... whim decision. I wanted to see if I could do as bad as other people... So I made "Music." It attracted 50,000 people, and the cost of making movies was so high; I loved movies then, and I love movies now, and I said to myself, "Okay, I'm not making movies for the general public." Over the next six months, I stopped making films during the year because "Music" didn't sell very well. When I returned to film, with "The Undoing," she said. ", I realized two things: I realized that movies are a very serious matter that requires you to participate very seriously; I also realized that not being popular with the public is a completely secondary factor and it is absolutely This is no reason to give up on filmmaking. So it was at that moment five years ago that I really started making spoken-word films.

p.b.: What do you think is the difference between book writing and film writing?

m.d.: At the stage of script creation, there is no difference between the two. During the filming phase, the difference was cost: due to cost constraints, we had to know what we wanted to achieve once the film started shooting.

p.b.: There is a certain similarity between writing and the use of various elements in film editing...

m.d.: Yes, the similarity is in time, rhythm, rhythm, speed, organization, arrangement , and, shall we say, informing narrative as a ritual. From a narrative perspective, the two are the same thing; but the materials we use are different.

p.b.: Do you feel that your literary style has become more specific after turning to film?

m.d.: This is an appearance. In fact, this concreteness will be broader than the kind of abstract writing I've had before. When I started making the film, my problem was how to represent this thing: silence. Compared to books, silence is something new to me. Silence is not just the opposite of speaking; it is something positive, it is not silence.

p.b.: The scripts for Ganga and Natalie Grainger were both rewritten after the films. Is writing also aware of this shift towards movies?

m.d.: We can give some very specific examples: the sentences are different. Previously the sentences were longer, had more clauses, and the content of the sentences was more abstract. My books used to be much longer than they are now. And when I reread them, I feel sad and grateful at the same time. Feeling sad that you still gave up something is like giving up an entire continent, but feel happy that you came out of it. I can't linger in it any longer.

I hardly read novels anymore. I stopped reading theoretical works altogether. There is a complete irreconcilability here. I will read the works of some emerging historians, such as LeRoy-Ladurie, Le Goff, and Douby, because only in their writings can I find the use of the spirit of doubt and ignorance. [Werner Heisenberg once said: "The incomplete state of knowledge is regarded as the key component of theory."]

p.b.: Have you really negated the profession of the writer in your mind through movies?

m.d .: If you think film isn't the same as writing, then maybe... but Ganga Girl isn't quite a film either.

p.b.: You mentioned earlier that movies are serious business. Why is it serious?

m.d.: Because cinema is a field of total depravity.I think movies bear a huge responsibility for the stupidity of the masses. For example, the political stupidity of the people. The capitalist dream imposed on the proletariat. Those wrong ideas, those conspiracies and so on. So this is an area that - if we get close to it - we need to be very careful about. The film needs to create its own form and should not fool the audience. The same questioning of sincerity is present in the book.

p.b.: But the point is at the public level. Speaking for yourself, do you personally think that movies are a serious thing?

m.d.: Initially, I thought that making a movie would be much easier than writing a book. In fact it is easier. We can appeal to images, colors, frames, photography; we do not create alone.

p.b.: Teamwork played a big role in the filming of the film.

m.d.: Yes, we are not so lonely in the movie compared to facing the book manuscript. Who can be more lonely than a writer? But we can read movies. In recent years, I’ve become better at reading scripts than novels. In the script, there are even fewer traces of style as narrative cloak: style, the thing that sets the most self-limits.

Marguerite Duras

p.b.: Your transition from novel to film took place in May 1968.

m.d.: Before 1968, I had maintained a regular writing habit. After that year, I was unable to write anything for eleven months. This has never happened before. Can't write a single word. Then all of a sudden, within six days I wrote "Destruction," she said. 》. My books and films have since been created like this. After a long silence. Those books and videos were sudden attacks—quick, excruciatingly painful. It's overwhelming. I had a very severe depression and I had to tell the truth. I felt like I was going to die after the shoot of 'India Song'. I didn't know what disease I had contracted at that time. I don't know what happened after the work was over, that kind of collapse in the dark. I don't know what caused this panic. I guess it's the forced separation from the film, isn't it? It's like being forced to separate from your lover and love. Yes, that's it. I experienced this separation after the shooting of "India Song" ended. When I left India Song I left a love. As I walked past the set of "Indian Song," I felt the same emotions you feel when you pass by a place where you once had a sweetheart. Both are exactly the same. It's as if the body automatically "recognizes" its places, the places that give it pleasure. Frankly speaking, this is true for all my films, but for "The Undoing," she said. The situation is particularly serious in the case of "Ganga" and "India Song". In these films related to childhood, the same themes appear repeatedly. "Natalie Grainger" is more detached. In Nathalie's body, I am the woman, not the child I once was.

p.b.: How did you feel when you saw your own movie for the first time?

m.d.: is indescribable. Because the loneliness of reading books is completely destroyed. The screening room was unbearable. The first time, I simply couldn't watch my movie in front of people; suddenly, I couldn't be alone enough anymore.

p.b.: Have a question about Hiroshima Mon Amour: was the published screenplay completed before filming, or was it revised after?

m.d.: Resno brought the original from Japan material. He showed me fifteen minutes of footage shot for the first part of the film, and I created the text. I described images of radioactive fish, demonstrations, and people in cities after the atomic bombs. But the rest of the script had been completed before then. Resina set out for Japan with the dialogue, descriptions of the images, and my voice (recorded on tape reading the dialogue).

p.b.: Did you and Resnais collaborate on the script creation?

m.d.: He would come every two days to check on the progress of the script.He would say things to me like, "Here, not here." But he won't say what to do.

p.b.: You once said that you couldn't have written "The Song of India" without "The Ganga Girl". Why?

m.d.: means I might not dare to try that kind of dual narrative.

p.b.: What is the function of dual narrative?

m.d.: Why is a narrative more compelling to you when it is told by another voice? This voice not only shoulders the responsibility of telling, but also experiences a love story with another person. a and b are the characters in the picture, x and y are the characters in the sound, and s is the audience, you. The narrative of the picture and the sound are misaligned, and it is conveyed through the emotion of the sound. You do not receive the narrative directly. You receive emotions.

p.b.: Compared with the picture content, the content expressed by the sound is not always clear.

m.d.: These voices don’t quite understand the narrative of the picture. You have to reconstruct the narrative. Each voice, to varying degrees, has forgotten something. And this kind of forgetting is not entirely voluntary. It's the same thing for me, eight years after writing this book, and I've forgotten a few things. I made no attempt to correct my forgetfulness. It is as valuable as my memory. I value my oblivion. If I search my memory, I am performing an academic, cultural, and traditional act. And I work with these holes, these ruins in my mind. This is not a trick. The voiceover takes the audience to the location on the screen.

I can see that among the fifty young people in the audience, there are both men and women - young people especially love my movies. Men will watch the film through the sound, they are addicted to the tenderness and sweetness of the sound like bees; As for women, they can ignore the sound and go straight to the picture. They have their own voices in their hearts, and men listen to external voices. For them, sound serves as a mechanism for sexual attraction. I think Ganga Girl was based entirely on that.

But there is one more thing about sound. The young people who reviewed the film made an important point: the voice is as important as the words. Perhaps the voice itself—its almost physical presence—is as important as the content of the words spoken by the voice.

p.b.: Do you think movies have a more powerful political impact than writing?

m.d.: Yes, of course, because movies have an extremely mixed audience and are therefore riskier. The readers are always those people. In addition, the film language is also simpler. There is a condensation in the film that gets right to the point. Even an obscure film, such as Hiroshima Mon Amour, can be seen more easily through images.

p.b.: But your film does not represent some kind of political intervention.

m.d.: Obviously, I think all my videos are political. Even if they don’t directly address politics. Regarding "Natalie Grainger", people say that it is a political movie through and through.

p.b.: In Ganga Girl, destruction has a political meaning.

m.d.: Yes, there is a signal at the end of the movie: that siren.

p.b.: You once said that Ganga Girl came into existence after editing.

m.d.: Yes, the sound was added after the movie was edited. This is not intentional. In "Song of India" there is a third voice, and that is my voice. In this film, the visuals are more descriptive.

p.b.: What is the function of this triple discourse?

m.d.: We never use only one conjugation to describe the duration of an event. A time can be in your past, your future, and your present at the same time; in "Hindu Song," this polyphony is related to mental activity. Someone once said in the screening room: "None of us know where we are looking!" A linear story is a simplification and therefore a lie.

p.b.: When we compare your work, we detect in your films prior to Ganga a kind of extreme sensitivity that we tend to describe as "quintessentially feminine", Yet in Ganga you seem to have destroyed this sensibility, but in depth, the female state...

m.d.: I understand what you are trying to say. Indeed, in Hiroshima Mon Amour the acute perception of things - what you would call sensitivity - and the expression of that sensitivity are more evident. For me, this sensitive state reached such an intensity in Ganga Girl that I finally gave up on direct expression of it. For a steady emotion, you can always express it - through the lyricism of the image. But when emotions are extremely intense, there is nothing you can do. When I was filming Ganga Girl, I was in an extreme state of emotion, even morbid. That's why I was stuck in this emotion. But I guess this feeling is finally over.

p.b.: This state is an absolute negation of expression. In Hiroshima Mon Amour, there are two levels of expression: in memory, and through action.

m.d.: yes, but the expressions are still presented as a whole, whereas in Ganga there is a real distinction between the expressions. The distinction exists even between the person who causes the emotion and the person who expresses it. The universality of women you just talked about, I think it has everything to do with silence. Any man could probably make a lyrical film on this subject. Because silence is feminine. It is the existential condition of women that makes this experience possible.

p.b.: The paradox in this sense is that this silence related to the female situation becomes a mode of expression. Silence is an expression of women's situation.

m.d.: No, this is an expression of female "class". Women are not alone in silence. Others are silent too: the proletarians, the working class, the hungry and suffering. It’s just that these webs of silence overlap and intertwine. There is a commonality between a woman who lives in a plague-ridden suburb of Calcutta and a woman who lives on a street in Parsi - where the nature of female silence is shared, though the former is misery and the latter safety - . It is not, as you say, that the silence of the female situation becomes a mode of expression in women's films: this understanding may be too simplistic; in fact, there is another tense in the discourse that attempts to further interpret this silence.

ps: Source: "Cinema Art", Issue 13, 1975, Jean-Pierre Jean Colas Foundation-Department of Film History and Aesthetics, University of Lausanne (jpjc)

Original author/Marguerite Dura Si

excerpt/Zhang Jin

editor/Zhang Jin