Throughout Marguerite Duras’s prolific filmmaking and writing career, she was obsessed with both the impossibility of creating images to represent the past and a desire to “assassinate” traditional forms of narrative (“department store cinema” as she called it) that were incapable of representing the psyche and her memories. In the recently published collection of Duras’s writing on film, My Cinema—translated by the London-based Another Gaze co-founder, editor, and programmer Daniella Shreir—the word “impossible” appears 37 times. On the making of India Song, Duras remarks: “I wanted identification between the actors and the real characters to be impossible. By which I mean that I broke the basic premise of commercial cinema, that is to say identification.” Both early works Dark Night, Calcutta (1964) and Destroy, She Said (1969)—screening tonight at L’Alliance New York—are born out of this early attraction to impossibility, and work with different cinematic and textual modes to break any form of easy identification or representation.
Dark Night, Calcutta, directed by Marin Karmitz and written by Duras, was initially a project commissioned by a pharmaceutical company developing a drug to cure alcoholism. However, at the hands of Karmitz and Duras, the film rapidly loses any didactic and informational quality. Instead, it adopts a loose, fragmentary tale following Maurice Garrel as a drunken vice-consul of Calcutta who undergoes torturous attempts at writing. Dark Night can be seen as a prelude to Duras’s films in her “Indian Cycle”—all works attempting to represent the fou d’amour of the vice-consul who captured Duras’s imagination during her childhood in Indochina.
In the opening shot of houses lining a cliff looking over the ocean, we hear Duras’s voice: “I have come here to write a novel. It is of a man I have imagined …. The Vice Counsel.” Framing Garrel in tight close-ups, the camera flits between observing him write, to wobbly tracking shots that follow him around a seaside town—all set to Duras’s voice-over expressing her own writer’s block. Nevertheless, Duras’s use of the first-person “I” is not stable, and the camera facilitates this slippage of perspectives.
As Garrel wanders around town, he starts following Natasha Parry, a woman in the midst of a break-up. In a series of rhythmic match cuts, we see a close-up of Garrel’s gazing ahead matched by a woman unaware of being watched, framed within her large bay windows, accompanied by Duras’s voiceover: “I’d like to tell of her despair… Tomorrow, I will invent her.” Suddenly, we are no longer within the realm of Duras’s gaze, but a staggering Russian doll of perspectives: Garrel and Duras’s shared “I”; Parry framed by Garrel’s gaze set within Duras’s omniscient gaze; and a lineup of muses who are always watched from a distance, written from the periphery, and not entirely accessible.
In Destroy, She Said, Duras’s first solo-directed feature, she is similarly concerned with the instability of the gaze. In the first shot of the film, the camera roves over a tennis court and we hear a contrapuntal exchange between two female voices in voiceover: “Where are we?” “For example, in a hotel.” Their voices function like stage directions, but afterwards, they are rarely heard from again. Their initial gaze structures the film—a voyeurism that already denies any sense of objective viewership.
Throughout the film, the camera is constantly refracted by different gazes: just when you think you’re following one character, the camera suddenly pans out to an omniscient point-of-view; and just when you rest in third-person, the camera then possesses another character. In an interview with Jean Narboni and Jacques Rivette originally published in 1969 by Cahiers du cinéma, Duras expresses her political attempt for a more collective spectatorial gaze, breaking away from traditional cinematic identification: “There is no primacy of one character over another.... Why? I think this is because they are all the same.”
An active participant in the May ‘68 protests, Duras was known for her communist and anti-colonialist politics. Destroy, She Said was directly inspired by these events, as she wanted to destroy old forms and hierarchies—both cinematic and societal. Situated in an empty hotel, Destroy, She Said consists of an interaction between four characters: Max, a writer-professor who teaches the “history of the future,” his wife Alissa Thor, a Jewish writer named Stein, and Elisabeth Alione, a bourgeois housewife. Throughout the film, their desire for one another becomes progressively more threatening; as all the couples disintegrate into multiple triangular relationships, they start repeating and parroting each other. “You might call this love,” Duras notes in the Cahiers interview. “Or the demand communism makes.” Although politics are never once mentioned in the film, Duras wrote about how the film is “profoundly” political in her press notes. Her characters are emblematized by their emptiness, their lassitude, and their increasing loss of self; as she also noted in the film’s press release: “What do you mean by ‘capital destruction’?” “The destruction of someone as a person.” “As opposed to what?” “To the unknown. Which is how our communist world will appear. Tomorrow.’”
Elisabeth Alione is the character at the center of the three other gazes. They prod her and question her, and her fragile, structured performance of bourgeois lifestyle slowly crumbles. She admits to her pretenses. She hates to read, but postures with her book as a daily accessory; she chats about the niceties of her Italian holiday while playing a card game, only to break down when the other characters reveal that this game doesn’t exist. The only moment when the film adopts her gaze is at the end, when her real-estate developer husband arrives to pick her up. He is almost entirely framed by the camera through Elisabeth’s position at the table. Here, she sees him anew, refracted through the gaze of the three other characters who’ve assimilated her to their perspective. Duras describes the last scene as “the slaughter of the bourgeoisie.” Destroy, She Said may be her directorial debut, but by no means does she stray in her desire. By her later work, Le Camion (1977), she speaks to a similarly destructive impulse: “Let cinema go to its ruin, that is the only cinema. Let the world go to its ruin, that is the only politics.”
Destroy, She Said and Dark Night, Calcutta screen tonight, September 24, at L’Alliance New York as part of the series “Version Restaurée / Restored Version.”
