Dr. Alwin Baum

 

 Le Ravissement de l’autre: Subjective Exile and Semiotic Subversion in Duras’s Écriture filmique

&nbsp;

 ‘Let the cinema go to ruin, it’s the only cinema. Let the
world go to its ruin; the fact that it’s going to its ruin is the only politics.’
(Marguerite Duras, Le Camion)<a target="" rel="" title="Link: null">[1]</a>

&nbsp; 

 Between 1966 and 1985, Marguerite
Duras conceived, wrote, and directed nineteen films. Outside of her native
France, however, she is little known for her cinematic work, with the possible
exception of India Song (IS).<a target="" rel="">[2]</a>
Ironically, the films that brought her worldwide attention are the adaptations
from her novels, over which she had the least authorial and directorial
control.<a target="" rel="">[3]</a>
Except for Hiroshima mon amour/Hiroshima, My Love (HMA),
on which she collaborated closely with the film-maker Alain Resnais, she
disliked these films because they conformed to the naturalistic style and
objectifying representation of women typically found in classical and
mainstream film modes.<a target="" rel="">[4]</a>
In many of her own films, Duras abandons chronological plot development,
conflict/resolution structure, traditional characterization and representation
of characters’ relationships. Given her antipathies to conventional film form,
it is a wonder she decided to make films at all. In an interview with Michelle
Porte regarding LC, Duras remarks that ‘cinema impedes the text, strikes
down its progeny – the imaginary – with death,’ but she adds, paradoxically,
that cinema’s real strength is ‘to close off, to impede the imaginary’.<a target="" rel="">[5]</a>
As she further explains, the problem with conventional cinema is that it ‘no
longer knows how to return to the unlimited potential of the text, to its
illimitable proliferation of images.’<a target="" rel="">[6]</a>
For this reason, she suggests that taking traditional cinema to its ‘ruin’ may
be the only way to revive it. Her films seem to fulfill this redemptive
strategy. In addition to the overt political and social issues explored in
several of Duras’s films, their formal aesthetics may be regarded as inherently
political also. Because traditional films ‘impede the imaginary,’ one of
Duras’s strategies is to create what may be considered a ‘textual’ cinema that
opens itself up to the viewer’s imagination and interpretation, thus creating a
proliferation of potential images and associations. Madeleine Borgomano
appropriately defines this hybrid approach to film-making as ‘écriture
filmique,’ or ‘filmic writing’.<a target="" rel="">[7]</a>
The concept parallels the theoretical paradigm of écriture féminine
(feminine writing) developed by Hélène Cixous in the 1976 essay ‘Le Rire de la
Méduse’ (‘The Laugh of the Medusa’).<a target="" rel="">[8]</a>
Cixous’s theoretical reflections on the way in which women are inscribed in
language and the way they articulate their discursive subjectivity are
particularly relevant to the analysis of Duras’s film-making style. For Cixous,
if language is traditionally invested with patriarchal ideology and is thus a
primary medium of repression, then subverting the parameters of patriarchal
discourse – for example, logical and chronological order – could also become a
primary counter-offensive weapon of political agency for women.

Another
important theory of relevance to Duras’s filmic writing is Julia Kristeva’s
notion, developed in her seminal study Desire in Language, that the
locus of the feminine is what Jacques Lacan designates the ‘imaginary’ stage of
development, the stage of the mother/child bond prior to the formation of
self-identity.<a target="" rel="">[9]</a>
Kristeva identifies this stage as ‘semiotic’ to suggest that the memories of
this phase are configured in a sign system, but one that does not lend itself
to interpretation because it is the space of displaced and deferred
subconscious meaning. For Lacan and Kristeva, this phase precedes the
‘symbolic’ order, which is dominated by the ‘law of the father’ and, as such, requires
repression of the semiotic and the irreparable loss of the mother. To recover
the repressed semiotic space of the feminine, however, Kristeva argues that the
law of the father may be subverted through a kind of discursive terrorism that
disrupts the orders of patriarchal language.<a target="" rel="">[10]</a>


One of
the most intriguing aspects of Duras’s career is that the political aesthetic
of l’écriture féminine was already evident in her narratives even before
its development in theory. L’écriture filmique dominates her cinema
also, partly because the films depend so much on narratives in the form of
spoken discourse – voices that serve to decenter and disrupt the patriarchal
order through her unconventional narrative style of film-making. Consequently,
I concur with Borgomano’s suggestion that the study of Duras’s films could not
be ‘separated completely from her literary works without becoming unfaithful
and even incomprehensible.’<a target="" rel="">[11]</a>
This essay will explore also how these central elements of Duras’s style
– particularly her creation of an ‘other space,’ her use of narrative
techniques echoed in the nouveau roman movement, and her movement away from
naturalistic cinematography – connect her works to both Lacanian and Derridean
deconstructions of conventional ideas regarding meaning, reality, desire, and
subjectivity associated with patriarchal logic. 

<div> 





<div>

<a target="" rel=""></a>1
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Duras
makes these comments in an interview with Michelle Porte regarding her most
self-reflexive film, Le Camion/The Lorry (LC/TL, 1977). Le Camion, suivi de ‘Entretien avec Michelle Porte’, (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1977). English
translation reprinted in ‘Le Camion (The Truck)’, tr. Peter Connor, Marguerite Duras
(San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1987), 98–101, (p.98).

</div>

<div>

<a target="" rel=""></a>2
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; See Laure Adler, Marguerite
Duras: A Life, tr. Anne-Marie Glasheen (Chicago: Chicago University Press,
2000), p.298.

</div>

<div>

<a target="" rel=""></a>3 &nbsp; These
adaptations include This Angry Age (René Clement, 1958), from Duras’s
1950 novel, Un Barrage contre le Pacifique; Moderato Cantabile
(Peter Brook, 1960), from the 1957 book by the same name; Ten-Thirty on a
Summer Night (Jules Dassin, 1966), from the 1960 novel; The Sailor from
Gibraltar (Tony Richardson, 1967), from the 1960 novel; and, finally, L’Amant
(Jean-Jacques Annaud, 1992), loosely based on the 1984 novel. 

</div>

<div>

<a target="" rel=""></a>4 &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; See
Renate Günther, French Film Directors: Marguerite Duras (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2002), pp.16–24. See also Duras’s interviews with
Xavière Gauthier, Woman to Woman, tr. and afterword by Katharine A.
Jensen (Lincoln: Nebraska University Press, 1987), pp.59–65. 

</div>

<div>

<a target="" rel=""></a>5 &nbsp; ‘Le
Camion (The Truck)’, p.98.

</div>

<div>

<a target="" rel=""></a>6 &nbsp; Ibid. p.98.

</div>

<div>

<a target="" rel=""></a>7 &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Madeleine Borgomano, L’Écriture
filmique de Marguerite Duras (Paris: Albatros, 1985), p.9.

</div>

<div>

<a target="" rel=""></a>8 &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Hélène
Cixous, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, tr. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, Signs 1
(1976), 875–93.

</div>

<div>

<a target="" rel=""></a>9 &nbsp; Julia
Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art,
Ed. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia UP, 1980).

</div>

<div>

<a target="" rel=""></a>10 &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Julia
Kristeva, ‘Women’s Time’ in New Maladies of the Soul, tr. Ross Guberman
(New York: Columbia UP, 1997), 201–24.

11 &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; My translation, Borgomano,
L’Écriture filmique, p.9.

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; 

</div>

<div>

<a target="" rel=""></a>&nbsp;</div>

</div>

Le Ravissement de l’autre: Subjective Exile and Semiotic Subversion in Duras’s Écriture filmique

Useful links

Company

Information

Content Writers

Freelancers

Freelance Jobs

Online Jobs

Designers

Developers

Translations