In Marguerite Duras, author Renate Günther examines Marguerite Duras’s films from the perspective of interweaving politics and memory that runs through her body of work. Born in Gia-Dinh in French Indochina (now Vietnam), the only daughter of emigrant teachers Emile and Marie Donnadieu who moved to the colonies in search of a better life, Duras’s […]
The static shot of a sun setting in real-time on an eerily tranquil, desolate horizon is framed against the sound of multicultural voices interwoven into a curious – and strangely dissociative – chorus of traditional storytelling chants and third-person recollective dialogue. Recounting the story of a Laotian-born beggar girl along the Ganges River who, at […]
It would seem logical to characterize Marguerite Duras’ organic, elliptical anti-melodrama Nathalie Granger as a precursor of sorts to the implosive isolation and domestic violence of Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. Both films depict a silent ritualism to the performance of domestic chores through stationary shots and disembodied framing, and […]