Aurélia Steiner - Melbourne

To show on the basis of something being missing, such is no doubt the obsessive quest in the films of Marguerite Duras. Like her stories and novels, they explore absence (of meaning, of the other); and her films are full of the idea of her own death; of its inability ever to replace the text. While Marguerite Duras has made screen versions of some of her narratives (her way of exhausting them perhaps), this cycle dating from 1979 is taken from no independent writing. The writing is introduced beneath, or beyond, the pictures, it never accompanies them. These four shorts are not blind films in which Duras took her experimentations with the cinema to their limits (L’Homme atlantique, of 1981, for instance). But they do carry the premises of it, being full of that ‘tepid softness of the threatened image’. They in fact start a transition, taking the disassociation of the picture and the soundtrack further on from work like India Song (1974), with a more conventional narrative structure.