Exploring the films of Marguerite Duras

Entering the Durasienne dream world

Filming Natalie Granger. From L: Cinematographer Bruno Nuytten, cameraman Ghislain Cloquet, writer/director Marguerite Duras, actor Jeanne Moreau.

Dear Readers,

Since I started this Substack, I’ve wondered what kind of ‘behind the scenes’ back room grabs I could create for my paid subscribers. This week instead of posting the next chapter I thought I would share some of the resources I discovered during the writing of my travel memoir, Looking for Duras, Finding my Mother. These relate in particular to MD’s films mentioned in Chapter 13.

It’s easy to become a paid subscriber, you really won’t notice it in your hip pocket. If you subscribe for a year it’s just under an aussie dollar a week. What a bargain and you get to be part of a secret club….

Ok, enough hard sell, back to the topic….

Not everyone loved the acclaimed French author Marguerite Duras. She was difficult, avant garde, experimental — she broke all the rules when it came to story telling. To enter her world you had to let go of conventional expectations. And while you may not like or understand her work, you would certainly experience it. It could be said that to enter the Durasienne world was like entering into a dream, one you might not initially understand, but that you knew to be somehow significant.

Working on this project has been like a lot like that. It’s been years since I began and while there were long stretches of time when I couldn’t give it my full attention, whenever I did, I wrapped myself in a Durasienne cocoon. For days on end I would stay in my small office surrounded by reference books, scholarly articles and my battered dog-eared copies of a good number of MD’s written works. It’s there I would go hunting down various YouTube clips and Pinterest photos, obscure thesis abtracts, blogs and journal features. Recently, when I had to go searching for a page number for a quote, I got all my Duras books out again. (Remembering where I put them is always a challenge). Once I opened them up, I was back in the dream again, back in my Durasienne world, so now I want share with you some of the treasures I found.