The Suspended Passion

by Marguerite Duras

  Tell me some more about your favourite film-makers.

  When I used to talk with the Cahiers du cinéma group, I’d compare the love I have for Dreyer’s tragic sublime with the intolerance I feel for [Ingmar] Bergman-style cerebral aestheticism. Sham stuff aimed at Americans wanting to sate their insatiable hunger for ‘culture’.

  My favourites are, and always will be, Yasujiro Ozu, John Ford, Jean Renoir and Fritz Lang. And Chaplin—his genius lies in his ability to say so many things without speaking. His eye movements, facial expressions, gestures and silences. How different from the Woody Allen–style obsession with words so typical of New York. Talkies will never have the intensity of the silents.

  I recently read a long interview you did with Elia Kazan.13

  Speaking to him, I noticed how alike we were.14 The same, rather primitive, taste for the essential, for rigour and the cleanness of the image.

  With me, Kazan is perhaps the only film-maker—the fact he’s a man makes this even more extraordinary—to have attempted to represent desire. Ineffable and inaccessible by nature.

  You wrote a whole issue of the magazine Les Cahiers du cinéma, an issue entitled ‘Les yeux verts’ or ‘Green Eyes’.15

  That began with a series of interviews they did with me. Then they wanted some direct contributions. In the end, it was decided that I’d coordinate the whole issue that was entirely devoted to me.

  I suppose it was quicker in the end?

  It was Godard who suggested this. To begin with, the editors did only a small print run. They didn’t think it would sell. Now they’ve brought it out as a paperback.16 They’ve told me it’s doing very well . . . They’ve told me that the money that was down to me from sales—and I’m sure this is true—was just about enough to pay off the journal’s debts.

  Do you think your films can be regarded as works of women’s cinema?

  If I’d made ‘women’s’ films, I’d have betrayed both—women and film. Except where their particular irony is concerned, the particular view they alone have of things, women really have to give up on the female part of themselves.

  They must simply be authors, full stop. Going beyond the alienation of their role, which has always strengthened their position, but also undermined them.

  Do you believe in political cinema?

  If it’s used badly, as in propaganda films, it can become a dangerous instrument. It’s easier to convey messages and disseminate them through film than through books—the image simplifies what reading renders inimical. My films are all political in nature, but they don’t talk about politics, they don’t advance arguments. At least, their political meaning has to be achieved by other means—not those of rhetoric or the mythification of the proletariat.

  René Clément made The Sea Wall (also known as This Angry Age) in 1957, Peter Brook made Moderato Cantabile in 1960, Jules Dassin made 10:30 P.M. Summer in 1966, and Tony Richardson made The Sailor from Gibraltar in 1967. Then in 1985 there was the film Peter Handke made from The Malady of Death. And there was also Henri Colpi’s Une aussi longue absence (The Long Absence), on which you collaborated. Not forgetting Hiroshima mon amour by Alain Resnais. What do you think of the films made from your novels or screenplays?

  I started making films because, apart from Resnais’s, I didn’t like the ones that were made from my books. I said to myself, let me see what I’m capable of—it would have been impossible to do worse.

  So the film-makers can be said to have denatured or betrayed the texts?

  Mainly by banalizing them. By appropriating stories or reinventing them in novelistic form, without understanding that these were starting points, evocations based more on the reduction or suspension of narration than on its saturation. They tried to fill the gaps in the written text. But that way the words lost all their intensity—the image in their films was there precisely to substitute for the words, to illustrate the story by compensating for this paring-down.

  Cinema’s been afraid of words for nearly fifty years now.

  Paradoxically, the film that gained you recognition among the general public was made from a scenario you authored, but not by you.

  Are you talking about Hiroshima? It was Alain Resnais who phoned me one day. I didn’t even know he was thinking about filming it.

  Anyway, I provided him with all the direction and ideas. He followed me, backed me up. Godard was one of the first to notice that the film—as is clear from the outset—is, first and foremost, my film.17

  Did you and Resnais do a lot of work together?

  I wrote the scenario and he reworked it as a function of ideas that came to him as he was working. He’d been to Japan to find ideas that we subsequently worked from.18

  The film was made in 1959. Was that the first time you had been so closely involved in cinema?

  Yes. I didn’t know anything—about contracts or about percentages that should have come to me as royalties. In the process of producing a film, the author—even if she’s mentioned and lauded by the critics—actually counts for nothing. Or she’s treated merely as the narrator of a story that the film stages. I did a lot of work and was very poorly paid. I got a cheque for a million and a half old francs.19 I thought I’d be getting more later on, but I came to realize that that was it. Resnais told me a few years later that I’d been given less than half of what I was owed. I was flat broke and inexperienced. Of course, no one helped me.

  Your other very well-known film is India Song. You yourself have spoken of it as a thwarting of any possible reconstruction.

  Yes, it was only through the destruction of the story that was told—the story of Anne-Marie Stretter and the Vice Consul—that another could be created, a story the wrong way round, that was even stronger. The whole film works by this distanced doubling.

  And, after India Song, what led you to make another film, Son nom de Venise dans Calcutta désert, which not only uses the same soundtrack but evokes the same settings, the same atmospheres?

  For some months I’d felt a sense of dissatisfaction—a feeling I hadn’t finished what I wanted to say with India Song, that I had something else to say. Anyway, both are the perfect staging of what I’d imagined when I was writing them—the decay of the French embassy in India is already, in itself, the end of colonialism, the despair of the whites, the exhaustion of a love affair, the twilight and death that I felt as a child walking down those streets.

  Your last film, The Children, with Pierre Arditi, André Dussollier and Axel Bogousslavsky, was made in 1984. Since then, you’ve said you don’t want to make any more films.

  That’s true, yes. I’m done with cinema. After all, making films was difficult all those years.

  The film is about an adult-child Ernesto, who suddenly refuses to go to school because he doesn’t, as he puts it, want to learn what he doesn’t know. He’s strenuously opposed to the logic of compulsory education.

  Ernesto’s madness, in a world wholly subject to the logic of consensus, lies in this excessive, extreme, revolutionary freedom he’d like to have; in his rejection of all pre-established values, in his desire to destroy and sabotage knowledge—in his case, academic knowledge—so as to recover universal innocence within himself. It’s no accident that the film is built on a sort of desperate comedy.

  As you made it, were you thinking of your son Jean?

  Yes, of Outa20 and of myself. Ernesto, like me, has learnt to say no.

  What were your relations like with the actors? Judging by your relationship with Gérard Depardieu in Le Camion and when you directed Lucia Bosè and Jeanne Moreau in Nathalie Granger, one would imagine they were very intense.

  Even passionate. A thing of understandings and clashes. We talked about everything and I was often forced, as a result of the actors’ criticisms, to change the text to accommodate their suggestions, adapting the characters
to the actors playing them as we went along.

  It was important to me that there was nothing general about their attitudes—that they came from themselves, the emotions and fears driving them. They said I was hard, that I got angry.

  I even got mad with Yann, when he was working on Agatha with Bulle Ogier. I wanted him to ‘enter into’ the film, not to act it. Depardieu and I got on together straight away. Before we began, I simply said, ‘Give in to the sound of the words you’re speaking, without worrying about the meaning of the sentences. The music of the words, the tone you adopt will be enough to overcome the static nature of the film.’ Le Camion’s a difficult film, yet we never had a moment’s boredom or anguish. Depardieu and the team were enthusiastic.

  You yourself have admitted that you had special relationships with actresses, from Jeanne Moreau and Lucia Bosè through Delphine Seyrig, Bulle Ogier, Madeleine Renaud and Dominique Sanda, to Isabelle Adjani and Catherine Sellers.21 And, indeed, many of them have become your friends.

  Madeleine Renaud is still one of my dearest friends. We are even alike in our rather hasty, careless way of dressing. I like to listen to her, rather than talk theatre with her. I love her guilelessness, her ‘naive’ innocence ([Samuel] Beckett once said that was her genius), the fact of knowing that even now walking on stage is a terrible ordeal for Madeleine.

  You wrote Savannah Bay for her.

  I couldn’t forget the way she’d played the role of my mother in Whole Days in the Trees. She asked me to talk about her and I showed her some photos. It was really moving. Madeleine threw off her Parisian manner and became a teacher of native children in Indochina.

  Suddenly I could see my mother there, old and drained, on the big stage at the Odéon theatre.22

  In your bedroom, there’s a big photo of Delphine Seyrig who was chosen by you to play in India Song—and not accidentally.

  It was Resnais who discovered her. He wanted her to be in Last Year in Marienbad. That was in 1961. Delphine had been a theatre actress for eight years at that point. She was reclusive, reserved and didn’t give interviews. She wasn’t among the fashionable set and yet she was one of France’s greatest actresses. Without having seen her, I believe I’d have chosen Delphine, just from hearing her on the telephone, for her extraordinary vocal inflections.23

  In Nathalie Granger, on the other hand, the actresses are Jeanne Moreau and Lucia Bosè. Did you write the screenplay with them in mind?

  I liked the idea of working with two big stars, but going against the clichéd approach—showing their bodies from behind, or their hands, but not lingering over their legs, faces or breasts.

  I wanted to make a film that respected women’s rhythms without appealing to the usual, hackneyed femininity. I’ve got good memories of the understanding that formed, as women, between them and me.

  As for Jeanne, since the time of Moderato Cantabile I’ve been aware of the extraordinary intelligence in her eyes, the seriousness with which she entered into her roles. While she was making the film with Peter Brook, she kept coming to my place to ask for information about the life of Anne Desbaresdes, which I had to make up on the spot to satisfy her.24

  Jeanne is a lot like me—we’ve both of us felt the force of a love throughout our entire lives. Not necessarily a love already in existence, but something that wasn’t there yet, that was going to come—or to end.

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  • • • THEATRE • • •

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  You’ve written quite a lot of stage plays and adaptations. What happens when your works are adapted for the stage?

  Whereas a book exists as such, in this case it’s the stage that ‘lends reality’ to a text which wouldn’t exist at all on its own. It’s the actors’ voices that bring it to life, overriding even the voice of the author. Ultimately, I’m silent as my stage plays are performed—an unseen ‘vanishing point’ in the wings. The actors, as we might say, speak in my stead.

  What’s the difference between a theatre production and a film set?

  The theatre will never be an industrial product. It’s something alive, a risk that begins afresh every evening. The cinema knows nothing of these fears; a film is vivisected and corrected before being offered up to the viewer.

  There’s nothing chancy or fortuitous about it.

  But there are the limits of the stage, which everyone knows. Only film allows you to give total free rein to the imagination.

  That’s exactly where the theatre scores—its limited scope of vision.

  And what changes does the text undergo when it’s staged? In your work, it would seem there aren’t those inevitable slippages that usually happen when we move from book to film or to the stage. Critics have often presented your work as having no internal boundaries, no break in continuity, whatever art form you adopt.

  To work in the theatre, a literary text has to be constructed very strictly. This is something that very seldom occurs. First and foremost, the scale has to be changed—one could confine oneself to the dialogues, but they aren’t sufficient. Hence a certain difficulty in rendering certain ineffable evocations that have to do with the magic of the written text—evocations that film is also able to render, though to a lesser degree, by way of technical effects.

  Take a text like The Malady of Death, entirely built around the blank spaces, the pauses, the gaps, the sound of the sea, the light, the wind—the stage is too small . . .

  Who is the playwright you feel closest to?

  Strindberg analyses the ghastliness of man’s inner dejection. Pinter brings out humanity’s pathology. But the theatrical space never conveys what really happens between human beings, except perhaps in the plays of Chekhov.

  A theatre of text and voice, interwoven with apparently banal and yet significant details. It’s beneath the ‘simple’ structure of the dialogues and what speech hides or masks—beneath the allusive stammerings of conversation—that the greatness of Chekhov lies. These are texts which, like mine, are never saturated; texts in which the action is suspended, left unfinished. A sort of music of silence. Entirely left to the imagination.

  Thinking of texts like The Square, La Musica, L’Amante anglaise, Suzanna Andler, Savannah Bay and Whole Days in the Trees, what genre do your plays belong to?

  There’s no theatre without tragedy. And tragedy is love, hysteria . . . even the simple separation of a provincial couple. What I’d really like to do would be to transpose the sacred power of liturgy into theatrical speech.

  You yourself have defined your theatrical productions as a ‘theatre of spoken words and voices’.

  The main thing is not to call it a ‘theatre of ideas’.

  What does it mean to you to have worked for the theatre?

  It’s about having learnt to treat the theatre as something foreign to oneself, something done and made outside of oneself, without the involvement and intimacy that normally comes about with a book. It was the dialogue I put enormous effort into. I rewrote it every day, for three hours each morning. Then I’d get to the theatre in the afternoon with new ideas each time. La Musica, for example, is one of the texts that underwent the most change. Until the day when Miou-Miou and Sami Frey were exhausted and asked me to stop . . .

  How does your relationship with the actors in the theatre differ from your relations with film actors?

  What they brought to the text was indispensable—more so than anywhere else. That’s to say, it helped me to modify the text, even if that meant starting again from scratch, before it was acted in front of an audience.
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br />   Ideas, as I remember, emerged like that—simply from seeing someone’s body move in a particular way.

  What, in your view, should be the relationship between the text and the voice interpreting it?

  The actor shouldn’t identify with it in a naturalistic way but keep a certain distance, playing on the distantiation between person and character.

  Where did this passion for the theatre come from?

  Definitely not from any shows that I saw. In a village in Cochinchina in the 1930s there was neither cinema nor theatre. One of the rare publications to be found in our home was La Petite Illustration.1

  You began to write plays in the 1950s with Les Viaducs de la Seine-et-Oise. What did you think of French theatre at the time in the immediate aftermath of the war?

  Some of the theorists like Antonin Artaud, despite having revolutionized the theatre, didn’t interest me all that much. As for Sartre and Camus, my impression was that they were making thesis-plays, a form as outdated as the ideologies they were replete with. A defective, didactic theatre that lacked the true contribution of tragedy. The spectators were reduced to the role of passive—subordinated, I would say—recipients of everything that was laid out before them.

  At each opening night of a new Camus play, Dionys Mascolo forced me to go with him.2

  What do you think of theatre criticism?

  That it’s only meaningful for a beginner—certainly not for someone like me. I’ve no time at all for the theatrical rear-guard, based, as it was forty years ago, on criteria of psychological verisimilitude or things of that sort.