Let Cinema Go To Its Ruin: The Cinema of Marguerite Duras

From July 18 to August 25, the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), in collaboration with Another Gaze Editions, presents a full retrospective of Marguerite Duras' work in London. The retrospective will include her shorts, features, and televisual work, alongside several works in literal or theoretical conversation with hers.

“Duras’s films challenge and complicate any conventional relationship between the audio and the visual: often, that which is described never manifests on-screen, when, indeed, there is an easily decipherable image at all. The majority of her films are anti-narrative, and the backgrounds and motivations of her characters (in so far as they can be described as such, given that characterisation is often deliberately lacking) are absent. As in her writing, Duras’s scripts are full of language games: sentences are twisted beyond recognisable syntax, and repetition of elements of speech and music is used to hypnotic and sometimes maddening effect.

Duras’s filmic experiments are deeply sensual: many of them concern the most extreme – sometimes taboo, often deadly – limits of desire, and their soundtracks, containing rumbas and tangos, conjure the tropics in which the filmmaker came of age. Her unconventional relationship to form reflects a complicated relationship with representation. Nonetheless, the defining preoccupations of the writer-filmmaker’s life move in and out of the frame: the French colonies, Jewishness after the Shoah, the domestic lives of women, the proletariat and the Communist Party…” – Daniella Shreir, Another Gaze co-founder

More information here.