Passage: Herman Asselberghs

Chatting with JLG in the autumn of 1979, Marguerite Duras proclaims: “This morning, I wrote something about what I call the ‘primary spectator’: the most infantile one, the minor of cinema, he stays in his zone, autistic, looking for the violence of childhood, the fear of childhood, and there’s nothing you can do to make him budge.”1 What the writer-filmmaker committed to paper that morning can be read in the Cahiers du Cinéma a good six months later.2 Under the heading “Le spectateur”, she takes two pages to expound her firm view on the average moviegoer. Her “primary spectator” flocks to the cinema to relax, an “infantile spectator” willingly surrendering to the film experience to escape and forget. She views this brainless escapism as a bad habit learned from childhood that has grown into an unbending conception of cinema as a penchant for repetition and recognition, for more of the same. Duras shows her most virulent side when she lumps her immature spectator and the right-wing voter unabashedly together. In her view, both share a militant conservatism that does not waste words on how in the right it obviously is but regularly vents a loud distaste for others’ different views.

I haven’t read enough of Duras’s books to know whether the characters in her novels ever end up in cinemas. But I wouldn’t be surprised. Her firm rejection of the basic spectator is based on the absolute desolation of people I associate with her work. I have heard her in the consul’s cry in India Song and in the cry of the paleolithic man in The Negative Hands. I have seen her in The Lorry’s wandering truck and in the void of the black image in L’homme atlantique. For Duras, the cinema seems the ideal place to show, to experience, to face, to keep facing existential solitude: “It’s perhaps there, in the movie theater, that this spectator finds his sole solitude and this solitude consists of turning away from himself.”3 As a result, she equates relaxation and distraction in cinema with escapism. Her faith in the cinema apparatus is greater than her trust in its user. The unwritten contract that chains the spectator to the cinema seat for the duration of the screening can and should lead to the ultimate confrontation with oneself, face to face with the power of the image projected on the big screen. Of course, she knows better than anybody else that leaving during the screening remains an option anyway. Is leaving the cinema prematurely a sign of resistance or proof of abandonment? Until further notice, Duras sees the spectator throw in the towel and the film (her film?) triumph: the immature spectator has lost the staring contest.

Duras’s oracle about cinema as a power play, her eagerness to spread discord between good and bad films, to drive a wedge between smart and dumb, strong and weak spectators, is lost on me and seems to me to belong to the previous century of film. And yet, those two pages from forty years ago keep haunting me. No doubt because I came across them only recently. The more outdated the more relevant? Duras’s vitriolic, polarising view on the spectator touches on pressing issues, such as: watching films all the way through (in one sitting), the trip to the cinema (with or without a mask), the (forced) longing for what is known and familiar, the (open) rejection of what is unseen and strange, the loneliness of screen users (quarantined or otherwise). And, most certainly, the need for connective criticism.

• 1“Ce que j’appelle ‘le spectateur premier’, c’est là-dessus que j’ai écrit quelque chose, ce matin: le plus infantile, le mineur du cinéma, celui-là, il reste dans sa zone, il est autistique, il recherche les violences de l’enfance, la peur de l’enfance, et il n’y a rien à faire pour le faire bouger.” Duras/Godard Dialogues (Paris: Post-éditions, 2014) 30-31.
• 2Marguerite Duras, “Les yeux verts,” Cahiers du Cinéma 312-313 (1980): 11-13.
• 3Marguerite Duras, Green Eyes, trans. Carol Barko (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 12.