My Cinema by Marguerite Duras
From Le cinéma que je fais (P.O.L, 2021), edited by François Bovier and Serge Margel, translated by Daniella Shreir, with a foreword by Alice Blackhurst.
My Cinema is a delightfully designed, chronological assemblage of novelist, filmmaker, and film theorist Marguerite Duras’s reflections on her nineteen films completed between 1966 and 1985. Duras’s frequently caustic, sometimes maddening pronouncements offer much insight into her artistic sovereignty & vulnerabilities. A solo maverick of the first order, Duras was DURAS the way Maria Callas was CALLAS. Another Gaze Editions's wonderful 400-plus page publication conveys and salutes this mercurial character of artistic genius, who was "committed to the extremities of the soul," sublimely contemptuous of the profit-motive, and paradoxically worked at creating a cinema "of no hope" that "mercilessly" sought "to destroy the cinema." — Herbert Pföstl, Book Consultant for the New Museum Store.
This collection of reflections by Marguerite Duras (1914–1996) spans her nineteen films made between 1966 and 1985. It includes non-standard press releases, notes to actors, letters to funders, and short essays on themes like ‘mothers’ and ‘witches’. Additionally, it features significant interviews with filmmakers and critics such as Jacques Rivette, Caroline Champetier, and Jean Narboni. Duras transforms these forms into a unique literature where the boundary between word and image blurs, embodying her paradoxical aim to create a cinema that seeks ‘to destroy the cinema’.
Duras’s work is not limited to her own cinematic endeavors but is informed by global preoccupations. Her encyclopedic associative powers connect readers with diverse subjects like the French Communist Party, hippies, Jews, revolutionary love, madness, and freedom. Her oeuvre, spanning four decades, remains in constant dialogue with contemporary moments and world history, using the audiovisual as a starting point to explore broader themes and ideas.
2023; paperback; 5.35 x 7.95 inches; 405 pages; ISBN: 9781738460908.