I Make Films to Fill My Time

We are pleased to share this recently translated text from My Cinema, a collection of Marguerite Duras’s writings that offers a window into her unique approach to cinema. In these notes, Duras discusses her innovative use of sound, image, and work with actors in making India Song (1975), one of her most celebrated films. The text not only comments of the film’s treatment of colonialism, emotional estrangement, and desire, but also offers a deeper understanding of Duras’s philosophy of filmmaking that continues to inspire contemporary thinkers and filmmakers. We are grateful to Daniella Shreir, the translator of the book, and Another Gaze Editions for their collaboration in bringing this text to e-flux Film Notes’ readers.1

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I make films to fill my time. If I had the strength to do nothing, I would do nothing. It is only because I haven’t the strength to do nothing that I make films. For no other reason. This is the truest thing I can say about my practice.

I am publishing the shooting script of the first part of India Song without the dialogue spoken by the Voices. I imagine that only those who will have seen the film, and would like to ‘see’ it again, will have any desire to read this. It seems to me that a simultaneous reading of image and sound would disturb the afterlife of the film, the memory of it. Besides, the texts spoken by the Voices in this first part have been brought over from the book, so whoever wishes to can find them there. This isn’t the case for the texts in the second part of the film, which were written in a different way, and which are, for the most part, entirely new.

This is the shooting script from which we worked and shot the film. As you can see, it includes very little in the way of technical direction. Some will find it too vague, too ‘writerly’. I have never been able to write a purely technical script. I always write them for their readers, which is what technicians are. Why prevent them from accessing the very meaning of my project? Why obstruct the path that leads to their integration into the film?

And then it has always seemed fairly useless to draft the technical side of things in advance. The shot is the way it is as it is conceived in the moment. The size, the light, the framing of a shot—these things are the shot. Of course, the filmmaker arrives on set with a mental outline of their film. No matter how perfect or how precise the shooting script is, it can never fully translate what the filmmaker sees. Only the articulation of the project’s meaning as a whole and, with every shot, a reminder of this meaning—expressing how the fragment links to the whole, is the whole—can begin to bring about this translation. The technical side of things will enact this second translation of the film’s essential meaning, and most of the time it will happen organically.

During the rehearsals of India Song, the text spoken by the Voices and the guests—as well as the texts that describe the shot itself (‘He enters, he looks around, he would like to see her’, etc.)—were read aloud and recorded. When necessary, a second tape player took care of the music. And, when the camera began to roll, this oral script was unleashed in its entirety.

The shots were long and, of course, we had to be precise in our placement of words within them. But there were other reasons for this, too. On the one hand, the actors (and the camera) had to be able to access the meaning of the shots at the very moment they would be responsible for making this meaning appear, for expressing it. On the other, the meaning also had to appear and be expressed beyond the camera, beyond the actors. Done over there, expressed over there, and said here. So that expression would partially escape them. For example, if in the oral script the Voices said, ‘A-M Stretter enters the private room, looks at the grounds’, Delphine Seyrig would enter, would look at the grounds. She would be listening to what she was said to be doing at the same time as she was doing it. So she would enter to a lesser extent, look at the park to a lesser extent: because, on the other hand, she would be listening to a greater extent. Words were responsible for the lesser expression of her entrance and her gaze, but so was she, and both were responsible at exactly the same time. Initially, these words, this oral script, were going to disappear in the edit, with Delphine remaining alone to perform her entrance and train her gaze on the grounds. All the same, Delphine’s distraction, due to this embodied form of listening, remained in the film. In my view, this distraction, this subordination to language was the only thing that could be expressed in India Song: that is, an awareness of meaning. At that moment, Delphine would hear it being said that a woman enters and looks at the grounds, and so, without specifying that it was her, the field of language allowed her to feel and express the generality of the term: a woman.

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When I speak, I draw attention to the act of speech. When I say ‘an understanding of meaning’, I mean an understanding of words. And when I say ‘an awareness of meaning’, I am talking about a meaning that cannot be reduced, but to which one must nonetheless stay close.

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When I talk about the meaning of a shot, I am trying to talk about its direction, about the direction the shot takes by virtue of the one that came before it, and about the meaning it takes on when it is itself overtaken by another shot. Nothing else. The overall meaning of a film, I believe, is at once the invariability of this movement and the way its intensity rises and falls with the passing of each shot. And, of course, the realisation of its ending, too: breaking off the flow here, in the film, but not letting it dry up over there, once the film has come to an end. No: delivering it to the world. A river that can be harnessed and then delivered to the waters of the world. And that this delivery is seen, is read, inside of the film. That Calcutta, led out from its shelter, takes its place outside of the film again, in the open air. And that the same goes for death. For silence.

The understanding the camera operators had of the film’s meaning (a meaning far deeper than one that would have been informed by any amount of technical directions provided by the filmmaker) undoubtedly gave it its own ‘step’, its own unity of movement, of light, of breath, of body. And it was the same for the actors who merged with this body and moulded themselves to it. During the shoot, I saw all the actors of India Song become of the same nature. I saw them distanced from themselves by the same amount of distance, removed from themselves at the same remove, held back, all humble with the same humility. As if they were all similarly attached to the knowledge of that which they would be entrusted to express, if this were in fact expressible; as if they were in another place from where they actually were—in an ideal place where meaning would be reducible to a substance they could play with, for example. Or, if you like, in the ideal place of language, a place which has still barely begun to be uncovered. By which I mean: cinema.

In this film I see the actors here absent—yes, absent, and therefore returned to themselves, cleaned of the self-regard that in general envelops the acting of a movie star, and which deprives the viewer of the chance of glimpsing these stars at the other side of themselves, in the midst of discovering their function. I see their absence as parallel to our own as we watch them in the film. And so, with the star and the viewer made distant in the same way, the two finally meet.

I believe that the strange tenderness—alive, lasting—that binds me to these actors who performed in India Song must also come from the lack of self-regard with which they performed it.

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As for the second part of India Song—meaning the reception at the French embassy—I will publish only the texts and dialogues without the shooting script: the converse of what I have done for the first part. But, as I have been asked to do so, I will publish the shooting script for two of the shots, so that the first and final scripts can be compared. The most recent being that which, for the most part, was shot, and then the oldest, so that one will be able to judge the thinning that is effected by the time (and, I believe, only time) that separates a project from its shooting.

The reception lasts over an hour (sixty-six minutes and thirteen seconds). I see the reception, more than anything else, as an auditory mass that orbits around images that vary only slightly, images that are like anchors that bind this mass to fixed locations, preventing it from drifting into illustration. Here, there is no longer any unfolding narrative, no longer any narrative that follows episodes or chronologies of space and time. I see the reception as a unique event with a unique substance, as if isolated within the film. Here, time must pass, and time must be the only thing that passes. The sixty-six minutes of the reception represent five to six hours that take place between the beginning of the night and the arrival of dawn. Whereas it is my opinion that the twenty-nine minutes of the first part represent the several most recent weeks, the several most recent months, in the everyday life of Anne-Marie Stretter.

It is therefore the sound in this second part that will be the sensory trigger for those who want to ‘see’ the first part again. By sound, I mean the fusion of words and music. In this way, I gesture towards the dance according to which the text develops.

All that which is not visible in the reception has been mapped out in advance, identified. Every departure, every entrance of one of the five people who, alone, ‘create’ this reception for us on the screen, has been reasoned and explained. Before being unleashed, everything had to be made logical and feasible, and yet it was also vital that the apparent disorder of the evening should at no time be seen to be planned as such. On the contrary, everything had to be as clear as if the reception had been filmed in its entirety. For example, when the vice-consul enters the private salon, it has to be obvious that he is there looking for Mme Stretter and that, if he is looking for her there, it is because if she had taken the right direction in the previous shot, then she would have found herself there.

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To speak about the reception in India Song is, for me, to curb an impulse to talk about it.

What we wanted to retain, to distil, of the reception, was the pursuit of Anne-Marie Stretter, the fact of her being hunted by the vice-consul of Lahore, by the bearer of that feminine trope, meaning death. This pursuit should have led to the final reconciliation between him and her at the end of the night: in other words, the mortally convincing expression of the common understanding of the word refusal. To an end point, meaning suicide. A refusal of life in the name of life that encompasses love itself and the diversion of its expression. (‘Love affairs you have with others. We have no need for them,’ says the vice- consul. ‘We haven’t anything to say to each other. We are the same.’) And yet, despite the flurry of the reception, this pursuit should never be lost from sight and must bear upon the apparent disorder with the greatest clarity, without ever becoming submerged in secondary events. To try and obtain this result, we decided that the whole reception should be channelled through a single place to which we gave the name ‘the rectangle’, by which we meant the space—which indeed was rectangular—of the private lounge, with the furniture set up in front of the great mirror, as well as that of its reflected double. This double rectangle was filmed from two positions: one at the gates of the grounds, from which the camera’s gaze was cast into the invisible reception, and another from which it was turned to capture the partition walls of the private apartments that were never penetrated (except, it is true, twice: two shots were filmed in the Chinese living room on the first floor). This double rectangle contained the epicentre of the whole film: the photograph on the piano of the deceased Anne-Marie Stretter, surrounded by the roses and incense that had been placed there in her memory, assembled as a kind of altar. This altar was always meant to be perceived as clutter, as something in the way, and, of course, something that cast doubt over everything that was happening in the rectangle around it. The whole film was shot—the film was able to be shot—because the story of this woman had been suspended by death, with the altar there as a constant reminder of this fact. It was therefore the altar of pain. Of my pain, too. The source of my pain was present there, at the epicentre of the film.

Through this place of doubt—meaning the almost immutable image of the rectangle—the five people delegated to ‘hold together’ the reception move amid the distant sounds of the others: the voices of the guests, music, dances, conversations, the screams of the madman of Lahore. In this interior place, the story is discussed in the present tense (‘He looks’, ‘they dance’, ‘he makes his way toward’), whereas, in the places that we have called the counterparts of the inside shots—when, for example, the camera glides over the destroyed facades of the Palais Rothschild—what is talked about is talked about in the past (‘We had always talked about her..’, ‘Perhaps she will have made music behind these walls..’) The interior space is populated with regular comings and goings before, no less regularly, it empties out again, once again becoming the space of the altar— that of the relative death of the place, fresh death. The flowers appear again but this time in full bloom, and someone comes to burn the incense. Whereas, in the counterparts of the inside shots (with the exception of the shots of the tennis courts), there is no longer any kind of coming or going—not even of the actors. They are uninhabitable, uninhabited, emptied out once and for all by time, the swallowing up of everything by death.

For these outside shots, too, we hardly varied the image that is eternally plunged into the dark of night. Here, the skin of the image is the voice of Viviane Forrester, a skin that covers the facades of the Palais Rothschild with slowly spoken pieces of text, chronicle-like accounts of the reception that has just been abandoned, as well as the Calcutta of this woman. Chronicles that speak of a before, now that something can be said about it.

It was between April and June of 1974, between drafts of two shooting scripts, that we decided to get rid of all of the secondary characters at the reception. Then, in turn, we abandoned the appearance of the characters of George Crawn and the ambassador. George Crawn appears once more, much later on, at dawn; the ambassador, never again. The last character we abandoned was that of the ‘femme en noir’ , the woman in black.2 Niki de Saint Phalle refused the role and so we had her replaced by three photos of another woman, taken by Edouard Boubat after the war.3

Once this decision had been taken, there was no question of going back on it. All of the abandoned characters became superfluous: from then on, if we’d put them back into the film they would have overcrowded it, and, this time, the congestion would have felt artificial. And we discovered that all we had considered to be self-evident at the beginning of the process had, in fact, only come from habit, from compulsion, and that extras would only have had the function of furnishing the space (whereas we wanted it free), and of making people believe in the reality of Calcutta and Lahore (while it was her, this woman from Venice, and him, the vice-consul, who were Calcutta and Lahore). By enlisting two or ten chaperones we would have been evading the essential functions of this man and this woman. Therefore, that which wasn’t indispensable immediately became useless, thus false.

She is Calcutta. Yes. And there, with her, is the rambling of the beggarwoman, the Laos song that runs through her. There is also the stagnating fan, the sweat on her naked body, the birds and the dogs. Nothing else, I think. He, by himself, is Lahore. We see nothing of Lahore but him.

Yes, these secondary roles were meant to shape the Lahore of which we would see nothing—not the balcony in front of the Shalimar gardens, not the beggarwoman, nor the other guests. The voice-over was enough. Only that which is indispensable was to remain in the image. Her, Anne-Marie Stretter; him, the vice-consul of Lahore; this other lover, Michael Richardson; and these two young people: the young attaché and the young guest, with these two meaning witnesses, meaning us. And, like us, those two young people aren’t linked to her in any way: neither in the present, nor in the past. Like us, they are uninformed and discover this story, or rather, look at her, following her with their eyes.

I tried to clear the space, so that the naked geometry of the pursuit I evoked earlier could be inscribed there. And to do so in such a way that the spectator had only that to look at, nothing else, and that, if he refused to do so, it could only be in the form of a complete, flawless refusal: one that would have a bearing on the film itself. Of this I am certain: that if one decides to flee, one must flee everything. I avoided these ‘pick-up’ shots like the cinematographic plague. No, you can’t mix genres. But, even when one puts the past behind oneself, it is still difficult to extract, to depopulate, to unbuild. When you do manage to do so, it can be called progress. If I didn’t believe that this could be achieved sometimes, I would never make another film.

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I wrote somewhere, in one of the first notes I made about the film: ‘India Song will be constructed first and foremost through sound, and then through light.’ I was already en route, then, to my project of depopulation, and this from the very beginning.

After the depopulation of the space around them, there was still a problem concerning the speech of the five remaining people. The two long conversations between Anne-Marie Stretter and the young attaché on the one hand, and between her and the vice-consul on the other. I wanted them to be seen within this rectangle. I wanted the merging of bodies to be seen, and this could only take place when they were dancing and speaking in our presence (whereas, in the book, these dances and conversations take place beyond the margins of the page). At the same time, I couldn’t stand the idea of these conversations going against the fundamental role of doubt in the film. At no moment did I want this story to be ‘relived’ and to bring about a form of identification between the people on the screen, these actors and these other people from Calcutta. At no moment, not even over the course of a few minutes. What was supposed to have been said by these people during these conversations had to be restated, but in the presence of the concrete sign of their death. Likewise, what was supposed to have been seen had to be seen again, but in the presence of the photograph of the dead woman. And I found these mouths closed. They are speaking, yes, but their lips are sealed.

Once this decision had been taken, just as with the extras, it was impossible to go back. They are listening to their own voices, but the pronunciation, the utterance of these words, does not take place.

India Song is perhaps, yes, the defeat of any form of recovery. If India Song succeeds on any level, it can only be as the realisation of a failed project. This result fills me with hope. Here, that which might usually be called tragic is not tragic: neither on the level of the substance of the story that is being told, nor according to the genre to which it might correspond according to conventional forms of classification. What might be said to be tragic is inherent to the place from which this story is told: by which I mean the reciprocal presence of the destruction of the story—both by death and a lapse of memory—and of this love which, despite its destruction, continues to proliferate. As if the only memory of the story were the love that leaked from a dried-up body riddled with holes. The terrain of this story is this contradiction, this rupture. The mise en scène of this story, the only possible story, is that of the incessant movement of our despair between this love and that body: the very prevention of any form of narrative.

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One final remark: there is no place here for fools who speak of her, of Calcutta, nor any place for mockery. In any case, this would have served no purpose. Why? There was also no use in piling up extras on the stage of the image. Only those who believe they are informed and who thereby come to know something remain, alongside those who believe they are informed and who really know something. Nobody possesses a complete form of knowledge. Nobody is entirely ignorant. But everyone knows that they cannot know everything. It is with this baggage, riddled with holes, and with an essential and permanent fear of lies, that I tried to trace the filmed proposition that is India Song.

[Source: ‘Notes sur India Song’, Marguerite Duras, Albatros, 1975, pp. 14-22]