Duras film: Aurelia Steiner (Melbourne)

Extract from Aurelia Steiner (Melbourne), a film by Marguerite Duras from 1979

It is three o’clock in the afternoon. Behind the trees, there is sun. It is cool.

I am in this big room where I stay in summer, facing the garden. On the other side of the window there is this forest of roses and, since three days, there is this cat, skinny, white, who comes to look at me through the window, his eyes in my eyes.

He frightens me. He cries. He is lost. He wants to belong. And I, I don’t want to any more.

Many of Duras’ later films are made in this way. Voices reading over images that show no direct connection with the text. Images of landscapes, of empty places. Stills or slow panning shots. But while a link in terms of content seems to be missing, there is a strong correlation in rhythm that happens almost unnoticed at first -while we are recovering from the alienation caused by not being able to make sense of the images in connection with the text. There’s a rhythm, the juxtaposition of images and text form a sort of choreography. The images lead your mind in the understanding and appreciation of the text. And the objects in the images become props that stand for objects in the text, and your mind plays with them that way.

This is a very tricky conceit. Many contemporary artists use a similar language and fail to connect with the viewer. I imagine for many Duras fails as well. I remember seeing a film of hers for the first time in a gallery and being somewhat disgusted with what seemed to me as modernist pedantry, being weird for the sake of being weird. But a gallery is a bad place for appreciating this work —the internet is much better.

When I concentrate on the text —not just the words and their meaning but also the flow of the reading, the rhythm of speaking and silence— I feel the film lifting me up and carrying me. There is something immensely soothing about this work, despite of the sometimes painful subject matter. And by the end, I feel like a child being read a bed time story by mother Duras, ignoring the blood on my knee caused by falling off my bike.

To some extent, this soothing quality that I deeply enjoy, reduces my capacity to understand what the writer is talking about. I am lulled into an aesthetic bliss where I don’t care about meaning. It may take me several viewings to realize what the story is about.