April 4, 1914

Marguerite Duras , (April 4, 1914 to March 3, 1996), was a French writer and is also remembered for the films she directed. She did for instance the screen play for Hiroshima Mon Amour, said to have been part of the beginning of  La Nouveau Roman movement in the western world.

Here is an excerpt from a short experimental film, an example of her work. (I couldn't get it to load, but I think that is my computer.)

Her accompanying text says:

'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.'

This analysis accompanies the excerpt:

'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.'

A brief glimpse of her life is below, excerpted from the London Review of Books, a scene set by interviewer, Joanna Biggs:

'To interview Marguerite Duras, you had to speak Duras. ‘Durassien’ stood, then and now, for inscrutability. Her novels consist of a succession of paragraphs entire of themselves; in her plots everything happens at once or nothing happens. Her movies were about giving the viewer as little to see as possible, and all the better if that meant the screen went black for up to half an hour at a time. Everyone knew she drank, that she’d nearly died from it, and that she loved recklessly, and that she refused to be counted as a Nouveau Romancier, or part of the Nouvelle Vague, or an habituée of the Flore, or the Deux Magots, or wherever else it was fashionable to go that season. But she was in the habit of leaving the door of her apartment on the Left Bank open from dawn until dusk. Home, she thought, ought to be open to the outside: to her friends Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot, to Alain Resnais and Delphine Seyrig, to those who simply rang the bell on the rue Saint-Benoît, like the Italian journalist Leopoldina Pallotta della Torre. (It helped that she had brought a hunk of Parmesan; it was noon, the 73-year-old had just got up, and there was nothing to eat in the house.) Pallotta della Torre came on commission from La Stampa, and stayed for long afternoons of talk over two years. The result, a book-length interview called La passione sospesa, came out with a tiny Italian press in 1989 ... It now appears in English as Suspended Passion ...and it shows Duras at her most scrutable.

Marguerite Duras is counted as a great writer. She is underestimated.