Desire in Duras

Abstract

The thesis will research the ways Marguerite Duras, one of the most controversial and fruitful female writers and filmmakers of the twentieth century, employs certain elements of film language in order to expose complex inner landscape of her female characters, thus creating distinctive poetics that evokes her écriture féminine. Deriving from nouveau roman, a movement in French literature that questioned traditional modes of literary realism, Duras approached film medium in her own courageous way, deconstructing plot, fragmenting time through total separation of audio and image, using silence, repetition and absence as particular poetical elements. Comparing films Duras wrote and directed herself to the adaptations of her work done by male directors, the thesis will demonstrate how experimentation in film language was crucial in order to portray the elusiveness of female desire that was such a principal preoccupation of Marguerite Duras. Equivalent to Lacan’s definition of desire and poststructuralist feminism, where desire is perceived as a state of eternal unfulfillment inevitably marked by melancholy, Duras’s oeuvre is marked by contrasting principles of thematic continuity and formal discontinuity, with the emphasis on sensuality of image rather than its interpretive attainability, thus treating desire from inwards, as inscribed in text and image, in oppose to mere descriptions. Heavily under the influence of her earliest love affair, Duras moulded her autobiography into the tissue of her work, blurring the line between fiction and reality, presence and memory, love and longing. Capturing the ineffable on screen by extending the boundaries of cinema as visual medium, Duras exposed female desire in its rawest form, purely feminine, liberated from phallocentric gaze. This thesis will argue that by doing so, Duras empowered women as writers, authors, subjects, and created space for a sincere dialogue about love and sex.