http://celinejulie.wordpress.com/2007/05/27/royal-s-brown-interviews-alain-robbe-grillet/
This is Celinejulie’s reply:
Thank you very much for the information about a book by Royal S. Brown.
I saw SLOW MOTION (1980, Jean-Luc Godard) about 8-9 years ago. I can’t remember the scene referring to Marguerite Duras, but what I like very much about this film is the funniest scene in which one character did a funny thing, and the second character would do a funny thing, and the third character would do a funny thing, and go on and on like this.
However, your mentioning of Duras reference in SLOW MOTION reminds me that I read something about this in FILM COMMENT a few years ago. So I searched and found that in FILM COMMENT, Jan-Feb 2002, Godard talked about this in an interview conducted by Jean-Yves Gaillac, Tissy Morgue & Jean-Philippe Guerand. The interview was translated by Alice Lovejoy:
“The interviewer: It reminds me of the scene in “Sauve qui peut (la vie)” when Dutronc announces to his students that Marguerite Duras is in the next room, but we never see her.
Godard: In fact, she really was there, but she did not want to be filmed—perhaps because of her taste for voiceover in her own films. She came in order to be offscreen [laughs].”
I have read from TIME OUT FILM GUIDE that another film which mentions Marguerite Duras is POLYESTER (1981, John Waters), in which there is a huge drive-in billboard saying “NOW SHOWING…THREE MARGUERITE DURAS HITS”, or something like that. I haven’t seen POLYESTER, but I have heard that John Waters like Duras’ films very much.
I think I’m a little bit obsessed with Duras and Robbe-Grillet. Hahaha. But I’m not obsessed enough to find the time to read their novels yet.
In my opinion, I think Duras and Robbe-Grillet represent something ironic in the film history. I think one thing filmmakers should do is to make films which can’t be described by words, films which cannot be replaced by novels. But the filmmakers who seem to achieve this, the filmmakers who seem to really understand the huge potential of cinema are, unexpectedly, the novelists—Duras and Robbe-Grillet.
Talking about writing and filming reminds of what Duras said in the book DURAS BY DURAS (published by City Lights Books, San Francisco, 1987). In an article THE PATH OF JOYFUL DESPAIR, which is an interview with Duras by Claire Devarrieux, Duras said:
“It is when a script is performed that we’re the furthest from the author. Even when I directed my own scripts, it happened to me—except in INDIA SONG. In INDIA SONG the actors proposed characters but didn’t embody them. “Off screen” is still the place of writing. Delphine Seyrig’s fantastic performance in INDIA SONG came about because she never presents herself as someone named Anne-Marie Stretter but as her far-off, contestable double, as if uninhabited, and as if she never regarded this role as an emptiness to be enacted; but on the contrary, as though her reference to the written Anne-Marie Stretter remained intact. As for my other films, some evenings after a shoot, I had the sense I had lost my text. I was in despair. Its undefined virtuality was destroyed, it left its written form to end up as a sort of definitive utterance. To be completely honest, I have always suffered from this transformation, this shattering of the text’s obscurities; it’s because of that I made LE CAMION.”
What I like very much in INDIA SONG is the voiceover in the film. In March, I also made a list of films with interesting use of voiceovers. I would like to post it again here:
http://celinejulie.blogspot.com/2007/03/twisted-dimensions-of-narrativity.html
8.1 INDIA SONG (MARGUERITE DURAS, A+)
8.2 A WALK THROUGH H: THE REINCARNATION OF AN ORNITHOLOGIST (1978. PETER GREENAWAY, A+)
8.3 RUSSIAN ARK (ALEXANDER SOKUROV, A+)
8.4 OUD DEE (2003, SOMPOT CHIDGASORNPONGSE, A+)
8.5 A HALF LIFE OF CARBON 14 (2005, PUNLOP HORHARIN, A+)
8.6 NEWS FROM HOME (1977, CHANTAL AKERMAN, A+)http://www.filmref.com/directors/dirpages/akerman.html
8.7 A PLACE AMONG THE LIVING (2004, RAOUL RUIZ, A)
8.8 LONDON (1994, PATRICK KEILLER)
http://imdb.com/title/tt0110377/
8.9 SANS SOLEIL (1983, CHRIS MARKER)
Below is a photo of TAXANDRIA (1994, Raoul Servais), of which Alain Robbe-Grillet co-wrote the screenplay. The photo is from dvdbeaver.com
http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film/DVDReview3/RaoulServais.htm
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