She’s completely mad 
Yes, but she’s alive 
- India Song, 1975

Taking the work and influence of Marguerite Duras as a starting point, eight of today’s most influential voices respond to the life, work, mind and influence of one of cinema’s most iconoclastic geniuses. 

Interventions by Travis Alabanza, Sarah Cleaver, Susanna Davies-Crook, Lizzie Homersham, Juliet Jacques, Savanah Leaf, Jennifer Lewandowska, Golnoosh Nour, Sarah Shin. 

The skill of Duras’ writing to channel the human condition and play with the forms of words is what differentiates her most starkly from her contemporaries. Opaque dialogue and piqued sentences are paired with striking visual tableaux, often with a woman at the apex: waiting, staring, still or dead. A doubling of self and other, or the Lacanian mirror-self, is embedded in screenplays and novels that are strange and compelling, close and distant, at once knowable and incomprehensible. Duras exists in this contradiction, exploiting the space between meaning and language just as she exploits the space between words spoken and sighed, and between lovers pulled together and kept apart. The slippage between “I”, “she”, and “her” followed her like a shadow through her writing up until her final book “C’est Tout”, which she wrote in part to her lover Yann as she sickened and died. 

Love and longing are veins that run through Duras’ vast body of work. Here, writers respond to her rich, desirous lineage of text and image, the dislocation of self and the legacy of a woman who scorched her own path.