Marguerite Duras

In this most talky and personal of films, director Marguerite Duras and actor Gerard Depardieu do an on-camera read-through of a movie script. Occasionally, the director comments about the characters or their motivations, and sometimes the actor does. That's all -- there is no action, there are no location shots, no one pretends to be anything else. The script itself tells about an encounter between a blank-slate of a woman hitchhiker, and a communist truck driver. As the reading progresses, Duras comments bitterly about the failed ideals of communism and the glorious revolution that will probably never happen.

A documentary, originally produced in 1966 for the French TV series "Pour le plaisir," about Robert Bresson's film "Au Hasard Balthazar," featuring interviews and discussions with Bresson, Jean-Luc Godard, Louis Malle, Marguerite Duras and others.

Duras narrates a short story while the camera travels through the streets of Paris with short interludes of solemn music.

She was the sort of woman who spared neither herself nor others—and arguably qualifies as 20th-century France’s greatest femme de lettres. In this interview, the late novelist and filmmaker talks openly about the hardship and the romance of her childhood in French Indochina, sharing how this period haunted her life and shaped her work. Excerpts from her films and readings from her books by actress Elizabeth Rider and Duras herself—including The Lover, winner of the Prix Goncourt and translated into more than forty languages—bring to life those formative years in Vietnam.

A documentary about filmmaker Marguerite Duras.

TV series directed by Varda in which she gives thoughts to her favorite images and why she is drawn to them (in short one minute segments per image)

Marguerite Duras tells the story of the death of a young English aviator in a French village.

When Duras saw 'La mort du jeune aviateur anglais', she told Benoît Jacquot that the film was about him, not her. "She treated me like a thief. So I offered to make another film, where she could say whatever she wanted about her life as a writer. That’s how we did Écrire. I brought the same film crew. We went to her house at Neauphle-le-Château and we set up in the room she called 'the music room,' where there was a piano and you could listen to records. She settled in and for two days of non-stop filming, she talked."

On June 3, 1991, Marguerite Duras gave me her last published work, "The North China Lover", autographed for the first time. She wrote: "For my friend Dominique Auvray, in memory of a wonder of wonders: a still recent past, when we worked together in the cinema". This is a portrait of her as she was cheerful and serious, authentic and provocative, considerate and categorical, but first and foremost young and free.

In 1937 Calcutta, the wife of the French ambassador takes on many lovers.

This afterword to India Song (Duras' celebrated 1975 film) is organized in several parts. It begins with an interview to Marguerite Duras by Dominique Noguez, an expert in her work; the interview links the film to the two movies whom it's related to: The Ravishment of Lol V. Stein and The Vice-Consul. Several themes are tackled: childhood, autobiographical traces, relationships between differents characters and different films and more. India Song's main actors — Delphine Seyrig and Michael Lonsdale, who played Anne-Marie Stretter and the French vice-consul — join the conversation and talk about their roles and their craft. Marguerite Duras then evokes her memories of the shooting with the composer Carlos D'Alessio and her camera operato Bruno Nuytten. The conversations are punctuated by clips of the film.

When everything was ready for my death, I began to write of what I know precisely, which you’ve never understood, knowing you would never understand … I have made a film out of your absence.

Each night in Paris, hundreds of men and women anonymously use telephone lines that date from the German Occupation and are no longer listed to talk to each other, to love each other. These people, shipwrecked lovers, are dying to love, to escape the abyss of solitude.

A man and his sister meet at a seaside village to discuss their relationship.

40 years of "Apostrophes". Hours and historical meetings, Pierre Assouline has composed an anthology of the best extracts presented in the form of a primer, which he had commented on by a surprised Bernard Pivot.

About the Gabriel Matzneff affair and pedophilia in French culture and society from the 1950s to the present day. "It was not very difficult to know who Matzneff was at the time." Vanessa Springora denounces thus, in an interview with the Parisian , the support which benefited the writer Gabriel Matzneff , in the years 1970 and 1980. The author fifties then maintains an affair with the young girl, aged 14 years. A relationship under control that the editor tells in Le Consentement (éd. Grasset), published Thursday. "After having analyzed the work " , the Paris public prosecutor's office announced Friday January 3 the opening of an investigation for "rapes committed on the person of a minor of 15 years".

Luc Lagier puts Alain Resnais' film back in its historical context and in the filmmaker's biography. He tells the story, then the development of what was originally intended to be a short documentary film and which turned into an unusual allegory. Composed of fascinating archives, including notably the correspondence between Duras and Resnais, this analysis of 'Hiroshima mon amour' manages to put the film in perspective while detaching itself from it. A rare and captivating work.

Duras/Godard

Broadcast once a month, Dim Dam Dom was a TV variety show on the second channel of French public television agency ORTF made up of a series of short sequences presented by one–off guest presenters. On the 30th of April 1965, Marguerite Duras interviewed François, a little seven-year old boy. Duras asked him what he thought about the inventions of the future, school, the usefulness of TV, "Belphégor" and talking horses. Francois answered the writer’s cunning questions with humour, candour and poetry.

Conversation between a woman (Duras) and a man (D. Noguez) about a woman and a man.

In an empty villa, Vera Baxter sits and contemplates her life, as she recounts to a woman who was drawn to the villa when she heard the name Vera Baxter pronounced. Vera tells her about her no-good husband, who has been using her to keep his failing business afloat, up to her present love affair.

An account of the life of actress Jeanne Moreau (1928-2017), a true icon of the New Wave and one of the most idolized French movie stars.

Her whole childhood, Marguerite Duras spent her time moving. Her house in Neauphle-le-Château is the one she has lived in the most, and the one she says: “All the women in my books have lived in this house. All ... ” Duras tells about her house and her garden closely linked to his work, remembers the forest of her childhood and evokes her fear of music.

When French writer Marguerite Duras (1914-96) published her novel The Sea Wall in 1950, she came very close to winning the prestigious Prix Goncourt. Meanwhile, in Indochina, France was suffering its first military defeats in its war against the Việt Minh, the rebel movement for independence.

Report on the young people of the yéyé period and pop music. Jerk at the Palladium, Beatles, press clippings, questions about the impact of fashion (long hair and accoutrements) and modernity, youth, change, freedom.

In the 70s, actress Delphine Seyrig and director Carole Roussopoulos, both militant feminists, were the pioneers of video activism in France. They documented the demonstrations of French feminists and used the new technologies to counter the poor representation of women in the public media.

In this episode of Dim Dam Dom, Duras interviews the stripper Lolo Pigalle. A clip of Lolo dancing in a golden dress is followed by an intense and intimate conversation in which Lolo discusses the definition of work, the splitting of the self, and acting vs. sex work.

Duras interviews an exhausted Jeanne Moreau, addressing her friend as vous, despite the fact "the two were close friends for many years, living in neighbouring houses and cooking for each other from the early ‘60s.

Duras, ever the challenging interviewer, forensically questions a Parisian zookeeper regarding the happiness of the animals in his charge. Intercut with her questions is stark black-and-white footage of the animals themselves behind bars, as they pace the length of their small concrete enclosures. Duras is very much on the side of the big cats. “Are you ever careless?” she asks the zookeeper. When he replies in the negative, Duras says smilingly: “In your position I’d be tempted to be careless”.

During this strange and confrontational interview, Duras takes on France’s only female prison warden. In the women’s verbal wrangling we find reflected many contemporary concerns surrounding the ongoing moral disaster of the prison industrial complex.

Here Duras assumes a more distant role, less an interviewer than an invested documentarian. Her questions precede footage of her main subject, the sixteen-year-old Romain Goupil, recently excluded from the lycée, among his peers and fellow student revolutonaries. After we see them discuss the complexities of their position and deal with internal dissent, Duras asks Romain if he ever forgets how young he is. Romain replies with a grin: “Totally.”

On the occasion of the fourty years anniversary of François Mitterand's election, a look back to the relationship between the President and artists, from admiration to manipulation.

In this interview with Dominique Noguez, Marguerite Duras talks successively about each of her four short films made in 1979: Césarée, Les Mains négatives, Aurélia Steiner (Melbourne), Aurélia Steiner (Vancouver). She touches briefly on the various subjects dealt with: the return to Césarée of Berenice, repudiated for reasons of state, Jewish wandering, the scandal of the camps in the two Aurelia Steiner. Negative Hands as the colonial data of humanity, a film offered to the blacks and Portuguese who clean up Paris before leaving the place. Marguerite Duras also comments, with excerpts, on the various traveling shots that make up the main plot of each of the short films. And the documentary ends with a few words of epilogue: a real pamphlet by Marguerite Duras against dreams, significantly entitled Work and Words.

25 years ago, Marguerite Duras passed away at the age of 81. At the evocation of this name, one spontaneously thinks of the intellectual superstar Duras, adulated or hated, with her big glasses and turtleneck, who received the Goncourt prize for her mythical novel, "L'Amant". But behind the superstar writer, who either fascinates or annoys, and behind his double novel, the young Indochinese girl, with her hair pulled back and lips underlined with lipstick, which is precisely the subject of "L'Amant", are hidden other, perhaps less well-known facets of the character, a writer, but also a filmmaker, journalist, a woman committed to the left, a transient lover or a loving mother. Marguerite Duras will have had 1000 lives in one and many other faces. This film attempts to get as close as possible to this extraordinary destiny.

Marguerite Duras - Écrire

Marguerite Duras still has much to tell us about her words and about her silences. In this film, hers is the only voice we hear. She talks about herself, without excuses, and with the keen wit, the humour, and the straightforward attitude that became her trademark.

A man returns to the place he once lived a passionate love affair with a woman who is now dead. So powerful are the emotions that seize him that he imagines she is still alive, and begins to live as if this were the case...

The full soundtrack to Marguerite Duras' 1975 film India Song, about a French ambassador's wife in 1930s India, is here repurposed with all new cinematography. As we hear all the dialogue of a bygone movie, we travel visually through images of absence and decay, bereft of life. It's the ghost of a film, and a further commentary on colonialism.

Marguerite Duras.is interviewed twice, first in 1984 and then in 1993, on her life and work as a writer and filmmaker.

Based on the letters of a fictitious poetess to her lover. Duras reads extracts from the letters, about the poetess’s Jewish past, while the film shows stark waves beating against the seashore. – BFI

Documentary on famous writer Marguerite Duras and her paradoxical relation to the seventh art by her former film editor.

In May 1974, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing became President of the Republic and wanted to bring about a new era of modernity. One of his first decisions was to break up the ORTF with the creation of three new television channels: TF1, Antenne 2 and FR3. Three new public channels but autonomous and competing. It is a race for the audience which is engaged then, and from now on the channels will make the war! This competition will give birth to a real golden age for television programs, with variety shows in the forefront. The stars of the song are going to invade the living rooms of the French for their biggest pleasure. This unedited documentary tells the story of the metamorphosis of this television of the early 1970s, between freedom of tone, scandals, political intrigues and programs that have become mythical.

Savannah Bay c’est toi

With little or no embellishment, filmmaker Marguerite Duras offers a simple, often wordless chronicle of a woman's day. She and her friend are seen doing yard work, talking about their families and receiving the occasional visitor. The brightest spot in the day is when a washing machine salesman comes to call.

Stages a double persona on a music of Monteverdi (Ariadne’s lamento interpreted by Janet Baker).

In 2016, French writer and photographer Carole Achache took her own life. After Carole's death, her daughter Mona Achache, a film director, discovers thousands of photos, letters and recordings that Carole left behind, but these buried secrets make her disappearance even more of an enigma. Through the power of filmmaking and the beauty of incarnation with the help of actress Marion Cotillard, the director brings her mother back to life to retrace her journey and find out who she really was.

Dim Dam Dom

Apostrophes was a live, weekly, literary, prime-time, talk show on French television created and hosted by Bernard Pivot. It ran for fifteen years (724 episodes) from January 10, 1975, to June 22, 1990, and was one of the most watched shows on French television (around 6 million regular viewers). It was broadcast on Friday nights on the channel France 2 (which was called "Antenne 2" from 1975 to 1992). The hourlong show was devoted to books, authors and literature. The format varied between one-on-one interviews with a single author and open discussions between four or five authors.

Spécial cinéma