Cambodia was a recurring motif in the work of French writer Marguerite Duras
The French author and filmmaker Marguerite Duras was 20 years old when she left Cambodia in 1934. Born in Saigon, she and her family had moved, after her father’s death, to a farm west of the provincial capital in Kampot province. But every crop Duras’ family tried to grow on their parcel of land was destroyed by salt water flooding from what was then known as the Gulf of Siam.
Ms Duras, who died in 1996, would never return to Asia. And yet, the novel “Un Barrage contre le Pacifique” (The Sea Wall) that launched her career in 1950 would be about her mother’s despair and anger at the French colonial officials who had sold her that plot of worthless land near Kampot.
Three decades later, her book “L’Amant” (The Lover) about an adolescent girl in Saigon having an affair with the son of a rich Chinese merchant would turn her into a household name in France and earn her one of the country’s most prestigious literary awards, the Goncourt prize.
Starting today, the Bophana Audiovisual Resource Center in Phnom Penh is holding a retrospective of Ms Duras’ films to end Saturday with a conference on her work, which in its entirety includes around 50 books, seven stage adaptations and 10 films she personally directed.
For the French, said Gaetan Crespel of the Bophana Center, “she is synonymous with Indochina. One cannot refer to Marguerite Duras without taking into account her childhood in Indochina.”
Although every mention of France’s colonial project known as Indochina tends to evoke romance for French people, Ms Duras’ works focus on reality, complete with French officials’ corruption, rather than present an idealized vision of the period, he said.
The film retrospective starts tonight with Ms Duras’ 1975 film “India Song,” which is considered her masterpiece, Mr Crespel said.
This will be followed on Wednesday by “Les Enfants” (The Children), which earned Ms Duras several awards in 1984, and on Thursday with three shorts—”Cesaree,” “Les Mains negatives,” or negative hands, and “Aurelia Steiner (Vancouver).”
The retrospective will end on Saturday with a conference at 4 pm by Marie-Pierre Fernandes on the situation of women and their everyday concerns as expressed in Ms Duras’s work. Ms Fernandes said she hopes this will turn into a debate extending to Cambodian women’s lives. She will also briefly introduce the films before each screening during the week.
A theater director by profession, Ms Fernandes assisted Ms Duras in the mid-1980s on three plays the author had decided to direct.
Ms Fernandes became truly involved with Ms Duras’ productions by the simple expedient of a phone call, she said. “She phoned me and said, ‘We’re doing this work: come over.’ And ‘come over’ was her way of saying ‘I’m hiring you as my assistant.’ That’s how it was.”
“Ms Duras was in a constant creative state even though this did not reflect in her way of dealing with others: she always conveyed familiarity, a presence,” Ms Fernandes said.
Although she wrote books and made films that had nothing to do with Asia, Ms Duras’ time in Cambodia permeated her work, Ms Fernandes said. “All this atmosphere, this context, this universe: heat, dust, vegetation, light” influenced her way to see and perceive reality, she said.
In fact, her idea of reality was fundamentally personal, Ms Fernandes said.
“It was not a matter of transcribing reality but of transforming it: in other words to catch this famous ‘internal shadow,’” as Ms Duras described the subconscious mind, Ms Fernandes said.
And yet, Ms Duras remained fully aware of the material side of life such as one’s home or everyday cooking, and even wrote the book “Practicalities” in the mid 1980s on women’s relations with daily life, Ms Fernandes said.
Always searching and creating, Ms Duras rarely put an end to a work, and could write sequels to a book 10 or 20 years later.
For example, in “The Sea Wall,” one character is a Cambodian woman who entrusts her child to the French mother.
About 15 years later in “The Vice Consul,” this Cambodian woman reappears.
In the book, “Ms Duras speaks at length of that beggar woman’s wanderings around the Tonle Sap lake and in Battambang” province, Ms Fernandes said.
In fact when Ms Duras wrote “The Lover” in 1984, “she was revisiting her childhood,” Ms Fernandes said. “This is when her public figure conquered a much larger and totally popular readership.”
In interviews about her life, Ms Duras spoke candidly, discussing her bout with alcoholism and, Ms Fernandes said, “she won the masses.”
Among other works that brought her fame was her script for the 1959 Alain Renais masterpiece “Hiroshima Mon Amour,” or Hiroshima my love, which earned her an Oscar nomination.
The retrospective at the Bophana Center is organized with the permission of her son Jean Mascolo, Mr Crespel said.
Though the films are in French, the experimental techniques employed in the works warrant seeing them even if one cannot understand the language, Mr Crespel added.
