Exposition marguerite duras biography book
•
Marguerite Duras
Marguerite Duras (Gia Định, 1914 – Paris, 1996) was one of the most influential European writers and filmmakers of the second half of the 20th century. The author of fifty-six books—including novels, journalistic writings and theatre plays—nineteen films and a dozen or so screenplays, Duras remains not only a cult figure but also, above all in France, a true popular icon.
Each of the nine rooms in this exhibition includes films that offer an insight into Marguerite Duras’s experimental spirit and uncanny flair for forging new semantic links between image and text.
The first room explores how the writer portrayed life in French Indochina along the southern border of Vietnam between 1914 and 1933, based on her experience of growing up as a member of the privileged, white ruling class while corrupt colonial authorities exploited the local population under a barely disguised regime of slavery. This section includes Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub’
•
The Durassian Mysteries: On Marguerite Duras’s “Me & Other Writing”
Natasha Boyd reviews Marguerite Duras’s “Me & Other Writing,” out now from Dorothy, a publishing project.
Me & Other Writing bygd Marguerite Duras. , 2019. 204 pages.
MARGUERITE DURAS never went out to måltid. She believes that to love everyone as the Christians proclaim is a joke; that publication fryst vatten prostitution; that God’s absence is “irreplaceable and magnificent”; that she is unworthy of what she has discovered in cinema and will be long dead before the audience understands it either; that making art will not in the least help you live; that women have a real wildness in them while men, though she loves them more, are plagiarists sick with masculinity; that suicide fryst vatten idiotic for attributing meaning to life; and that “all the world’s masterpieces should have been funnen by children in public landfills and read secretly unbeknownst to their parents and teachers.”
Sometimes she believes in al
•
Exposition is the first in a triptych of books by the award-winning writer and archivist Nathalie Léger that includes Suite for Barbara Loden and The White Dress. In each, Léger sets the story of a female artist against the background of her own life and research—an archivist’s journey into the self, into the lives that history hides from us. Here, Léger’s subject is the Countess of Castiglione (1837–1899), who at the dawn of photography dedicated herself to becoming the most photographed woman in the world, modeling for hundreds of photos, including “Scherzo di Follia,” among the most famous in history. Set long before our own “selfie” age, Exposition is a remarkably modern investigation into the curses of beauty, fame, vanity, and age, as well as the obsessive drive to control and commodify one’s image.
Read an excerpt at Literary Hub. Read Amanda DeMarco on translating Exposition at The Paris Review. Read an interview with Nathalie Léger at BOMB.
*
“In Lé