The Darkroom

by Marguerite Duras, Jean-Luc Nancy (Introduction), Alta Ifland (Translator)

Overview

The Darkroom contains the script for Marguerite Duras' 1977 radically experimental film Le camion (The Truck), as well as four manifesto-like propositions in which Duras protests that most movies "beat the imagination to death" because they "are the same every time they are played." She also accuses the gatekeepers of traditional cinema of treating intelligence as if it were a "class phenomenon" and distinguishes her own approach: a cinema based on ideas and sensory experience.

In the dialogue with Michelle Porte at the end of the book, Duras further describes her filmmaking style, discussing everything from her biography to her critique of Marxism.

Translated by Alta Ifland & Eireene Nealand, and featuring an introduction by Jean-Luc Nancy.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781940625447
Publisher:	Contra Mundum Press
Publication date:	04/04/2021
Pages:	152
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.35(d)

About the Author

French novelist, screenwriter, scenarist, playwright, and film director, internationally known for her screenplays of Hiroshima mon amour (1959) and India Song (1975). The novel L'Amant (1984; The Lover; film, 1992) won the prestigious Prix Goncourt in 1984.

Jean-Luc Nancy (b. 1940) is a French philosopher. He is the Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Chair and a professor of philosophy at The European Graduate School / EGS. While he has written on numerous major European thinkers such as Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, etc., he has also responded to many key twentieth-century French contemporaries, such as Jacques Lacan, Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, and Jacques Derrida. The philosopher's most important topics include: the question of community, the nature of the political, German Romanticism, psychoanalysis, literature, technology, and hermeneutics.

Table of Contents

Jean-Luc Nancy - Introduction: A Passing 0-X

The Darkroom 0-50

Explanatory Texts 52-59

Dialogue with Michelle Porte 60-108

Translators' Note 110-116

Editorial Reviews

"Le camion is . . . uncompromising. [It] lets the text come through but also carries it." - Jean-Luc Godard

"For Duras, this situation [of Le camion] represents our modern condition: en route to who knows where, crossing desolate lands, with no other destination, perhaps, than the end of the world [...]. This text from 1977 is entirely relevant almost half a century later." - Jean-Luc Nancy

From the Publisher