Marguerite Duras

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.

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Jean-Luc Godard is synonymous with cinema. With the release of Breathless in 1960, he established himself overnight as a cinematic rebel and symbol for the era's progressive and anti-war youth. Sixty-two years and 140 films later, Godard is among the most renowned artists of all time, taught in every film school yet still shrouded in mystery. One of the founders of the French New Wave, political agitator, revolutionary misanthrope, film theorist and critic, the list of his descriptors goes on and on. Godard Cinema offers an opportunity for film lovers to look back at his career and the subjects and themes that obsessed him, while paying tribute to the ineffable essence of the most revered French director of all time.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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".

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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.

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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.

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

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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.

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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.

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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."

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

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

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On December 2, 1987, the filmmaker visited the novelist at her home in Paris. This meeting gave rise to this hour-long documentary in which JLG and Marguerite Duras attempt to establish a dialogue about artistic creation.

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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.

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

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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.

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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.

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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)

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A woman watches and speaks to a man as he moves through a house by the sea. She observes his presence and tracks his shifting distance from her.

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

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A documentary about filmmaker Marguerite Duras.

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‘Mulher a Mulher’ is a Portuguese TV show dedicated to the condition of women that aims to demystify gender prejudice. Its last programme looks at the literary and cinematographic work of Marguerite Duras (writer, playwright and film director) with an interview conducted by writer Yann Lemée and provided by the Centro Nacional de Cultura, in Lisbon.

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Le Navire Night is a story of love and desire sustained and nourished through sound waves. The film’s voice-over tells the story of a woman, terminally ill with leukemia, living in isolation at her wealthy father's villa, and a man working night shifts at a telephone company. They have never met in person.

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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

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On images of the Tuileries Gardens, Marguerite Duras recalls Césarée, an ancient destroyed city.

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Traces a slow advance through Paris in the early hours of the morning. The deserted boulevards of Paris are punctuated by interspersed groups of dark-skinned workers, stray prostitutes and vagabonds.

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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.

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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.

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

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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.

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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.

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It’s summer, the heat is overwhelming and the weather is out of whack. A group of friends are enjoying their yearly holiday in their favorite little village, wedged between the sea and the mountains. As usual, they are bored and eat and drink a lot. They do not pay attention to the fire which progresses on the mountain nearby, nor to the world around them. But this year, a mysterious man arrives from the sea and shakes up their seemingly balanced existence...

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Ernesto, a seven-year-old boy who has the body of a thirty-year-old man, decides, upon attending his first day of school, that he no longer wishes to attend, because he does not wish to be taught matters that he does not know.

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'The subject of this film is the conversation between a man and a woman. A couple, maybe lovers, maybe married, it doesn't matter. (...) During this conversation, we do not see but the city of Rome. I wanted to transmit that what Rome provokes in me, the feeling of an intrinsic matter, indissoluble, in difference with Paris, made of small parks and open spaces, crossed by the sky and the wind. Hand in hand with the film, the difficulty of the two lovers assumes a clearer, more explicit form. But as much as, in my opinion, it is impossible to describe and film Rome, the difficulty in the love of a couple can never be totally understood.' - Marguerite Duras, Venice film festival catalogue, 1982.

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A woman watches and speaks to a man as he moves through a house by the sea. She observes his presence and tracks his shifting distance from her.

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

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Ten years after their first meeting, John Marcher and May Bartram meet again in the magnificent Weatherend estate, but, as the first time, John's certainty of being doomed to a tragic fate hinders the feelings they have for each other.

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Le Navire Night is a story of love and desire sustained and nourished through sound waves. The film’s voice-over tells the story of a woman, terminally ill with leukemia, living in isolation at her wealthy father's villa, and a man working night shifts at a telephone company. They have never met in person.

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Based on the letters of a fictitious poetess to her lover. Duras reads extracts from these letters, as the film shows a boat journey down the Seine, past familiar bridges and landmarks. – BFI

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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

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On images of the Tuileries Gardens, Marguerite Duras recalls Césarée, an ancient destroyed city.

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Traces a slow advance through Paris in the early hours of the morning. The deserted boulevards of Paris are punctuated by interspersed groups of dark-skinned workers, stray prostitutes and vagabonds.

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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.

Open details →

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.

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An old lady returns from Africa where she made a fortune to find her son in Paris, whom she has not seen in five years, with the intention of bringing him back with her. But this project fails.

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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.

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Anne-Marie Stretter, the wife of a French diplomat in 1930s India, takes many lovers to relieve the boredom in her life.

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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...

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The whole film takes place in a single room where representatives of the two political forces and their enemy "the Jew" are gathered. A female character establishes the dialogue between these individuals and comments on the ideology of each; Until the final scene where everyone seems to rally to a common idea.

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In a secluded hotel circumscribed by a dense forest Max and Alissa Thor meet Stein and Elisabeth. Max, a professor of future history and an aspiring author, is immediately attracted to the brooding wife of industrialist Bernard Alione, Elisabeth, who is recovering from a miscarriage. Stein, a German Jew and potential writer, is infatuated by Alissa, Max's young wife and former student. During their sojourn the guests' identities gradually meld.

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A young woman, who works as a maid for a living, takes her charge out to play in a Parisian garden square. Sitting on a bench, she starts talking to a stranger, a travelling salesman, and their conversation gradually turns into an exchange of confidences.

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A husband and wife meet three years after their formal separation, when they return to the provincial town where they once lived to pick up their divorce decree.

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A frail old woman meets a middle-aged man - her estranged son, whom she hasn't seen for five years.

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A female traveling companion seduces a married man and his alcoholic wife.

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Drama of an unmarried mother who regrets having had her child fostered and fights its foster parents to have it restored to her.

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A sexually repressed school teacher releases her pent up passions in a series of shocking crimes.

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The movie "L'instant de la paix" consists of three segments: 1. "Les rideaux blancs" (France) 2. "Berlin N 65" (West Germany) 3. "Matura" (Poland)

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An anthology series of television plays which aired on BBC1 from October 1964 to May 1970. The plays were usually written for television, although adaptations from other sources also featured.

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Franck and Hélène meet in Deauville and decide to get married instantly. A year passes. Their conversation, over the seasons, questions their love as it's put to the test.

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Marin Karmitz's avant-garde short film is a haunting tale about an alcoholic novelist facing a crippling case of writer's block.

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Two lonely people meet on a park bench and talk about their lives.

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Therese, a café owner, mourns the mysterious disappearance of her husband sixteen years earlier. A tramp arrives in the town and she believes him to be her husband. But he is suffering from amnesia and she tries to bring back his memory of earlier times.

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Anne Desbarèdes is a young woman who is married to a wealthy businessman and lives a monotonous existence in the small commune town of Blaye. After indirectly witnessing a murder in a café, she returns to the scene of the crime the next day and meets Chauvin, who informs her in more detail about the events that took place. Mentally unbalanced, Anne begins to believe that Chauvin intends to kill her.

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The deep conversation between a Japanese architect and a French actress forms the basis of this celebrated French film, considered one of the vanguard productions of the French New Wave. Set in Hiroshima after the end of World War II, the couple -- lovers turned friends -- recount, over many hours, previous romances and life experiences. The two intertwine their stories about the past with pondering the devastation wrought by the atomic bomb dropped on the city.

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