THE DARKROOM contains the script for 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. Much of the film consists of the sounds and images of a truck rumbling through an industrial landscape dotted with dilapidated, immigrant shantytowns. Periodically, the images of the truck are interrupted by cutaways of Duras and Gérard Depardieu sitting in Duras' living room, reading from a script that includes a dialogue between a staunchly communist truck driver and an anonymous, ethnically-unidentifiable woman who stands in as an alter-ego for Duras and at the same time is a substitute for "everyone." Neither of the characters are ever shown on-screen. Via an afterimage effect, the juxtaposed voice-over text and cutaways help the film's audience members project their own images of the truck driver and hitchhiker onto the screen. The truck driver quickly decides the hitchhiker is "a reactionary" suffering from some kind of "mental disturbance." Using the "mad," uneducated woman (who, is, nevertheless, interested in everything from the position of the earth in the universe to politics to such august personalities as Proust, Corneille, and Marx), Duras criticizes the invasion of Prague by the Soviets in 1968 and its support by the French Communist Party. Between the images of the truck, juxtaposed voice-overs, and cutaways to Duras and Depardieu, the art of film becomes the art of opening audience members to the possibility of engaging multiple faculties-not only the visual and the aural, but also memory, imagination, and desire.

A career-spanning collection of Marguerite Duras’s genre-bending essays that Kirkus calls “a luminous, erudite exploration of the self and art.” In her nonfiction as well as her fiction, Marguerite Duras’s curiosity was endless, her intellect voracious. Within a single essay she might roam from Flaubert to the “scattering of desire” to the Holocaust; within the body of her essays overall, style is always evolving, subject matter shifting, as her mind pushes beyond the obvious toward ever-original ground. Me & Other Writing is a guidebook to the extraordinary breadth of Duras’s nonfiction. From the stunning one-page “Me” to the sprawling 70-page “Summer 80,” there is not a piece in this collection that can be easily categorized. These are essayistic works written for their times but too virtuosic to be relegated to history, works of commentary or recollection or reportage that are also, unmistakably, works of art.

The first comprehensive study of the narrative and stylistic characteristics of all of Marguerite Duras' major works. Through close textual readings with a particular focus on women's access to language, this book shows how Duras critiques and subverts dominant discourse. Duras' textual strategies are described within a discussion of narrativity which also addresses factors of race and class. Cohen demonstrates how Duras achieves the famous ritual atmosphere of her prose through precise techniques which connect to her critique of representation.

Born in a northern suburb of Saigon in 1914, Marguerite Duras became one of the most prolific and analyzed figures in 20th-century French literature and film. She earned initial fame with her novel, Moderato Cantabile (1958), which sold half a million copies and won the Prix de Mai. At the request of Alain Resnais, she wrote a scenario on the bombing of Hiroshima. Resnais's film, Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1959), became an immediate hit at Cannes, thus earning Duras further fame. But even after these achievements, little was written about her work until the early 1970s. Since then, the situation has reversed, and a tremendous number of critical and scholarly works have been written about her. This bibliography includes annotated entries for works by and about Duras and includes a brief critical biography and chronology recounting the major events in her life and career. This volume documents the tremendous critical response to Duras's life and work. The book begins with a short critical biography that discusses some of the major events and themes in her career. A chronology then recounts her life in capsule form. The rest of the book presents annotated entries for works by and about Duras. It includes all works by Duras extant at the time of her death in March 1996, along with secondary sources published by the end of 1994. Works by Duras are grouped in chapters listing her writings, films, print interviews, and broadcast interviews. Works about Duras are grouped in chapters on books, edited collections, journals and journal articles, dissertations, reviews, magazine pieces, and critical editions. Several indexes add to the usefulness of the work.